Evidence that P = NP (or one is a subset of the other) means all cryptography is doomed to fail.

No it doesn't. Even if P = NP the conversion factors between algorithms can be so large that it's not possible in practice. I.e. x^100 is polynomial time, but not calculable on nearly on the same scale as x^2 or x^3.

Some current cryptographic methods may fail, but probably not all. And new algorithms that don't rely on non-polynomial time calculations will be available (if they aren't already). I studied cryptography in grad school. Some of the details have slipped my memory but I'm positive this isn't the end of the world. Crypto will survive.

The idea that such measures are required is it's own special sort of bigotry.

Actually it's a recognition that all metrics are flawed, a perfect rank ordering of candidates is impossible, that among good candidates lower "qualifications" can be more correlated with lower opportunities/resources than lesser ability, and that having employees with different backgrounds and life experiences leads to more viewpoints and perspectives that strengthen the overall result. It's not about preferential treatment, it's about recognizing the flaws and limitations in the evaluation system giving overlooked candidates a chance.

There's nothing bigoted about that.

Generate also a population B, with a same or similar distribution but a lower mean (or alternatively, same mean and lower variance, etc). Use any bell-curve distribution (such as normal) with no cap (so D&D-like 3d6 is out).

You'll see that any kind of racism hurts the person doing the discrimination as he gets an unoptimal result. You can also notice that affirmative action is drastically more harmful than traditional racism.

Your flaw is assuming that an objective and unbiased ranking of candidates is possible. It's not. There are no perfect indicators of ability. Test scores, grades, connections, etc - all have flaws. All are influenced by the resources you and your family have. And none of them correlate that well with job performance. Only in broad strokes.

Affirmative action is recognizing this fact and giving individuals who are normally overlooked an opportunity to show what they can do. That's it. It's like the NBA scouts who go to China or Africa searching for seven footers, when everyone else is recruiting in the US and Europe. They won't have the same pedigree as American players, but they can be just as good. Nothing nefarious about that.

That is the problem with affirmative action: by definition some candidates are less qualified. Which inevitably means that all members of the group are looked at skeptically, because you just don't know which ones are qualified, and which ones are not.

Oh to be young and foolish again...

You are starting from a false premise. That there are single measurements that apply equally across the board to all candidates and can be used to rank them. Life doesn't work that way.

"Objective" criteria have flaws. Grades, standardized testing, skills tests, they do not capture the world perfectly. Having a higher test score just means you are a better test taker, not that you are smarter or know more or perform better under pressure or are more qualified. I've been in top 1% of standardized test scores my whole life. I have plenty of friends who are just as smart and accomplished but for whatever reason don't test well. Same with grades.

Second, you are confusing cause and effect. Affirmative action is not intended to promote people with lower test scores (or whatever) just because they are minorities. Instead it starts with a simple premise: those with access to more resources perform better on standard metrics. Better schools, better grades, better tests, better connections, etc. Affirmative action attempts to reach past these inherent imbalances by promoting candidates who normally would get overlooked. People who went to a poor state school or HBCU instead of a big-name research institution. People whose grades and test scores are lower not because of inherent ability, but because they don't have access to the same opportunities and resources. People who don't look or talk like the person doing the hiring - we have an inherent bias toward those we see as being like ourselves, having a similar background and customs.

In other words, affirmative action is not about hiring less qualified candidates. It's about recognizing the inherent biases in the system that make minority candidates appear less desirable, because they have lower test scores or come from a minority culture or just look different from your self-selected peer group. It's giving deserving people a chance that they should get but otherwise don't. And it's not about promoting groups; it's about giving overlooked individuals an opportunity to show what they can do.

And engineering has a distinct male-dominated culture. I was a software developer for many years. As much as everyone romanticizes it being a pure meritocracy, it's not. There are ingrained patterns of communication and behavior that are incredibly male oriented. Combative and confrontational, arrogant, very direct. And a dismissive attitude that if you don't talk or think the same way as the group, then you are stupid or don't get it or can't hack it.

Yes there are women who have thrived in this culture, but they have to adapt to "fit" the expected patterns. Meanwhile a lot of incredibly talented people (including many women) are sidelined or ignored because they communicate or see things in a different way. That is a loss for all of us.

Healthy diversity is embracing other ways of doing things, of learning from different perspectives, not cramming everyone into the same square hole. Engineering culture is guilty of the very things people accuse Google of: dismissing those who don't follow the groupthink.

Consider that next time you see some "minority candidate" and assume they are less qualified than you. Understand that they have every bit as much right to be there as you do. Find out what they have to offer and what you can learn from them.

Yes you will occasionally find some minority hires who don't perform that well. But you will find white men who don't perform well either. It's a bell curve. You can't cherry pick a few outliers and assume the whole group is bad. Treat them as individuals regardless of their background, rather than starting off with unwarranted assumptions.

Americans seem to think that if they are kind to a stranger, if they yield, if they voluntarily allow someone else to be first ... if they say "excuse me" and actually give the other person a second to move instead of immediately invading their personal space like it was not a polite request but a warning ... if they decide that blocking high-traffic doorways, hallways and other narrow shared public spaces might be rude

The latter condition drives the former. I used to wait politely for people to finish what they're doing and move out of the way. But they don't. They sit there in the middle of the aisle / lane, blocking traffic without a second thought while they yammer on their phone about who their cousin is dating this week. You politely ask them to move or say "Excuse me, please, may I get through?" and they glare at you like you just ran over their dog. If you're lucky, then they'll slowly amble out of the way while giving you the finger. Don't ask what happens if you're unlucky.

So yeah, Americans are the worst. And I grew up with them. I'm always cognizant of my surroundings and not impeding others. The rude behaviors I do have are simply coping mechanisms to deal with my fellow citizens who couldn't give two shits about anyone beyond themselves.

That said, when I travel overseas I leave all that stuff at home. No one reason to inflict it on the rest of the world. EU and Japan are a joy to visit.

In short: people are the problem.

The govt is the people. Did you sleep through civics class?

Those local tax payers who paid for the kids education elected those city officials. The officials represent those citizens and serve their needs. They are implementing this policy on behalf of those taxpayers. It is the taxpayers who implementing this requirement, via their duly elected officials.

If it turns out the local tax payers don't like this policy, they can vote in new officials and overturn it. That's how govt works. The govt IS the people. What, you want every taxpayer showing up at graduation placing their own unique demand on every graduate because they paid for part of his education? It doesn't work that way dude. The taxpayers' collective rights to do this sort of thing are vested in their elected officials.

Whoa there. You're glossing over a huuuuuge difference. On earth the needed raw materials for our technology are immediately at hand, available with minimal effort. Bang some rocks, skins some animals, boom you're good.

On Mars we can't even breathe without help. The kinds of complex technology needed have to be imported from two gravity wells and 50 million km away. You can't make replacement parts on Mars for any but the simplest machines.

Colonizing other planets is a pipe dream. The energy and technology requirements are mind-boggling. They will never be more than a curiosity, dependent on Earth for their survival. Complete waste of time and resources.

It sounds more like a problem with your users being drooling idiots.

It's like they say: you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your users. Can't live with them, can't kill them.

The question I have is: what makes a notice "bogus"? It could mean at least any of the following: the URL never returned any useful content (returns a 404 or similar); the URL used to return content, but does not currently; the domain is not responding; the URL is not indexed by Google; the URL returns content, but none that contains a whiff of the copyrighted material; or other possibilities.

If the only thing "bogus" is that the URL is not indexed by Google (but does impermissibly contain copyrighted material), then this shouldn't be a problem. Google quickly scans the URL, sees that it's not indexed, and tosses the request. There should be no need for human intervention. If they wanted to, Google could even add the URL to a list of DMCAed URLs to prevent possible indexing in the future. All automated responses, very cheap to implement.

As for why copyright holders would do this, it's not difficult to see. Say you find a URL infringing your material. You don't know who indexes it. You can check Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc - but they are constantly updating their results, and it may not show up at the time you search. Especially if pirate sites appear and disappear quickly. So you send DMCA notices to every major search engine so the ones which index it stop and the ones which haven't indexed it don't pick it up later. Multiply this by 1,000 and you see why it's infeasible to verify that every takedown notice is currently active in Google's index.

If you want to talk about whether the DMCA process itself is reasonable, that's another conversation. But given the current system and the definition of "bogus" implied by the summary, this approach doesn't look unreasonable.

Adding California voters to Florida voters as a big total is actually an apples to oranges mistake.

Oh right, I forgot. People from Florida are annointed by God to rule the rest of the country. Those crazy Californians shouldn't even be allowed to vote.

How about this: ONE MAN ONE VOTE. Everyone's vote counts equally. Now I'm the one living in fantasy land...

So instead we get a few midwest farmers and unemployed mill workers telling the entire country what to do. Brilliant.

Hint: majority rule is called a DEMOCRACY. If you don't like it go back to Soviet Russia.

Fortunately there's a setting which will turn this behaviour off and force emacs to always use spaces.

That's like saying "Fortunately, this handgun has a feature to always disable the safety and aim the barrel at your foot." Repeat after me: spaces are not indentation.

This is why tabs and only tabs are the proper line indentation character. One tab = indent one level. Two tabs = indent two levels. Tab is the only line indent char. It's a semantic definition. No more confusion.

So, here's my problem with whitespace being syntactically significant ... everybody likes to see code with different levels of indent.

Not a problem. Everyone defines how much space to render for a tab in their own editor. Everyone wins.

The problem was his electric mode in emacs was thinking itself oh-so-clever, and instead of storing the *actual* number of tab indents or whitespace, it just stripped them in favor of a single tab that emacs would then know how to render later.

Misbehaving tools are bad. You correctly locked him out until he fixed it. Problem solved.

For any of us who have taken compiler classes, a context free grammar specifically ignores whitespace. That's how compilers have worked for a very long time, if the grammar productions for your language involve counting whitespace ... well, my compilers prof would have failed me. Instead of having a visible thing to define a block, oh, well, just indent a few more chars.

Tab = indent. Space = ignore. Problem solved.

You can't see what character whitespace actually is ... is that 8 spaces or a tab?

Beginning of line = tab = indent. Elsewhere = space = ignore. Problem solved.

I've seen someone debug a python program, and even though things were in the same column in the editor, some were tabs and some were spaces, which had the very bizarre effect of making it semantically different than it looked.

That man was an idiot. Run python -t. Tabs and spaces should never be mixed. Tab is the only proper, semantic line indent char. Problem solved.

I have several issues with whitespace defining block structure, but the ones you identified are trivial to fix. The real issues are:

• communicating code through sources that collapse or mangle whitespace (html, some emails)
• difficulty with quickly and efficiently changing block structure, e.g. to temporarily bypass a conditional or refactor functions

The second is properly addressed by better editing tools. The first is annoying, but not enough to outweigh the benefits in clarity and expressiveness from using python. It's really quite easy to adjust.

But it is plural - Mathematics. In the rest of the world its called Maths

Oh really? And what pray tell is a single Mathematic? I suppose you think hippo is short for hippopotamu.