The Manual contains guidelines for US operatives in foreign countries - say some banana republic in South America - to quell what they call "insurgency".
Insurgency against corrupt, inefficient, brutal regimes backed by the US - or directly put into place through a coup d'etat overturning the results of some election - because such regimes were considered a shield against bolshevism, or because the control over the government of that country will potentially entail huge benefits to corporations controlled by relatives & friends, or some major contributor for presidential election.
That's hardly war. That's State Terrorism. And it doesn't even have a "higher cause" to justify it, besides paranoia and/or greed.
And if I am naive, I wonder what you are.
What you actually aren't is a Historian nor particularly well-informed about Somalia or Bosnia. Especially in the latter, I really wonder how could those tactics could apply in Bosnia at all, where there was a multi-ethnic war going on, with at least three sides involved.
Regarding 3)
yeah, you cannot see anything beyond the "grid"... but not all things in the grid are supposed to be visible to players - like cloaked ships.
ouch!
We can do much better than that solving TSP nowadays. While NP--complete it doesn't mean that you're reduced to 5 cities problems:
1) You can use Heuristic Search to look for solutions of quite big TSPs. One very simple heuristic is the Maximum Spanning Tree heuristic. Not so simple is the AP heuristic. Do a search on scholar.google.com with the terms "TSP" "Heuristic" "Search" for the state-of-the-art. Note that this approach allows you to find the optimal tour.
2) For a practical application I doubt you'll be needing *always* an optimal solution - you can settle for something satisfactory, either by relaxing further the problem or by using non-optimal search algorithms. In this case, the NP--completitude issue becomes non-relevant at all.
I think you're a bit narrowminded about the abilities required for the first "category" which is pretty broad - it can potentially include as much as anybody who enrolls in CS. Let me remind you that very few first year CS students have a clue about what their career will be - so the wisest approach, rather than taking tests of 18-year-old people in order to efficiently classify them as I, II or III, is to "teach them how to learn new stuff" (as has been pointed elsewhere in this discussion).
You labeled category I as "programmer/potential project manager". This encroaches, let's say, 80 to 90% of all IT development today. Which is much more varied than just developing business applications with a front-end on the Internet. What Category I needs (as well as II) is to acquire the "know how to learn" skill. This allows future professionals willing to adapt to avoid getting obsolete. And this skill implies that people need to have an "open mind" about what tool is best for a certain task, which requires that they're somewhat competent in a not too wide, not too narrow set of programming languages. These guys http://tinyurl.com/3dvm3r/ make this point far better than myself.
We really need to offer them the opportunity to switch careers later in their lifes instead of sending masses of "one trick horses" into the fauces of IT consulting companies, which will find them easily replaceable...
Indeed, they're not just some "neutral observers". However, they're making a number of points. And languages like Simula and ADA have had quite an influence in design of programming languages.
One of the points they make refers to this quick-fix of your post:)
PS, Ada is mainly alive in the Military/Aerospace industries where projects must last 20+ years.
Slashdot Mirror
Stupid users? I would rather say stupid designers who impose stupid constraints on John Doe...
Anderson is ok, but I would also recommend "The Scientist in the Crib" by Allison Gopnik et al. Less formal, but very clear and inspiring.
The Manual contains guidelines for US operatives in foreign countries - say some banana republic in South America - to quell what they call "insurgency".
Insurgency against corrupt, inefficient, brutal regimes backed by the US - or directly put into place through a coup d'etat overturning the results of some election - because such regimes were considered a shield against bolshevism, or because the control over the government of that country will potentially entail huge benefits to corporations controlled by relatives & friends, or some major contributor for presidential election.
That's hardly war. That's State Terrorism. And it doesn't even have a "higher cause" to justify it, besides paranoia and/or greed.
And if I am naive, I wonder what you are.
What you actually aren't is a Historian nor particularly well-informed about Somalia or Bosnia. Especially in the latter, I really wonder how could those tactics could apply in Bosnia at all, where there was a multi-ethnic war going on, with at least three sides involved.
Regarding 3) yeah, you cannot see anything beyond the "grid"... but not all things in the grid are supposed to be visible to players - like cloaked ships. ouch!
We can do much better than that solving TSP nowadays. While NP--complete it doesn't mean that you're reduced to 5 cities problems:
1) You can use Heuristic Search to look for solutions of quite big TSPs. One very simple heuristic is the Maximum Spanning Tree heuristic. Not so simple is the AP heuristic. Do a search on scholar.google.com with the terms "TSP" "Heuristic" "Search" for the state-of-the-art. Note that this approach allows you to find the optimal tour.
2) For a practical application I doubt you'll be needing *always* an optimal solution - you can settle for something satisfactory, either by relaxing further the problem or by using non-optimal search algorithms. In this case, the NP--completitude issue becomes non-relevant at all.
I think you're a bit narrowminded about the abilities required for the first "category" which is pretty broad - it can potentially include as much as anybody who enrolls in CS. Let me remind you that very few first year CS students have a clue about what their career will be - so the wisest approach, rather than taking tests of 18-year-old people in order to efficiently classify them as I, II or III, is to "teach them how to learn new stuff" (as has been pointed elsewhere in this discussion).
You labeled category I as "programmer/potential project manager". This encroaches, let's say, 80 to 90% of all IT development today. Which is much more varied than just developing business applications with a front-end on the Internet. What Category I needs (as well as II) is to acquire the "know how to learn" skill. This allows future professionals willing to adapt to avoid getting obsolete. And this skill implies that people need to have an "open mind" about what tool is best for a certain task, which requires that they're somewhat competent in a not too wide, not too narrow set of programming languages. These guys http://tinyurl.com/3dvm3r/ make this point far better than myself.
We really need to offer them the opportunity to switch careers later in their lifes instead of sending masses of "one trick horses" into the fauces of IT consulting companies, which will find them easily replaceable...