IPv4 and IPv6 address space assignment is already hierarchical. IANA owns the whole space, and delegates it to the regional registries (ARIN, RIPE, etc.) which hand out blocks to customers, whether it's an IPv4/8 to a big ISP (which hands out/24s,/29s, etc. to its customers) or an IPv6/48 to an end user company (which assigns subnets to different buildings and LAN segments.)
Rover uses the Reverse DNS tree to advertise records that say that some address block [e.g. 0.192.in-addr.arpa] belongs to some ASN [e.g. 65535]. And you can use DNSSEC to verify that the rDNS advertisement for the address block is valid. This lets your routers (or at least the router-server you've got sitting next to your routers) validate whether a BGP announcement they receive is plausible.
And BGP's not at all anarchistic - the ASN assignments and IP address block assignments are both owned by IANA or its delegates (ARIN, RIPE, etc.), which is why it's meaningful to discuss whether a route advertisement is legitimate. The problem this is trying to solve is that people have been announcing routes they don't legitimately own, whether it's the kind of fat-fingers classful addressing autosummarization mistake that takes your two Class C subnets and announces the Class A that contains them, or whether it's Pakistan's PTT advertising YouTube's address blocks to keep Pakistanis (and the rest of the world) from watching politically incorrect videos on YouTube. (The fat-finger version happens more often, which is why you'll see ISPs that own a/8 advertising it as two/9s, so they can use longest-match to protect their space.)
TFA wasn't very detailed either, but it mentions that the new protocol is called Rover. Project website is here. The short summary is that you can use Reverse DNS to advertise the BGP Autonomous System Number (ASN) that's authoritative for your block of address space, and use DNSSEC to protect the Reverse DNS tree. If somebody else starts advertising that they've got a route to your address block, routers (or route servers sitting next to the routers, because your standard router doesn't actually know how to do this) can verify whether that's correct.
... but you can't always believe what they say. Dude, we just flew here in that saucer thing! Dude, we totally can't walk up stairs! It's a [tokes] Cookbook, man! Extoiminate! Extoiminate! Nyuk nyuk!
Secret-key crypto isn't dependent on NPish-hard problems, just on complex messiness, and it'll work fine even if we've got magic quantum computers. We'd have to go relearn all of those annoying Key Distribution System methods that public-key replaced, figure out what if anything to do about signatures, and have to build a whole lot of new business models for dealing with trust, since we'd have to actually trust the people running the KDC, but we'd live.
Secret-Key cryptography - the traditional stuff like DES or AES, where you use the same key to encrypt and decrypt a message - typically doesn't use algorithms that would be affected by a constructive proof that P==NP. They're basically designed around complex messy mixing systems, not around hard math problems that would be simplified by a P=NP solution.
Public-Key cryptography, of course, is all about hard math problems, though it turns out that NP-complete problems like knapsacks don't usually have the right structure to build successful crypto, and we've ended up with problems that are based on factoring instead, which might turn out to be easier than the NP-complete problems (or if P=NP is true, it's possible that factoring could actually be harder.)
A mathematical solution to P==NP or factoring or a sufficiently useful quantum computer could trash public-key cryptography (either break it entirely, or at least weaken it enough that you need keys that are impractically long), but that wouldn''t trash secret-key computing. For instance, Shor's quantum factoring algorithm at most forces you to double the key length for symmetric-key crypto.
So it would be really annoying, and would force us to use the kinds of key distribution systems we had before public-key. Typically they involve a Key Distribution Center with per-user secret keys that have to be heavily protected and let you request session keys that are transmitted to the sender and recipient of a communication, so the whole system is vulnerable if the KDC is compromised, and is vulnerable to traffic analysis if you're not very careful - but you could do it.
It's highly likely that somebody will eventually be able to prove it to be true or false. (The current thinking is that it's probably false, given the number of smart people who've been looking for it, but we could be surprised.) This isn't one of those "Gödel says this statement isn't a lie" sorts of problems, nor is it likely to be a "Proof won't fit in a single human brain" problem. And unless Charlie Stross is right, it's not even one of those "Maths that are too dangerous for mere mortals to meddle with" problems that evoke elder beings from other dimensions that #@#@!#~~~~~~~~
Some of you may not remember the Internet before ICANN (:-), which was founded about a year after The September That Never Ended, but back when there were only seven gTLDs, the IETF was looking at expanding them, and the Internet Ad-Hoc Committee (IAHC) was their organization that was working on it, and had a proposal for adding seven more fairly lame gTLDs (which was a good approach, because they were going to make mistakes in the process and learn things that nobody had expected, so it was better to do a practice round with gTLDs that nobody cares too much about, like.firm, before messing with important names like.inc,.ltd,.llc,.gmbh, and.sex.) The Trademark Gods got their hands in the pie early, because they cared a lot about Intellectual Property and didn't want those upstart Internet Protocol people messing with it, so they'd pressured the IAHC into requiring True Names and Addresses for name registrants, and they really didn't want community involvement in policy-making any more than the people who've been writing copyright treaties with domain-name confiscation and three-strikes internet disconnection want community involvement, so when ICANN suddenly appeared and took over control of DNS, you saw them doing the same things.
We don't need a huge number of gTLDs, because otherwise it would make the root just as cluttered as.com is now, but there's certainly room for a few hundred. For instance, the US trademark laws have about 35 categories of businesses, so Coke sodas don't conflict with coal product companies named Coke (or Koch), and Apple Computers doesn't conflict with fruit companies, and that could provide a mechanism for reducing the kinds of conflicts we get in.com, where only one business can get any particular name. It would also leave room for experimentation with naming structures, for instance doing geographically-based names (other than the.cctld approach), or phone-number-based domain names, or automatic disambiguation (for instance, if multiple companies want example.foo, they get example.1.foo, example.2.foo, etc.) The closest we've got in the current system is.museum, which nobody uses much.
That doesn't mean that ICANN's $185K/bid system is a great way to do gTLDs, but it'll at least break the ice a bit. Or it'll break ICANN, and that'd be fine too.
Why do you say that the optimal TSP solutions don't create optimal PTSP paths? If you're just saying that "we're using time as a cost function, and for physics reasons it's not a simple multiple of distance", that's fine, you still know all the physics in advance so you can calculate your cost functions in advance, and use them to solve the TSP. Also, the article doesn't say how large N is, so it's hard to tell from reading it whether there are too many destinations to use an exact TSP algorithm and you need to use a heuristic instead.
No. The reason the pure problem is hard is that there are N-factorial possible solutions, which becomes infeasible to compute if N is large, and there aren't any good algorithms known to find the optimal solution that are better than enumerating them all. The reason for approximation algorithms is to get a pretty good answer in a reasonable amount of computation time, and there are algorithms that can provably get you within X% of the best solution (50% back in the late 70s), but they don't tell you anything about what the best solution is, they just set lower bounds on it.
The pure problem uses a cost function, and which can be road distance or time or whatever makes sense for your application, so if your cost function is time, then the road with bad traffic/low speed limit/etc. is more expensive than a road that's more miles but less crowded / higher speed limit/etc.)
You're misunderstanding the TSP - in the standard problem, the distances are known in advance, but there are n-factorial possible routes, so if n's large, you can't just enumerate all of them to find the best one, which makes it hard to tell if the best route you've found so far is actually the best. In the mathematical version, you can quickly verify whether any particular route is valid (hits all the cities, using valid roads between them), so in the real world you could drive that. (The only way you wouldn't have a real-world-achievable solution is if it takes longer to calculate the optimal route than it does to drive a pretty-good route.) The reason for using heuristic algorithms is to find pretty good routes with a reasonable amount of computation, and when I last studied it back in the late 70s, there were heuristics that had provable upper bounds of "no more than 50% longer than the optimal route" - somebody's probably found better than that by now.
There are dynamic variations on the problem where you don't know all the destinations or costs in advance, so e.g. the salesman starts out on Monday with three cities to visit, and on Tuesday he gets an order for City 4, and on Wednesday he gets orders from City 5 and City 6, etc.
The article doesn't do a good job of explaining the game, probably because the author or game designer doesn't really understand the mathematical problem? From a mathematical standpoint, if you're trying to get from City 1 to City 2, it's going to cost X12, and unless the game is changing something about the physics, you can calculate X12 in advance. Maybe it's intended to let the kids who are intuitively good at driving games have some chance against the kids who are intuitively good at finding pretty good routes?
ICANN's first jobs when it seized control of the domain business were to require True Names for domain name registration and to stop the IETF Ad-Hoc Committee (IAHC)'s plan for expanding the gTLD space. The IAHC plan initially proposed seven fairly lame new gTLDs (which was fine, because you want to test out the expansion process on names that nobody really cares about, like.firm, using them as a scratch monkey before you sell the valuable gTLDs, like.inc,.llc,.ltd..gmbh, and.sex, because you only get to do that once. The Trademark Gods really didn't like the idea that they might have to buy up names in more namespaces, and wanted to make sure that if there was ever a trademark dispute involving a domain name that they'd be able to identify who to sue. And they certainly didn't want to allow any sort of experimental alternative name structures, though.museum sort of sneaked in, nor did they want to have actual public-interest representation on their board no matter what their initial charter said about electing members.
I don't think having a near-infinite number of gTLDs is a good idea; it's basically equivalent to losing the top level of hierarchy and having everybody under.com. But having a few dozen or a hundred gTLDs can work just fine - for instance, the US trademark registration system has something like 34 categories of businesses, so you can have a "Coke" company selling soda and another "Coke" company selling coal products without them infringing on each other. ICANN being the kind of organization that they are, they'll of course try to monetize the **** out of the gTLD registration process, which isn't going to be an optimally rational division of the name space, but will at least keep it from getting totally out of hand.
Le Figaro reports that Minitel will be closing June 30, 2012. End of an era.
Back in the 80s a company I worked for made computers that could handle really large quantities of low-speed cooked-mode serial I/O, and while they turned out not to be the big-selling high-performance high-reliability systems the marketing slides thought they were, they were occasionally useful, and I think we sold some for Minitel.
Creationism is a theory that evolution happened, all in one week, about six thousand years ago, in contrast to the standard theories that said it happened at random over a period of billions of years. Is it a plausible hypothesis? How would you tell? Is there evidence that might support or contradict either theory? What other alternatives could explain the evidence? What kinds of things would you look for to help you decide? Fossils? Erosion? Rates of piracy? Historical records and calendar systems from other cultures?
And if you do teach "the controversy" as a scientific controversy, what conclusions are your students likely to draw? How will their parents react? Is that what the legislators thought they were getting into when they wanted teachers to teach "the controversy"?
The Republicans are happy to push anti-evolution to get the religious right-winger demographic involved in their party, voting and giving money. But the real payoff is getting people to doubt climate change science, because that's important to their corporate sponsors, who don't want Congress making laws that would interfere with their businesses.
Yes, Hawley's starting to understand some of the technical issues now that he's no longer in charge. But fundamentally, TSA was always about bullying, intimidation, and dishonesty, and that culture hasn't changed.
Also, back in the 80s, the high-tech company I worked for tended to hire from Ivy League schools or equivalent high-end colleges. You weren't going to find a lot of black students there, and you weren't going to find a lot of women at MIT (though Harvard and Radcliffe had just recently started integrating their programs), and being bright and talented didn't necessarily mean you could afford to go to the places they hired from. They started recruiting at women's colleges, and at historically black colleges. And even there it took them a while to figure out some of the cultural and program issues - I had one coworker who had a math degree (computer science degrees weren't common yet), and was bright and articulate, but out of his depth; he'd have been a good high school math teacher, but we needed an academic research type, and hiring him didn't help him or us, and having a manager who was a space cadet made it take a while to figure out it had been a mistake.
The company I worked for back in the 80s did a lot of affirmative action, in spite of the grumbling it initially caused from people with attitudes like yours. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to include people who are culturally different from you, but it's worthwhile, and there are lots of different kinds of skills. For an easy example, we were an East Coast company dominated by New Yorkers, where any conversation that doesn't have three people talking at once is dull and boring, and if you're not contradicting the boss that means you're obviously not paying attention. But as a somewhat academic high-tech company we also got a lot of Chinese and Japanese people, who were from cultures where interrupting people and contradicting the boss in public were really rude things to do, and if you wanted to get Dr. Wang's best work, you might want to ask for his opinion or at least not interrupt him halfway through his first sentence. Or if you're ordering sandwiches so we can work through lunch on a project, you might want to ask the Indian contractor if she eats meat (neither did I, by then.)
And then there was dealing with our subsidiary in the south. Y'all know that they refer to women as "girls" down there, but we got a bit of extra cultural warning that it was normal for managers to refer to clerical workflow as "the little girl takes the form to the such-and-such department" etc., and the fact that they had a bunch of rather short women working there didn't make it any less ridiculous even though it wasn't intended to be negative.
On the other hand, after moving to San Francisco in the 90s, I worked for women for about 15 years, some who were techies and some who came from the business side. And maybe half the men in the department were straight - I was very much not in Kansas any more, but most of the cultural adjustment was getting used to working with sales people instead of techies.
The findings weren't that the people with Asian-sounding names had problems in the interviews. They were that Asians didn't get called in for the interviews as often as people with Anglo names and similar credentials. It's a much different problem.
And people do often treat immigrants or other people with strong accents as less educated, whether it's justified or not. I'm glad he did get to speak to her in French, and spoke it well enough to find out that she spoke it well.
Many American friends of mine have said "A Southern accent costs you 20 perceived IQ points." I had a friend who had a doctorate in Islamic literature, and identified himself as being from Jordan (I think he was actually Palestinian, but his village was in Jordan when he was born), and had a really thick accent even after a decade or more in the US. His wife is from Beirut, and she said "Yeah, he's from out in the sticks, he sounds like that in Arabic also."
The large US company I was in did a lot of work on affirmative action back in the 80s, after getting bashed by a few lawsuits. We didn't have to drop our standards any, but we did have to go to a lot of work to try to reach out to communities where we hadn't traditionally had much contact, and to try to understand the impact of cultural differences. For instance, since we were a technology company, we had a lot of Chinese and Japanese techies, who viewed interrupting people and contradicting the boss as rude - but we were a company full of New Yorkers, for whom any conversation that didn't have three people speaking at once was dull, and not interrupting the boss meant you hadn't been listening. It took a lot of adjusting to make sure we didn't exclude the Asians. And there was a lot of making sure that there wasn't sexist or racist language used (you'd think by the 80s we'd have been better about it that we were, but cultural change takes a long time, and some of my older coworkers were pretty much the first generation of Jewish people at the company.)
And in the early 90s, one of my coworkers who was about 25 and female did a computer systems consulting project at a large aircraft company - where just about all the engineers were male and over 50 and didn't quite know how to react to her, because the current wave of feminism had only been going on for 30 years so taking technical direction from a woman was still pretty radical. And then there was the lunchtime conversation about why almost all the women had left one of our five departments that grew into an almost-everybody-except-management meeting (about everything that people wanted to bitch about, not just sexism issues), and nobody really wanted to have to report to management about the conclusions. (It wasn't my department, and I wasn't at the meeting, but I was rather surprised by it, because their department head was the one I'd have thought least likely to have that problem - but they also tended to promote supervisors based on technical ability, not people skills, so maybe there was too much bro-managing going on at that level.)
Nah, you can Google it yourself, but the term has been around at least a couple of months, and actually used in at least one startup's job ad (apparently even non-ironically, unless by the time it reached Twitter it had lost the attribution from The Onion, which we can really hope was the case.)
Kid, back when we were in school, the RDBMS community was a bunch of academics, and nobody thought that you'd be using anything that resource-intensive to do Real Work with any time soon. (And it was a big deal when we got a fourth megabyte for the mainframe that supported the entire university's computing needs...) (And yes, we did walk through the snow uphill both ways to get to the keypunch room.)
A Sun3 had a 1152x900 screen, and was really better than the 25x80 terminals, especially if you were running NeWS so your screen was rendered in PostScript. And the 1024x1024 versions of the Blit had slightly more pixels, for different usage models.
Later, in the early 90s, I started doing consulting kinds of jobs where we mostly used laptops because we needed portability, so I was suddenly thrown backwards into the WinTel PC world, which thought that 640x480 was pretty cool. (And when the department decided to spring for laptops with higher resolution, they chose the versions that had 640x480 with 16-bit color, because it was Really Shiny, instead of paying less for 800x600 with 8-bit color, even though we all spent more of our computer time doing text-based email, or word processing, or calculations of various sorts, not photography.)
Eventually we got 1280x1024 monitors for our desks, which most of the laptops could drive by then, but it wasn't like I was usually at my desk, so I finally had occasional access to screens that were better than I'd been using 20 years earlier. And about 3-4 years ago we finally got 1440x900 laptops, and now I'm running 1920x1080, which would be about enough if Win7 had any intelligence about how to pick font sizes. (At least most of the browsers support Control-Plus or Control-Mousewheel resizing. But Win7 still gets terribly confused running dual-monitor when the resolutions are different. Sigh...
Sure, some people think laptops are passe, now that they've got their iPads that automagically detect which way is up and swap screen orientation, but laptops are still the way many of us work (or laptop plus external monitor at work.) And typing on a rotated laptop really just doesn't work.
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IPv4 and IPv6 address space assignment is already hierarchical. IANA owns the whole space, and delegates it to the regional registries (ARIN, RIPE, etc.) which hand out blocks to customers, whether it's an IPv4 /8 to a big ISP (which hands out /24s, /29s, etc. to its customers) or an IPv6 /48 to an end user company (which assigns subnets to different buildings and LAN segments.)
And the Reverse DNS tree maps those hierarchies.
Rover uses the Reverse DNS tree to advertise records that say that some address block [e.g. 0.192.in-addr.arpa] belongs to some ASN [e.g. 65535]. And you can use DNSSEC to verify that the rDNS advertisement for the address block is valid. This lets your routers (or at least the router-server you've got sitting next to your routers) validate whether a BGP announcement they receive is plausible.
And BGP's not at all anarchistic - the ASN assignments and IP address block assignments are both owned by IANA or its delegates (ARIN, RIPE, etc.), which is why it's meaningful to discuss whether a route advertisement is legitimate. The problem this is trying to solve is that people have been announcing routes they don't legitimately own, whether it's the kind of fat-fingers classful addressing autosummarization mistake that takes your two Class C subnets and announces the Class A that contains them, or whether it's Pakistan's PTT advertising YouTube's address blocks to keep Pakistanis (and the rest of the world) from watching politically incorrect videos on YouTube. (The fat-finger version happens more often, which is why you'll see ISPs that own a /8 advertising it as two /9s, so they can use longest-match to protect their space.)
TFA wasn't very detailed either, but it mentions that the new protocol is called Rover. Project website is here. The short summary is that you can use Reverse DNS to advertise the BGP Autonomous System Number (ASN) that's authoritative for your block of address space, and use DNSSEC to protect the Reverse DNS tree. If somebody else starts advertising that they've got a route to your address block, routers (or route servers sitting next to the routers, because your standard router doesn't actually know how to do this) can verify whether that's correct.
... but you can't always believe what they say.
Dude, we just flew here in that saucer thing!
Dude, we totally can't walk up stairs!
It's a [tokes] Cookbook, man!
Extoiminate! Extoiminate! Nyuk nyuk!
Secret-key crypto isn't dependent on NPish-hard problems, just on complex messiness, and it'll work fine even if we've got magic quantum computers. We'd have to go relearn all of those annoying Key Distribution System methods that public-key replaced, figure out what if anything to do about signatures, and have to build a whole lot of new business models for dealing with trust, since we'd have to actually trust the people running the KDC, but we'd live.
Secret-Key cryptography - the traditional stuff like DES or AES, where you use the same key to encrypt and decrypt a message - typically doesn't use algorithms that would be affected by a constructive proof that P==NP. They're basically designed around complex messy mixing systems, not around hard math problems that would be simplified by a P=NP solution.
Public-Key cryptography, of course, is all about hard math problems, though it turns out that NP-complete problems like knapsacks don't usually have the right structure to build successful crypto, and we've ended up with problems that are based on factoring instead, which might turn out to be easier than the NP-complete problems (or if P=NP is true, it's possible that factoring could actually be harder.)
A mathematical solution to P==NP or factoring or a sufficiently useful quantum computer could trash public-key cryptography (either break it entirely, or at least weaken it enough that you need keys that are impractically long), but that wouldn''t trash secret-key computing. For instance, Shor's quantum factoring algorithm at most forces you to double the key length for symmetric-key crypto.
So it would be really annoying, and would force us to use the kinds of key distribution systems we had before public-key. Typically they involve a Key Distribution Center with per-user secret keys that have to be heavily protected and let you request session keys that are transmitted to the sender and recipient of a communication, so the whole system is vulnerable if the KDC is compromised, and is vulnerable to traffic analysis if you're not very careful - but you could do it.
It's highly likely that somebody will eventually be able to prove it to be true or false. (The current thinking is that it's probably false, given the number of smart people who've been looking for it, but we could be surprised.) This isn't one of those "Gödel says this statement isn't a lie" sorts of problems, nor is it likely to be a "Proof won't fit in a single human brain" problem. And unless Charlie Stross is right, it's not even one of those "Maths that are too dangerous for mere mortals to meddle with" problems that evoke elder beings from other dimensions that #@#@!#~~~~~~~~
Some of you may not remember the Internet before ICANN (:-), which was founded about a year after The September That Never Ended, but back when there were only seven gTLDs, the IETF was looking at expanding them, and the Internet Ad-Hoc Committee (IAHC) was their organization that was working on it, and had a proposal for adding seven more fairly lame gTLDs (which was a good approach, because they were going to make mistakes in the process and learn things that nobody had expected, so it was better to do a practice round with gTLDs that nobody cares too much about, like .firm, before messing with important names like .inc, .ltd, .llc, .gmbh, and .sex.) The Trademark Gods got their hands in the pie early, because they cared a lot about Intellectual Property and didn't want those upstart Internet Protocol people messing with it, so they'd pressured the IAHC into requiring True Names and Addresses for name registrants, and they really didn't want community involvement in policy-making any more than the people who've been writing copyright treaties with domain-name confiscation and three-strikes internet disconnection want community involvement, so when ICANN suddenly appeared and took over control of DNS, you saw them doing the same things.
We don't need a huge number of gTLDs, because otherwise it would make the root just as cluttered as .com is now, but there's certainly room for a few hundred. For instance, the US trademark laws have about 35 categories of businesses, so Coke sodas don't conflict with coal product companies named Coke (or Koch), and Apple Computers doesn't conflict with fruit companies, and that could provide a mechanism for reducing the kinds of conflicts we get in .com, where only one business can get any particular name. It would also leave room for experimentation with naming structures, for instance doing geographically-based names (other than the .cctld approach), or phone-number-based domain names, or automatic disambiguation (for instance, if multiple companies want example.foo, they get example.1.foo, example.2.foo, etc.) The closest we've got in the current system is .museum, which nobody uses much.
That doesn't mean that ICANN's $185K/bid system is a great way to do gTLDs, but it'll at least break the ice a bit. Or it'll break ICANN, and that'd be fine too.
This is about Google's self-driving cars, isn't it?
Why do you say that the optimal TSP solutions don't create optimal PTSP paths? If you're just saying that "we're using time as a cost function, and for physics reasons it's not a simple multiple of distance", that's fine, you still know all the physics in advance so you can calculate your cost functions in advance, and use them to solve the TSP. Also, the article doesn't say how large N is, so it's hard to tell from reading it whether there are too many destinations to use an exact TSP algorithm and you need to use a heuristic instead.
No. The reason the pure problem is hard is that there are N-factorial possible solutions, which becomes infeasible to compute if N is large, and there aren't any good algorithms known to find the optimal solution that are better than enumerating them all. The reason for approximation algorithms is to get a pretty good answer in a reasonable amount of computation time, and there are algorithms that can provably get you within X% of the best solution (50% back in the late 70s), but they don't tell you anything about what the best solution is, they just set lower bounds on it.
The pure problem uses a cost function, and which can be road distance or time or whatever makes sense for your application, so if your cost function is time, then the road with bad traffic/low speed limit/etc. is more expensive than a road that's more miles but less crowded / higher speed limit /etc.)
You're misunderstanding the TSP - in the standard problem, the distances are known in advance, but there are n-factorial possible routes, so if n's large, you can't just enumerate all of them to find the best one, which makes it hard to tell if the best route you've found so far is actually the best. In the mathematical version, you can quickly verify whether any particular route is valid (hits all the cities, using valid roads between them), so in the real world you could drive that. (The only way you wouldn't have a real-world-achievable solution is if it takes longer to calculate the optimal route than it does to drive a pretty-good route.) The reason for using heuristic algorithms is to find pretty good routes with a reasonable amount of computation, and when I last studied it back in the late 70s, there were heuristics that had provable upper bounds of "no more than 50% longer than the optimal route" - somebody's probably found better than that by now.
There are dynamic variations on the problem where you don't know all the destinations or costs in advance, so e.g. the salesman starts out on Monday with three cities to visit, and on Tuesday he gets an order for City 4, and on Wednesday he gets orders from City 5 and City 6, etc.
The article doesn't do a good job of explaining the game, probably because the author or game designer doesn't really understand the mathematical problem? From a mathematical standpoint, if you're trying to get from City 1 to City 2, it's going to cost X12, and unless the game is changing something about the physics, you can calculate X12 in advance. Maybe it's intended to let the kids who are intuitively good at driving games have some chance against the kids who are intuitively good at finding pretty good routes?
ICANN's first jobs when it seized control of the domain business were to require True Names for domain name registration and to stop the IETF Ad-Hoc Committee (IAHC)'s plan for expanding the gTLD space. The IAHC plan initially proposed seven fairly lame new gTLDs (which was fine, because you want to test out the expansion process on names that nobody really cares about, like .firm, using them as a scratch monkey before you sell the valuable gTLDs, like .inc, .llc, .ltd. .gmbh, and .sex, because you only get to do that once. The Trademark Gods really didn't like the idea that they might have to buy up names in more namespaces, and wanted to make sure that if there was ever a trademark dispute involving a domain name that they'd be able to identify who to sue. And they certainly didn't want to allow any sort of experimental alternative name structures, though .museum sort of sneaked in, nor did they want to have actual public-interest representation on their board no matter what their initial charter said about electing members.
I don't think having a near-infinite number of gTLDs is a good idea; it's basically equivalent to losing the top level of hierarchy and having everybody under .com.
But having a few dozen or a hundred gTLDs can work just fine - for instance, the US trademark registration system has something like 34 categories of businesses, so you can have a "Coke" company selling soda and another "Coke" company selling coal products without them infringing on each other. ICANN being the kind of organization that they are, they'll of course try to monetize the **** out of the gTLD registration process, which isn't going to be an optimally rational division of the name space, but will at least keep it from getting totally out of hand.
Le Figaro reports that Minitel will be closing June 30, 2012. End of an era.
Back in the 80s a company I worked for made computers that could handle really large quantities of low-speed cooked-mode serial I/O, and while they turned out not to be the big-selling high-performance high-reliability systems the marketing slides thought they were, they were occasionally useful, and I think we sold some for Minitel.
Creationism is a theory that evolution happened, all in one week, about six thousand years ago, in contrast to the standard theories that said it happened at random over a period of billions of years. Is it a plausible hypothesis? How would you tell? Is there evidence that might support or contradict either theory? What other alternatives could explain the evidence? What kinds of things would you look for to help you decide? Fossils? Erosion? Rates of piracy? Historical records and calendar systems from other cultures?
And if you do teach "the controversy" as a scientific controversy, what conclusions are your students likely to draw? How will their parents react? Is that what the legislators thought they were getting into when they wanted teachers to teach "the controversy"?
The Republicans are happy to push anti-evolution to get the religious right-winger demographic involved in their party, voting and giving money. But the real payoff is getting people to doubt climate change science, because that's important to their corporate sponsors, who don't want Congress making laws that would interfere with their businesses.
Yes, Hawley's starting to understand some of the technical issues now that he's no longer in charge. But fundamentally, TSA was always about bullying, intimidation, and dishonesty, and that culture hasn't changed.
Also, back in the 80s, the high-tech company I worked for tended to hire from Ivy League schools or equivalent high-end colleges. You weren't going to find a lot of black students there, and you weren't going to find a lot of women at MIT (though Harvard and Radcliffe had just recently started integrating their programs), and being bright and talented didn't necessarily mean you could afford to go to the places they hired from. They started recruiting at women's colleges, and at historically black colleges. And even there it took them a while to figure out some of the cultural and program issues - I had one coworker who had a math degree (computer science degrees weren't common yet), and was bright and articulate, but out of his depth; he'd have been a good high school math teacher, but we needed an academic research type, and hiring him didn't help him or us, and having a manager who was a space cadet made it take a while to figure out it had been a mistake.
The company I worked for back in the 80s did a lot of affirmative action, in spite of the grumbling it initially caused from people with attitudes like yours. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to include people who are culturally different from you, but it's worthwhile, and there are lots of different kinds of skills. For an easy example, we were an East Coast company dominated by New Yorkers, where any conversation that doesn't have three people talking at once is dull and boring, and if you're not contradicting the boss that means you're obviously not paying attention. But as a somewhat academic high-tech company we also got a lot of Chinese and Japanese people, who were from cultures where interrupting people and contradicting the boss in public were really rude things to do, and if you wanted to get Dr. Wang's best work, you might want to ask for his opinion or at least not interrupt him halfway through his first sentence. Or if you're ordering sandwiches so we can work through lunch on a project, you might want to ask the Indian contractor if she eats meat (neither did I, by then.)
And then there was dealing with our subsidiary in the south. Y'all know that they refer to women as "girls" down there, but we got a bit of extra cultural warning that it was normal for managers to refer to clerical workflow as "the little girl takes the form to the such-and-such department" etc., and the fact that they had a bunch of rather short women working there didn't make it any less ridiculous even though it wasn't intended to be negative.
On the other hand, after moving to San Francisco in the 90s, I worked for women for about 15 years, some who were techies and some who came from the business side. And maybe half the men in the department were straight - I was very much not in Kansas any more, but most of the cultural adjustment was getting used to working with sales people instead of techies.
The findings weren't that the people with Asian-sounding names had problems in the interviews. They were that Asians didn't get called in for the interviews as often as people with Anglo names and similar credentials. It's a much different problem.
And people do often treat immigrants or other people with strong accents as less educated, whether it's justified or not. I'm glad he did get to speak to her in French, and spoke it well enough to find out that she spoke it well.
Many American friends of mine have said "A Southern accent costs you 20 perceived IQ points." I had a friend who had a doctorate in Islamic literature, and identified himself as being from Jordan (I think he was actually Palestinian, but his village was in Jordan when he was born), and had a really thick accent even after a decade or more in the US. His wife is from Beirut, and she said "Yeah, he's from out in the sticks, he sounds like that in Arabic also."
The large US company I was in did a lot of work on affirmative action back in the 80s, after getting bashed by a few lawsuits. We didn't have to drop our standards any, but we did have to go to a lot of work to try to reach out to communities where we hadn't traditionally had much contact, and to try to understand the impact of cultural differences. For instance, since we were a technology company, we had a lot of Chinese and Japanese techies, who viewed interrupting people and contradicting the boss as rude - but we were a company full of New Yorkers, for whom any conversation that didn't have three people speaking at once was dull, and not interrupting the boss meant you hadn't been listening. It took a lot of adjusting to make sure we didn't exclude the Asians. And there was a lot of making sure that there wasn't sexist or racist language used (you'd think by the 80s we'd have been better about it that we were, but cultural change takes a long time, and some of my older coworkers were pretty much the first generation of Jewish people at the company.)
And in the early 90s, one of my coworkers who was about 25 and female did a computer systems consulting project at a large aircraft company - where just about all the engineers were male and over 50 and didn't quite know how to react to her, because the current wave of feminism had only been going on for 30 years so taking technical direction from a woman was still pretty radical. And then there was the lunchtime conversation about why almost all the women had left one of our five departments that grew into an almost-everybody-except-management meeting (about everything that people wanted to bitch about, not just sexism issues), and nobody really wanted to have to report to management about the conclusions. (It wasn't my department, and I wasn't at the meeting, but I was rather surprised by it, because their department head was the one I'd have thought least likely to have that problem - but they also tended to promote supervisors based on technical ability, not people skills, so maybe there was too much bro-managing going on at that level.)
Nah, you can Google it yourself, but the term has been around at least a couple of months, and actually used in at least one startup's job ad (apparently even non-ironically, unless by the time it reached Twitter it had lost the attribution from The Onion, which we can really hope was the case.)
Kid, back when we were in school, the RDBMS community was a bunch of academics, and nobody thought that you'd be using anything that resource-intensive to do Real Work with any time soon. (And it was a big deal when we got a fourth megabyte for the mainframe that supported the entire university's computing needs...) (And yes, we did walk through the snow uphill both ways to get to the keypunch room.)
A Sun3 had a 1152x900 screen, and was really better than the 25x80 terminals, especially if you were running NeWS so your screen was rendered in PostScript. And the 1024x1024 versions of the Blit had slightly more pixels, for different usage models.
Later, in the early 90s, I started doing consulting kinds of jobs where we mostly used laptops because we needed portability, so I was suddenly thrown backwards into the WinTel PC world, which thought that 640x480 was pretty cool. (And when the department decided to spring for laptops with higher resolution, they chose the versions that had 640x480 with 16-bit color, because it was Really Shiny, instead of paying less for 800x600 with 8-bit color, even though we all spent more of our computer time doing text-based email, or word processing, or calculations of various sorts, not photography.)
Eventually we got 1280x1024 monitors for our desks, which most of the laptops could drive by then, but it wasn't like I was usually at my desk, so I finally had occasional access to screens that were better than I'd been using 20 years earlier. And about 3-4 years ago we finally got 1440x900 laptops, and now I'm running 1920x1080, which would be about enough if Win7 had any intelligence about how to pick font sizes. (At least most of the browsers support Control-Plus or Control-Mousewheel resizing. But Win7 still gets terribly confused running dual-monitor when the resolutions are different. Sigh...
Sure, some people think laptops are passe, now that they've got their iPads that automagically detect which way is up and swap screen orientation, but laptops are still the way many of us work (or laptop plus external monitor at work.) And typing on a rotated laptop really just doesn't work.