Throwing a bit of shit to the wind and possibly verging into troll territory here but my guess.. Americans just feel entitled to democracy. They've always had it and therefore they assume they always will have it and forget that its something they have to continually fight for, even if the "fight" is as simple as exercising their right to vote every couple of years.
As for two parties, check out this video. The guy has quite a few interesting videos on voting systems as well as a bunch of other topics, but that one gets into why the US system tends to naturally drive towards two parties (not just in the US of course -- other places use the same system and are or have trended toward two parties as well.)
Not really. Purchasing bodies just need to include security audit requirements as part of the bid criteria.
The bigger issue right now however isn't so much profiteering as it is political partisanship. There are few companies that don't lean to one side or the other, and the people in government obviously aren't neutral since you know.. its their job to be political and partisanship is the name of the game these days.
And I mean paper ballots aren't exactly the panacea that people like to believe either. Its not exactly hard to tally up 150,000 votes and tell the public that you only counted 130,000. We "prevent" this by having multiple counts and commissioners watching the count and whatever but that still adds up to only a small number of people and again its super hard to find a truly neutral party these days, so its not really all that much safer than the electronic voting -- the point of failure is just moved a few steps down the line.
Yeah sure there's a paper trail but who will they authorize to follow it if there's some question about the outcome? Again you have a neutrality issue to solve.
I don't especially have a fool-proof answer. There may not be one. But electronic voting isn't a bad idea in principle -- its only been implemented poorly because we're constantly taking the lowest bidder without any sort of oversight or followup to ensure that we aren't falling into a "you get what you pay for" trap.
They have a list of criteria. If you meet all of the criteria (and I'm sure pay some "small" administrative and logo licensing fees) then you get certified.
There's been occasional blowback because their criteria doesn't always match the intuitive sense of the word "organic" that has built up in the public conscience over the past couple of decades, particularly with respect to the list of allowed pesticides and other chemicals. You can read the regulations here if you want.
Nice rant. Too bad its completely wrong. Just because we treat everything on the internet as public domain doesn't mean it IS public domain. The only reason you and I don't get sued for copyright infringement is because we're too small to matter -- even the recording industry has kind of backed off suing thousands of John Doe's at a time because its too futile to warrant the bad PR and are focusing more on things like torrent sites (which is also pretty futile but at least they can name some defendants and try to win at whack-a-mole rather than hoping the entire country will happily give up our privacy for their benefit. At least when we give up our privacy to Facebook we get a social media site to use. When we give it up to the government we get some security theater to make us feel warm and fuzzy.
Giving it up to the RIAA gets us nothing.)
Google however is not too small to go after. So they get targeted when they do wrong, and rightfully so. So far their indexing has been mostly ruled under fair use, with some restrictions on the size of the snippits they can use in their results view and things like that. Its not really clear how, or if, that kind of "snippit" logic will apply to images since its not anywhere near as easy to identify a representative chunk of an image in the same way that you can identify sentence structure and grab the first paragraph of a block of text or the first 10 seconds of a video or the 113th page of a book or whatever.
Not to mention robots.txt doesn't do the right job. Yelp doesn't want Google to stop indexing their site, they just want Google to stop using their content for their quickboxes and other places where a (potential) user might get the information straight from the search page without clicking through.
I don't know how legitimate Yelp's complaint is in this case, but I'm sure if they could get what they wanted with a simple robots.txt tweak, they would have already done so.
That depends entirely on your business. For consumer-facing products that are marketed in brochures, giant in-store billboards, TV spots, internet ads, etc then sure -- the marketing has done the lion's share of the work and the salesperson is really just trying to sell you extended warranties and other add-ons. Of course, their commissions tend to reflect that fact (so they might get a decent percent commission on an extended warranty, but a small or zero commission on the base product.)
With the push-back against junk add-ons like extended warranties though, we're starting to see box stores like that advertise that they're not commission-based. Of course instead they replace it with monthly quotas which are just as bad if not worse and less visible to the customer.
But for non-consumer products.. typically there is no advertising. Sales people just cold call until they find someone who might be interested (obviously they don't make blind calls -- they know what their product is for and try to identify people who at least would have a use for it before wasting their time making a call!) In that type of scenario, the salespeople are often the only form of marketing involved beyond maybe a trade show booth (usually run by the same sales people anyway) or the occasional magazine ad but nothing on the scale of consumer-level advertising.
You could put the same argument toward the star athletes though -- they get some early goals so they get played more giving them more chance to score goals in future and so on.
Being a professional athlete in general obviously takes enormous amounts of practice, talent, skill and simple willpower. But the biggest difference between the "star" of a team and the next guy in line is often just the amount of play time. Sure there are exceptions where the star is truly leaps and bounds above everyone else not only on the team but in the entire league, but that also applies in sales as well.
Most (public) mail servers do most of that already. The only difference from what you're saying is that the "notify" is the entire email and the "pull" is just the reverse DNS lookup (and blacklist lookup and whatever other checks they do.)
The biggest problem is that all of this is optional, and many mail servers (especially private ones) are configured by default for ease of use rather than security (which makes sense -- there's no point hardening a system nobody can use in the first place.) Gmail has tried to lead the way on some of these issues -- they were one of the first providers, and I think the first really big/popular/well-known one, to make SSL non-optional for example. I realize that's only a tiny part of the chain but its a start.
If Google, Microsoft and Apple and maybe one or two other big name providers got together and started requiring SPF, DKIM, etc to all pass with a zero-tolerance policy, other providers and software packages would suddenly be pushing to add those features as secure-by-default because otherwise their products would stop working when sending emails to a large portion of the population. Same thing if they started requiring GPG (or similar) signatures. All of a sudden email signing would be an obvious and built-in part of almost every client out of the box.
Basically, we already have most if not all of the tools we need to secure email. We just (so far) haven't had the willpower to force the issue and at this point, the only people who have the clout to enforce such a will (if they decide to bother) are the largest handful of email providers.
And you're just clueless if you think everybody is, or even should be, technically proficient enough to know a "search bar" from a "URL bar," especially when every single one of the major browsers have intentionally merged the two over the past few years.
Really, the whole thread including the article is relatively pointless. This is one of those "security vs convenience" discussions, and one that isn't even remotely new, and one that the world has firmly fallen on the convenience side of.
There is zero probability that even a barely noticeable fraction of email users will suddenly decide to drop back to 1992 era email so there's little point even discussing it -- it would be far more useful to accept reality and put the efforts toward improving security in modern mail clients (and browsers and whatever else.)
Its like saying we should solve the problem of cars pumping out too much CO2 by going back to horses. Even if it wasn't a stupid idea right from surface level, nobody is going to do it because horses are slow and messy -- instead, we invent better technology to work around the problem while still retaining most if not all of the convenience we're used to.
The low hanging fruit was easiest to pick? What a shocking new revelatory cliche that we've totally never seen before in any other aspect of life and therefore would have had no reason to believe would apply here!
Or rent a hall. Or get the permit. As the old saying goes, your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose. Now you can try to convince people that any particular restriction against assembly isn't actually necessary for public safety or other public concerns and try to get the restriction lifted, but you can't just arbitrarily decide you don't like a rule and break it (well you can -- that's civil disobedience -- but you need to be expecting and willing to face the consequences if you choose to go that route.)
Yes and no. My brother runs a business and has decided to stop hiring untrained people due to a bit of a negative cycle:
1) He hires an untrained employee, at a wage befitting an untrained employee. 2) Employee gets trained. 3) Employee thinks they should be making more money. 4) But they're still inexperienced and while they maybe justify a raise, they don't usually justify what they think they're entitled to. 5) So they look for jobs elsewhere because they can say they're trained and gloss over the fact that they only completed their training a month ago.
Of course that could all probably be solved with some training clauses in the employment contract -- if you quit within 2 years you get billed/docked some amount of $$$ for training frees or something, or write it up so that they initially show a decent wage but are docked 30% to cover training costs (with explicit terms for deciding when training is ended of course.) I'm sure there's 100 other things that smarter people than me could come up with to get around the whole issue and ensure that investing the time in training someone will have at least a chance of paying off.
But that would require society adjusting in such a way that those kind of contract clauses don't seem strange or onerous. And it would require companies to start accepting responsibility for their employees again (if only barely) rather than crossing their fingers and hoping the perfect resume will just show up one day with a 6-figure skill set but only asking peanuts for wages and then wondering why they can't find such a person.
Microsoft collects the data on Chinese users and sends it directly to Chinese authorities' servers
Could be. Who knows. The Chinese government isn't exactly known for protecting citizens' rights and I don't know why privacy would be given any higher standing than other (lack of) rights.
Microsoft collects the data on US users and sends it directly to Chinese authorities' servers
Extremely unlikely. That would literally be treason and even Microsoft's bankroll would have trouble keeping people out of jail if they were caught doing this. Its one thing to fuck over your country for profit, its quite another to fuck over your country to promote another nation's interests, especially one that while not an actual enemy (yet) is generally considered at least moderately hostile.
Its really not that out of context -- Galactica's main reason for not using networked communications was purely Adama's distrust of them. Kind of like how some people don't trust any firewall at all and will only consider a computer safe if its physically unplugged from any network source and stored in a secure Faraday cage to block any sort of radio emissions.
If you watch Caprica, you get (a bit) more insight into Adama. While it doesn't really focus on him to any great extent you can kind read between the lines to get a sense of why he distrusts computers and whatnot more than most people.
Its not that there wasn't any networking (all of the other ships, plus all of the planetary systems were networked,) so you're free to start swallowing again.. its just that one specific guy was paranoid and happened to be in a position where he had the power to dictate his paranoia in a plot-convenient fashion.
In a lot of ways, they pushed the bar as far as they could get away with. They might not have had a female office but Uhara was bridge crew and considered important to running the ship, and some of the alien races had female leaders. Of course by the logic of modern SJWs that would be taken as a "so you're implying its totally alien to have a female leader!" but back in the 60s even the concept of a female leader, alien or not, was pretty rare.
And its not that strange that Trek was better with racism than sexism -- racism had already been getting a negative connotation for close to 100 years (that whole civil war thing and all) while feminism was kind of out of the limelight (first wave was a good 30 years in the past and primarily focused specifically on voting rights, while the second wave which was more focused on actual equality was barely getting started.)
NP-hard are not in the same class as NP-complete. NP-complete is a (fairly small) list of problems that are all equivalent to each other, within a polynomial-time conversion. NP-hard problems are not in that little group and may or may not be within NP entirely. NP-hard is kind of loosely defined as "anything harder than P that we haven't managed to otherwise classify yet."
Which means any particular NP-hard problem could be within NP-complete (and we just haven't discovered an appropriate polynomial-time conversion) or they could be outside of NP completely but again we just haven't managed to conclusively prove it.
TSP is a bit special in that there's two variants -- the decision variant ("does a path exist yes/no?") is NP-complete, but actually finding the path is NP-hard.
Showing that P=NP would immediately reduce everything in NP-complete to polynomial time (how to do that is not necessarily part of the statement unfortunately) but it wouldn't necessarily imply all NP-hard problems could be reduced to polynomial time due to the looseness of the definition (that is, some problems labeled NP-hard may not be NP at all and the P=NP proof wouldn't apply to them.. though it could potentially be used for contradiction to show certain problems are definitively not NP and could be properly categorized outside of NP-hard.)
Its not quite the same.. in math, "implies" is a strict "if P is true then Q is true" phrase as you wrote, while in English it tends to be read more along the lines of "P suggests Q," with a silent "but doesn't prove it" clause.
Its kind along the lines of how in English, "or" almost always means "exclusive or" while in math it definitely does not -- the concepts are related to be sure, but not exactly the same and mathematicians can't work with those inexacts so they use words in a much stricter sense (at least when being formal) than your average English speaker/writer ever would.
An important corollary: those true statements that aren't provable within their own system could still be provable within a larger system. For a really simple example, "1+1=2" is not provable within a system that consists entirely of real numbers and the "basic" high school level operators (such as addition) -- all you can do is define addition such that the statement is true and treat it essentially as an axiom from that point on. But it is provable within ZFC if you define your sets and operations correctly.
Yes they would. They would all be harmed approximately equally to each other, but the real harm would be the sudden possibility of startups that no longer had to try and wade through the patent minefield, and fewer ways to strangle any startups that get past the "startup" phase and begin to look competitive.
Of course in this case, I mean "harm" from the perspective of the companies in question. Society as a whole would likely benefit from the increased competition. Unfortunately the US government cares far more about giant companies than the public good (and under Trump, they don't even try to play coy about that fact) so there's little hope of patent reforms in the near future. At least not good reforms. And other nations aren't much better -- few (developed) nations are quite as pro-corporate as the US but most aren't that far off either.
By what metric? Some cultures have historically treated the ownership of physical property as immoral. They've mostly all been wiped out by those of us who happily shoot anyone who infringes on our property rights, including people who don't believe in such.
And other cultures (including our own!) have historically considered the ownership of people to be perfectly fine. We still have no problem with owning animals.
Why should it be "immoral" to own ideas but fine to own livestock? Certainly current US law (and much of international law that was mostly based on US law anyway) is far too heavily tilted against both consumers and innovation but the principle of intellectual property is not necessarily bad.
I mean again if we want to speak historically, how many industrial revolutions did we have before the invention of patents? Of course since we've only had one industrial revolution its entirely possible that its just coincidence, but an argument could be made that the patent at least augmented the dissemination of ideas when inventors no longer had to keep their craft secret in order to beat the competition.
Also might have to do with it being completely unnecessary: Laundry, cooking, cleaning.. somebody has to do that shit and if you don't hire it out, you have to do it yourself.
Deciding on an arbitrary set of "gadgets" for your home though? That's not really something most people care about, especially given the cost of most of those gadgets ($50-100 per item adds up pretty fast if they're suggesting a dozen or two items.)
If they targeted this at the kind of people who would hire a home decorator or a personal shopper or whatever, then fine.. but targeting it at the general public just seems silly.. even if you like the service, most of us can't afford to buy all that shit, especially not all at once and if you wait 6 months the tech is out of date and you'd need to have them come out and update their suggestions anyway.
- High speed: You think that providing high speed is an unreasonable demand of a business whose sole purpose is providing high speed? I'm sure McDonald's could be more profitable too if you buy a Happy Meal and they only give you the drink.
- Zero downtime: Not quite as dumb as the previous, but its still pretty expected that any major service provider has minimal downtime, especially if they're providing to commercial customers.
- Net neutrality: Well this is your only suggestion that isn't pretty much entirely ruled out by the basic bloody business plan, but its a fairly unlikely candidate as well.. I somehow doubt Google (a historical proponent of net neutrality) would have built an entire business model around net neutrality being axed, especially given that they were building this stuff out during a time when it was looking like net neutrality was going to be enforced.
I'm not going to blame Trump for this -- Fiber's been questionable for quite a bit longer than 7 months -- but you really should stop to think about what you say before posting suggestions like having to provide high speed being the reason a high speed provider is failing. That's just stupid.
I don't know that I'd call it fouled up. Google's incentives are pretty clear: Create the most profit possible. They're a company after all and that's kind of a company's whole gig.
That's why leaving essential services to unregulated industries is a bad idea: Even when the companies are acting in good faith, their incentives are not aligned with the incentives of the populace. And now that broadband is close to being labeled and essential service (I believe it even already has that label in some jurisdictions,) we need to create some method to incentivize providing broadband to less wealthy and less populated areas.
Up here in Canada we subsidize the big providers to expand into those areas. It works OK when providing service to the less wealthy areas of cities, but its been a moderate disaster with regards to rural areas (of which we have a lot in Canada.) The companies keep taking the handouts, doing a fraction of what they claimed they were going to do with the money and pocketing the rest, and then turn around with their hands out again the next time the citizens complain about lack of connectivity in remote areas.
So that's one option. One that hasn't worked very well and I'm not sure how it could be improved upon.. Simply penalizing the companies for not following through might make us feel better but would still leave those areas unserviced.
The only other option really is government-provided broadband. If the government's basically paying for it anyway, just cut out the middleman and do it yourself. That has the obvious downside of government inefficiency (and these days, spying) but its still more efficient than Bell or Rogers or whoever just taking the money without actually bothering to provide service.
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Throwing a bit of shit to the wind and possibly verging into troll territory here but my guess.. Americans just feel entitled to democracy. They've always had it and therefore they assume they always will have it and forget that its something they have to continually fight for, even if the "fight" is as simple as exercising their right to vote every couple of years.
As for two parties, check out this video. The guy has quite a few interesting videos on voting systems as well as a bunch of other topics, but that one gets into why the US system tends to naturally drive towards two parties (not just in the US of course -- other places use the same system and are or have trended toward two parties as well.)
Not really. Purchasing bodies just need to include security audit requirements as part of the bid criteria.
The bigger issue right now however isn't so much profiteering as it is political partisanship. There are few companies that don't lean to one side or the other, and the people in government obviously aren't neutral since you know.. its their job to be political and partisanship is the name of the game these days.
And I mean paper ballots aren't exactly the panacea that people like to believe either. Its not exactly hard to tally up 150,000 votes and tell the public that you only counted 130,000. We "prevent" this by having multiple counts and commissioners watching the count and whatever but that still adds up to only a small number of people and again its super hard to find a truly neutral party these days, so its not really all that much safer than the electronic voting -- the point of failure is just moved a few steps down the line.
Yeah sure there's a paper trail but who will they authorize to follow it if there's some question about the outcome? Again you have a neutrality issue to solve.
I don't especially have a fool-proof answer. There may not be one. But electronic voting isn't a bad idea in principle -- its only been implemented poorly because we're constantly taking the lowest bidder without any sort of oversight or followup to ensure that we aren't falling into a "you get what you pay for" trap.
They have a list of criteria. If you meet all of the criteria (and I'm sure pay some "small" administrative and logo licensing fees) then you get certified.
There's been occasional blowback because their criteria doesn't always match the intuitive sense of the word "organic" that has built up in the public conscience over the past couple of decades, particularly with respect to the list of allowed pesticides and other chemicals. You can read the regulations here if you want.
Nice rant. Too bad its completely wrong. Just because we treat everything on the internet as public domain doesn't mean it IS public domain. The only reason you and I don't get sued for copyright infringement is because we're too small to matter -- even the recording industry has kind of backed off suing thousands of John Doe's at a time because its too futile to warrant the bad PR and are focusing more on things like torrent sites (which is also pretty futile but at least they can name some defendants and try to win at whack-a-mole rather than hoping the entire country will happily give up our privacy for their benefit. At least when we give up our privacy to Facebook we get a social media site to use. When we give it up to the government we get some security theater to make us feel warm and fuzzy.
Giving it up to the RIAA gets us nothing.)
Google however is not too small to go after. So they get targeted when they do wrong, and rightfully so. So far their indexing has been mostly ruled under fair use, with some restrictions on the size of the snippits they can use in their results view and things like that. Its not really clear how, or if, that kind of "snippit" logic will apply to images since its not anywhere near as easy to identify a representative chunk of an image in the same way that you can identify sentence structure and grab the first paragraph of a block of text or the first 10 seconds of a video or the 113th page of a book or whatever.
In a court document somewhere.
Not to mention robots.txt doesn't do the right job. Yelp doesn't want Google to stop indexing their site, they just want Google to stop using their content for their quickboxes and other places where a (potential) user might get the information straight from the search page without clicking through.
I don't know how legitimate Yelp's complaint is in this case, but I'm sure if they could get what they wanted with a simple robots.txt tweak, they would have already done so.
That depends entirely on your business. For consumer-facing products that are marketed in brochures, giant in-store billboards, TV spots, internet ads, etc then sure -- the marketing has done the lion's share of the work and the salesperson is really just trying to sell you extended warranties and other add-ons. Of course, their commissions tend to reflect that fact (so they might get a decent percent commission on an extended warranty, but a small or zero commission on the base product.)
With the push-back against junk add-ons like extended warranties though, we're starting to see box stores like that advertise that they're not commission-based. Of course instead they replace it with monthly quotas which are just as bad if not worse and less visible to the customer.
But for non-consumer products.. typically there is no advertising. Sales people just cold call until they find someone who might be interested (obviously they don't make blind calls -- they know what their product is for and try to identify people who at least would have a use for it before wasting their time making a call!) In that type of scenario, the salespeople are often the only form of marketing involved beyond maybe a trade show booth (usually run by the same sales people anyway) or the occasional magazine ad but nothing on the scale of consumer-level advertising.
You could put the same argument toward the star athletes though -- they get some early goals so they get played more giving them more chance to score goals in future and so on.
Being a professional athlete in general obviously takes enormous amounts of practice, talent, skill and simple willpower. But the biggest difference between the "star" of a team and the next guy in line is often just the amount of play time. Sure there are exceptions where the star is truly leaps and bounds above everyone else not only on the team but in the entire league, but that also applies in sales as well.
TP isn't selling itself. It's being sold by assholes.
Most (public) mail servers do most of that already. The only difference from what you're saying is that the "notify" is the entire email and the "pull" is just the reverse DNS lookup (and blacklist lookup and whatever other checks they do.)
The biggest problem is that all of this is optional, and many mail servers (especially private ones) are configured by default for ease of use rather than security (which makes sense -- there's no point hardening a system nobody can use in the first place.) Gmail has tried to lead the way on some of these issues -- they were one of the first providers, and I think the first really big/popular/well-known one, to make SSL non-optional for example. I realize that's only a tiny part of the chain but its a start.
If Google, Microsoft and Apple and maybe one or two other big name providers got together and started requiring SPF, DKIM, etc to all pass with a zero-tolerance policy, other providers and software packages would suddenly be pushing to add those features as secure-by-default because otherwise their products would stop working when sending emails to a large portion of the population. Same thing if they started requiring GPG (or similar) signatures. All of a sudden email signing would be an obvious and built-in part of almost every client out of the box.
Basically, we already have most if not all of the tools we need to secure email. We just (so far) haven't had the willpower to force the issue and at this point, the only people who have the clout to enforce such a will (if they decide to bother) are the largest handful of email providers.
you are a clueless Microsoft wanker.
And you're just clueless if you think everybody is, or even should be, technically proficient enough to know a "search bar" from a "URL bar," especially when every single one of the major browsers have intentionally merged the two over the past few years.
Really, the whole thread including the article is relatively pointless. This is one of those "security vs convenience" discussions, and one that isn't even remotely new, and one that the world has firmly fallen on the convenience side of.
There is zero probability that even a barely noticeable fraction of email users will suddenly decide to drop back to 1992 era email so there's little point even discussing it -- it would be far more useful to accept reality and put the efforts toward improving security in modern mail clients (and browsers and whatever else.)
Its like saying we should solve the problem of cars pumping out too much CO2 by going back to horses. Even if it wasn't a stupid idea right from surface level, nobody is going to do it because horses are slow and messy -- instead, we invent better technology to work around the problem while still retaining most if not all of the convenience we're used to.
The low hanging fruit was easiest to pick? What a shocking new revelatory cliche that we've totally never seen before in any other aspect of life and therefore would have had no reason to believe would apply here!
Or rent a hall. Or get the permit. As the old saying goes, your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose. Now you can try to convince people that any particular restriction against assembly isn't actually necessary for public safety or other public concerns and try to get the restriction lifted, but you can't just arbitrarily decide you don't like a rule and break it (well you can -- that's civil disobedience -- but you need to be expecting and willing to face the consequences if you choose to go that route.)
Yes and no. My brother runs a business and has decided to stop hiring untrained people due to a bit of a negative cycle:
1) He hires an untrained employee, at a wage befitting an untrained employee.
2) Employee gets trained.
3) Employee thinks they should be making more money.
4) But they're still inexperienced and while they maybe justify a raise, they don't usually justify what they think they're entitled to.
5) So they look for jobs elsewhere because they can say they're trained and gloss over the fact that they only completed their training a month ago.
Of course that could all probably be solved with some training clauses in the employment contract -- if you quit within 2 years you get billed/docked some amount of $$$ for training frees or something, or write it up so that they initially show a decent wage but are docked 30% to cover training costs (with explicit terms for deciding when training is ended of course.) I'm sure there's 100 other things that smarter people than me could come up with to get around the whole issue and ensure that investing the time in training someone will have at least a chance of paying off.
But that would require society adjusting in such a way that those kind of contract clauses don't seem strange or onerous. And it would require companies to start accepting responsibility for their employees again (if only barely) rather than crossing their fingers and hoping the perfect resume will just show up one day with a 6-figure skill set but only asking peanuts for wages and then wondering why they can't find such a person.
Microsoft collects the data on Chinese users and sends it directly to Chinese authorities' servers
Could be. Who knows. The Chinese government isn't exactly known for protecting citizens' rights and I don't know why privacy would be given any higher standing than other (lack of) rights.
Microsoft collects the data on US users and sends it directly to Chinese authorities' servers
Extremely unlikely. That would literally be treason and even Microsoft's bankroll would have trouble keeping people out of jail if they were caught doing this. Its one thing to fuck over your country for profit, its quite another to fuck over your country to promote another nation's interests, especially one that while not an actual enemy (yet) is generally considered at least moderately hostile.
Its really not that out of context -- Galactica's main reason for not using networked communications was purely Adama's distrust of them. Kind of like how some people don't trust any firewall at all and will only consider a computer safe if its physically unplugged from any network source and stored in a secure Faraday cage to block any sort of radio emissions.
If you watch Caprica, you get (a bit) more insight into Adama. While it doesn't really focus on him to any great extent you can kind read between the lines to get a sense of why he distrusts computers and whatnot more than most people.
Its not that there wasn't any networking (all of the other ships, plus all of the planetary systems were networked,) so you're free to start swallowing again.. its just that one specific guy was paranoid and happened to be in a position where he had the power to dictate his paranoia in a plot-convenient fashion.
In a lot of ways, they pushed the bar as far as they could get away with. They might not have had a female office but Uhara was bridge crew and considered important to running the ship, and some of the alien races had female leaders. Of course by the logic of modern SJWs that would be taken as a "so you're implying its totally alien to have a female leader!" but back in the 60s even the concept of a female leader, alien or not, was pretty rare.
And its not that strange that Trek was better with racism than sexism -- racism had already been getting a negative connotation for close to 100 years (that whole civil war thing and all) while feminism was kind of out of the limelight (first wave was a good 30 years in the past and primarily focused specifically on voting rights, while the second wave which was more focused on actual equality was barely getting started.)
NP-hard are not in the same class as NP-complete. NP-complete is a (fairly small) list of problems that are all equivalent to each other, within a polynomial-time conversion. NP-hard problems are not in that little group and may or may not be within NP entirely. NP-hard is kind of loosely defined as "anything harder than P that we haven't managed to otherwise classify yet."
Which means any particular NP-hard problem could be within NP-complete (and we just haven't discovered an appropriate polynomial-time conversion) or they could be outside of NP completely but again we just haven't managed to conclusively prove it.
TSP is a bit special in that there's two variants -- the decision variant ("does a path exist yes/no?") is NP-complete, but actually finding the path is NP-hard.
Showing that P=NP would immediately reduce everything in NP-complete to polynomial time (how to do that is not necessarily part of the statement unfortunately) but it wouldn't necessarily imply all NP-hard problems could be reduced to polynomial time due to the looseness of the definition (that is, some problems labeled NP-hard may not be NP at all and the P=NP proof wouldn't apply to them.. though it could potentially be used for contradiction to show certain problems are definitively not NP and could be properly categorized outside of NP-hard.)
Its not quite the same.. in math, "implies" is a strict "if P is true then Q is true" phrase as you wrote, while in English it tends to be read more along the lines of "P suggests Q," with a silent "but doesn't prove it" clause.
Its kind along the lines of how in English, "or" almost always means "exclusive or" while in math it definitely does not -- the concepts are related to be sure, but not exactly the same and mathematicians can't work with those inexacts so they use words in a much stricter sense (at least when being formal) than your average English speaker/writer ever would.
An important corollary: those true statements that aren't provable within their own system could still be provable within a larger system. For a really simple example, "1+1=2" is not provable within a system that consists entirely of real numbers and the "basic" high school level operators (such as addition) -- all you can do is define addition such that the statement is true and treat it essentially as an axiom from that point on. But it is provable within ZFC if you define your sets and operations correctly.
Then its not a proof.
Yes they would. They would all be harmed approximately equally to each other, but the real harm would be the sudden possibility of startups that no longer had to try and wade through the patent minefield, and fewer ways to strangle any startups that get past the "startup" phase and begin to look competitive.
Of course in this case, I mean "harm" from the perspective of the companies in question. Society as a whole would likely benefit from the increased competition. Unfortunately the US government cares far more about giant companies than the public good (and under Trump, they don't even try to play coy about that fact) so there's little hope of patent reforms in the near future. At least not good reforms. And other nations aren't much better -- few (developed) nations are quite as pro-corporate as the US but most aren't that far off either.
By what metric? Some cultures have historically treated the ownership of physical property as immoral. They've mostly all been wiped out by those of us who happily shoot anyone who infringes on our property rights, including people who don't believe in such.
And other cultures (including our own!) have historically considered the ownership of people to be perfectly fine. We still have no problem with owning animals.
Why should it be "immoral" to own ideas but fine to own livestock? Certainly current US law (and much of international law that was mostly based on US law anyway) is far too heavily tilted against both consumers and innovation but the principle of intellectual property is not necessarily bad.
I mean again if we want to speak historically, how many industrial revolutions did we have before the invention of patents? Of course since we've only had one industrial revolution its entirely possible that its just coincidence, but an argument could be made that the patent at least augmented the dissemination of ideas when inventors no longer had to keep their craft secret in order to beat the competition.
Also might have to do with it being completely unnecessary: Laundry, cooking, cleaning.. somebody has to do that shit and if you don't hire it out, you have to do it yourself.
Deciding on an arbitrary set of "gadgets" for your home though? That's not really something most people care about, especially given the cost of most of those gadgets ($50-100 per item adds up pretty fast if they're suggesting a dozen or two items.)
If they targeted this at the kind of people who would hire a home decorator or a personal shopper or whatever, then fine.. but targeting it at the general public just seems silly.. even if you like the service, most of us can't afford to buy all that shit, especially not all at once and if you wait 6 months the tech is out of date and you'd need to have them come out and update their suggestions anyway.
.. seriously?
- High speed: You think that providing high speed is an unreasonable demand of a business whose sole purpose is providing high speed? I'm sure McDonald's could be more profitable too if you buy a Happy Meal and they only give you the drink.
- Zero downtime: Not quite as dumb as the previous, but its still pretty expected that any major service provider has minimal downtime, especially if they're providing to commercial customers.
- Net neutrality: Well this is your only suggestion that isn't pretty much entirely ruled out by the basic bloody business plan, but its a fairly unlikely candidate as well.. I somehow doubt Google (a historical proponent of net neutrality) would have built an entire business model around net neutrality being axed, especially given that they were building this stuff out during a time when it was looking like net neutrality was going to be enforced.
I'm not going to blame Trump for this -- Fiber's been questionable for quite a bit longer than 7 months -- but you really should stop to think about what you say before posting suggestions like having to provide high speed being the reason a high speed provider is failing. That's just stupid.
Google's incentives are as fouled up
I don't know that I'd call it fouled up. Google's incentives are pretty clear: Create the most profit possible. They're a company after all and that's kind of a company's whole gig.
That's why leaving essential services to unregulated industries is a bad idea: Even when the companies are acting in good faith, their incentives are not aligned with the incentives of the populace. And now that broadband is close to being labeled and essential service (I believe it even already has that label in some jurisdictions,) we need to create some method to incentivize providing broadband to less wealthy and less populated areas.
Up here in Canada we subsidize the big providers to expand into those areas. It works OK when providing service to the less wealthy areas of cities, but its been a moderate disaster with regards to rural areas (of which we have a lot in Canada.) The companies keep taking the handouts, doing a fraction of what they claimed they were going to do with the money and pocketing the rest, and then turn around with their hands out again the next time the citizens complain about lack of connectivity in remote areas.
So that's one option. One that hasn't worked very well and I'm not sure how it could be improved upon..
Simply penalizing the companies for not following through might make us feel better but would still leave those areas unserviced.
The only other option really is government-provided broadband. If the government's basically paying for it anyway, just cut out the middleman and do it yourself. That has the obvious downside of government inefficiency (and these days, spying) but its still more efficient than Bell or Rogers or whoever just taking the money without actually bothering to provide service.