The problem in itself is NP-hard, but it turns out that in some cases of interest

Perfect solutions are often NP-hard in systems where pretty-good solutions are nowhere close to NP-hard in many practical circumstances.

The declaration of NP-hard is way overrated. We use it mostly because mathematics still can't chew "pretty good" in any rigorous way.

The only reason we're still here is ... because we've been here so long.

FTFY. But it's actually not entirely true. When I've made an effort to jump ship, I find that many of the alternative sites have not yet invented the paragraph.

Seriously, the background music in this video is the all-time low since the day I gleefully blacklisted Jon Katz. But sadly, this still beats conversing in sentence fragments. I've seen articles written by Katz since then, elsewhere, that were quite good. It's just that his round-about mush brain was a terrible fit at geek central. He was always trying to discover if he had anything at all to say by dangling it in front of enraged bulls with an actual clue.

For me, writing is thinking. So I pound out a few paragraphs here whenever I need to consolidate some nuance of my personal perspective on life, out of long habit. Sometimes I write to discharge something old, tired and ugly. Other times I write to embrace a fresh new slant on an old issue. It's useful to have a place to write where I can fully exploit the revolving door of mental evolution. If I were writing under my own name on a blog, or something more formal, there would be far less opportunity to write in the jettison mode.

For about fifteen years I used to patronize one of the first outstanding microbrews in town, in a heritage building with a patio overlooking the waterfront backed by the quaint skyline of the garden city. About eight years ago you could see their business model shifting. First, fetch your own beer from the bar turned into table service, who handed you a menu and didn't even bother to mention the special keg of something especially interesting at the end of the bar. Then the menu went all over the place, including a sojourn through expensive and unpalatable, before fixing the quality problem, but leaving the price alone, in the bracket where mainly tourists are willing to go.

Once a year or so, we meet there out of pure nostalgia. The beer's still good, but everything else is either sad or expensive. True beer lovers are not their target market any longer. We don't belong there. I don't belong, here, really. I just haven't completely kicked the inertia.

And precisely how did we decide that these paintings weren't painted by outcast males with girlish mittens? Did we exhume Leonardo or Michelangelo to make sure he was "one of us"?

As well, it's not clear how we go from hand prints to a conclusion about who painted the animal outlines. I just watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams last week and I was thinking these thoughts all the while. I doubt we will ever know with any degree of confidence.

That's why Hertzog titled his movie "Forgotten". Because we'll never know. Hertzog is a strange duck, but he's not stupid.

We wonder why so many Americans are ignorant of the standards of science when the only time anything scientific captures their attention, it's complete bullshit wrapped around an intriguing nugget. Selling the bullshit sizzle but not the steak is the reason the majority of the population remains clueless about this important food group.

I'm usually pretty good about that.

Here follows some anti-lameness fodder:

The origins of Unicode date to 1987, when Joe Becker from Xerox and Lee Collins and Mark Davis from Apple started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set. In August 1988, Joe Becker published a draft proposal for an "international/multilingual text character encoding system, tentatively called Unicode". Although the term "Unicode" had previously been used for other purposes, such as the name of a programming language developed for the UNIVAC in the late 1950s, and most notably a universal telegraphic phrase-book that was first published in 1889, Becker may not have been aware of these earlier usages, and he explained that "[t]he name 'Unicode' is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding".

Advertising in general is just scummy shit to make people do what they don't want. Unfortunately Marti's argument falls apart by it being hinged on this insane "rational economy" assertion.

Sorry, bucko there's no free lunch on thinking straight.

Actually burning money is déclassé. (So is failing to render basic Unicode.) However, conspicuous consumption really works when done right. Thorstein Veblen, this is Mr Cecil Rhodes. You'll get along famously.

As far as Don Marti goes, it's an extremely well-written article about factors many people don't bother to consider. It's a heavy lunch as it now stands. But still, he leaves too much out. Sometimes you can't win.

The problem is that advertisers pursue mixed tactics. They burn money to burnish the brand silver, while also pushing your worst buttons, while moving mountains behind the scenes to obscure whatever direct quality signal the consumer might also observe.

In the rare case where a branding effort convinces me, I'll go to the corporate web site with a specific question about whether their product has a quality I regard as essential. It'll take me five minutes to even find the page that reveals this (or ten minutes of futility culminating in a boiling rage if the page doesn't even exist). Then I when I find the page, it might reveal what I wish to know or it might not. When it reveals what I wish to know, it might yet remain hard to determine exactly which models and which model years conform to my wishes.

When one steps back to do a NPV on the entire experience, the answer is "Why the fuck bother?"

My most recent horror-show experience involved procuring Nomacorc for some homemade wine which I wish to cellar for up to five years (my cellar is set up for upright bottle storage, so natural cork is a no-fly zone).

Check out this exercise in burning money: NomaSense OxiSense video. Labcoats, the musical, scored by John Williams. Notice the use of a thick French accent to extol product virtue, and the Swiss accent for the bean-counter spiff. This is a cool technology. I'm impressed, and not just in my shrivelled MTV reflex arc.

But mainly I just wanted to buy the best existing Nomcorc closure. Well, it took a long time on that horrid website to determine which of their product levels was best suited to my needs. Try it yourself.

Having figured this out, I started to call local wine supply retailers, and not a single one could tell me which expensively-branded Nomacorc they were actually purveying. Nomacorc (or their hapless distributor) ships out bags with no product markings, and neither do the individual corks have any such marking. If you bottle your fine Nebbiolo with a two-year cork by mistake, four years from now you can kiss your draino goodbye.

Eventually I found a hopeless geek such as myself who runs a brew-on-premise. I asked him which Nomacorc he sells. He launched into a tirade (without any prompting from me) "oh my god, I wasted of my life on their web site and putting through my order, but I did finally get a huge bail of corks suited to preserve wine for four plus years". I replied "thank you for saying that, I think we'll be friends for life".

As far as I'm concerned, the entire advertising industry can go stuff itself until the day comes when the supermarket informs me that I've selected a product that exceeds my personal guidelines for sodium or MSG or Monsanto extortion chemical, so I can reject it from my basket prior to paying. Until advertising is on-side with helping me enforce my better self (over my harried, impulsive fuckwit self) their business model will continue to circle the drain of preying on the weak, or the strong in weak moments.

The idea behind insurance is that it is a personal choice to have it or not.

Where the fuck did you get that? That's actually the founding idea and sole power source behind libertarianism: that all good things come from choice alone.

Insurance is about entering into social compact where individual risks are borne by the group. The Canadian health care system is an insurance system, even though I've never personally received a choice in whether to participate. Insurance actually works best when it casts a wide net, despite the exceedingly awkward conversation about where benefits end, for the diseases where medical science offers us the most heroic, astrobuck interventions. Not facing these adult questions doesn't make a system better, it just makes the system easier to stomach, living life with your head in the sand.

If you're not even conversant on Rawl's original position, it's going to be hard to draw you into meaningful debate. Rules that everyone would agree to before the first card is dealt will be portrayed as selectively punitive if introduced after people take a boo at their hole cards. Fly in the ointment: we all have hole cards already dealt.

Why did Europeans not adopt American notions of freedom and government long before America embarked on the great experiment? Because they reached a gridlock of vested interests, each pursuing their own glorious choices.

Now America has an advanced case of gridlock syndrome. The better path for all concerned is no longer an option. Democracy in the first place is all about facing the risk that your own choices will overruled by the choices of others, should they happen to outnumber you, or the electoral lines were cleverly gerrymandered, or the options presented/not presented have been engineered by the deepest pockets.

No matter how you slice it, choice is a social construct. Do you really think a libertarian paradise is immune to the vested interests of shadowy elites?

If I thought choice worked the way you think choice works, I'd be libertarian too. Choice is a superhero, but not a faultless superhero. Choice simply can not fix all problems. The fly in the ointment is biological interconnection.

The form of choice that must be most zealously guarded is that surrounding self-actualization. I'm sitting here at a keyboard, connected to the internet, in a country which guarantees free speech in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and generally enforces those laws with laudable diligence. If I fail to self-actualize, I'm sure as hell not blaming it on the Canadian health care system.

We're in a medical reality right now where large numbers of people take drugs such as Lipitor, where few benefit from doing so. This is fundamentally socialist. These drugs are explicitly designed to behave like this, by profit maximizing private interests. It's awfully darn hard to make a billion dollars a year selling a drug costing $500,000 for a course of treatment with 100% guarantee of permanent cure. Many of your prospective patients don't have $500,000 at hand, and even if they did, it means their children don't go to college.

That reality will change over time. Topol on the Creative Destruction of Medicine is a great overview of this. The day will come to circle the wagons around the American health care delivery model yet again. But you fear waiting for that day, don't you, because you know how damn important it is to the outcome of the debate that hole cards have already been dealt. People will then cling to the the Obamacare system using exactly the same arguments you are using to prevent its inception. And I'll still be here upbraiding those idiots, too, so long as my fingers obey my command.

Many of the Obamacare opponents are so prostate before the god of gridlock, that they conceive of Obamacare as terminal station. It's not a good terminal station. I agree. So let's kill gridlock and live like sensible humans.

PS post.

I was reading Wikipedia just last night after viewing Cave of Forgotten Dreams on the origins of language, which the article proclaims is viewed by many[who?] as one of the hardest problems in science.

Noam Chomsky is a prominent proponent of discontinuity theory. "The views of Noam Chomsky on the nature of UG (innate universal grammar) have long been dominant within the field of linguistics, but they themselves have undergone marked changes from decade to decade" (Christiansen, 59).

He argues that a single chance mutation occurred in one individual on the order of 100,000 years ago, triggering the "instantaneous" emergence of the language faculty (a component of the mind-brain) in "perfect" or "near-perfect" form.

The philosophical argument runs, briefly, as follows: firstly, from what is known about evolution, any biological change in a species arises by a random genetic change in a single individual which spreads throughout its breeding group.

Secondly, from a computational perspective on the theory of language: the only change that was needed was the cognitive ability to construct and process recursive data structures in the mind (the property of "discrete infinity", which appears to be unique to the human mind). This genetic change, which endowed the human mind with the property of discrete infinity, Chomsky argues, essentially amounts to a jump from being able to count up to N, where N is a fixed number, to being able to count indefinitely (i.e. if N can be constructed then so can N+1).

It follows from these assertions that the evolution of the human language faculty is saltational since, as a matter of logical fact, there is no way to gradually transition from a mind capable only of counting up to a fixed number, to a mind capable of counting indefinitely.

The picture then, by loose analogy, is that the formation of the language faculty in humans is akin to the formation of a crystal; discrete infinity was the seed crystal in a super-saturated primate brain, on the verge of blossoming into the human mind, by physical law, once a single small, but crucial, key stone was added by evolution. It thus follows from this theory that language did appear rather suddenly within the history of human evolution.

Does anyone else find it weird that in Chomsky's view, the magic moment in human evolution is something that our computational mechanisms have possessed at least since Turing showed in 1937 that Turing machines equal the lambda calculus in expressiveness?

Or does Chomsky somehow secretly believe that the gene for human mental recursion is more supercalifragilisticexpialidocious than lambda calculus?

Freud and Chomsky share a unique gift in their capacity to make impressive technical accomplishments without uprooting or disturbing too much of the psychedelic wu underbrush.

Unless this people building this system have come up with a way to program a creative spirit into the system, I'm skeptical

Daniel Dennett made himself a career out of arguing against this kind of twaddle. Whenever I listen to him, I always wonder what he's making such a big deal about, then I head back out into the world, and sure enough, he's busy saying what needs to be said.

From Daniel Dennett: 'You can make Aristotle look like a flaming idiot':

There's a pattern here, "the story of my life", as Dennett puts it. People assume unrealistic ideals of what free will, selfhood or rationality are and then get upset when Dennett says: "It's not the overwhelming supercalifragilisticexpialidocious phenomenon that you thought it was." But it's still real enough. The problem is simply: "Both free will and consciousness have been, by my lights, inflated in the popular imagination and in the philosophical imagination," and so "anybody who has a view of either one that is chopped down to size" is accused of "a wretched subterfuge", as Kant memorably put it.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious travels under many aliases. One of these is "creative spirit". A calling card of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is that there can be no such thing as incremental progress. You either have it, or you're wasting your time. There's a grain of truth to this. It's hard to sneak up on a moving bar that travels by teleportation whenever encroached.

As I recall, Dennett goes into this in the last third of Daniel Dennett: Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. It's a virtuous and mildly tedious sermon if you already belong to the choir.

part of the problem, not the solution

This kind of logic is itself part of the problem. It presumes that people are engaged in the political dimensions of their life activities everywhere and always. Now perhaps you think the world would be a better place if this were true, and you might have the view—from within the confines of your evidently narrow and sheltered life—that we all have limitless capacity to politicize our every twitch and sneeze. But we don't, and it's not effective.

I have a range of issues where I'm especially well placed (though aptitude, knowledge, experience, and social connections) to speak out loudly and effectively. The rest of the time, like everyone else, I'm merely trying to get through life without succumbing to death by paper cut. Facebook is a cancer, so I don't go there at all, but if I did, I wouldn't regard Social Fixer as part of the problem. I'd regard it as a dry pair of socks, so I could live to hike another day.

But sure, if your boots pinch, burn your socks. It's true: you won't ever buy a bad-fitting pair of boots ever again. Too bad about those refrigerated vaccines you were trekking into a remote African village. Better luck next year.

Regardless, the jump from "you're not doing what we ask" to "we get to install a black box on your network and spoof as you, trust us not to abuse this" seems excessive if not absurd as lavabit's core business is centered around privacy.

Considering the likely demographics of their clientele, if word leaks out that Lavabit's entire service is wearing an FBI wire, the Lavabit proprietors are about as long for the good life as Adriana La Cerva during her Pepto-Bismol phase.

Adriana La Cerva cooperates with the FBI

Ah, thanks for that. Without a gratuitous ad distronem attack within the first page of comments, I wouldn't be sure I was reading something about BSD.

As for de Raadt's "unsupportable fuckwittery", the infallably polite are soon back-doored and sent to PRISM. The Philistines didn't send Goliath down to challenge the Israelites in single combat because he was the life of the party. His rawhide posse seems to get a lot done, despite the incessant hail of small stones. If only they'd sent Theo instead. Thirty thousand rueful historical Philistines can't be wrong.

There's many things that Apple might not have invented, but did nonetheless popularize.

It was IBM who "popularized" the PC among the ranks of accountants and economists and statisticians and MBAs who never felt the magic of the cramped Apple II keyboard or the 40 column display with no lowercase letters. These dullards constituted a far larger market than Apple commanded until the distant dawn of gadget manna.

For the tablet, some company that loomed large in the public imagination needed to step up and offer legitimacy that this wasn't just a niche product doomed to forever remain a niche product, just as IBM did with the original PC—this while Xerox already had the bones of the Apple Lisa/Macintosh with mice and networking in an advanced state of development within their research lab.

Funny how the worm turns.

The entirely of the PC revolution was set in motion by a combination of Leibniz/Babbage and the invention of solid state semiconductors and would have unfolded much as it has without any of the companies we know today who muscled their way into the vanguard of brand recognition by some combination of skill and luck (far more luck than usually admitted in the retrospective hagiography).

Bell Labs' attorneys soon discovered Shockley's field effect principle had been anticipated and devices based on it patented in 1930 by Julius Lilienfeld, who filed his MESFET-like patent in Canada on October 22, 1925.

Fifty years later, we arrive at Apple's founding moment:

The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by Chuck Peddle and Bill Mensch for MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced, the 6502 was by a considerable margin, the least expensive full-featured microprocessor on the market, selling for less than one-sixth the cost of competing designs from larger companies, such as Motorola and Intel.

Innovation is a fifty-lap relay race around a marathon track. I'd also give props to Colossus, System/360 (mainframe), the Unix philosophy, and the massive scale of Google's data center search appliance (cloudframe). Apple never made it into this league.

Throughout this period the Colossus remained secret, long after any of its technical details were of any importance. This was due to the UK's intelligence agencies use of Enigma-like machines which they promoted and sold to other governments, and then broke the codes using a variety of methods. Had the knowledge of the codebreaking machines been widely known, no one would have accepted these machines; rather, they would have developed their own methods for encryption, methods that the UK services might not have been able to break.

The scope of PRISM is a big surprise? To anyone? Really?

It's pretty obvious with Coke that cultivating their global brand was their core innovation. This is less obvious with Apple, but closer to the mark than most suppose.

How Amazon Followed Google Into the World of Secret Servers

Pinkham was struck by how different the machines looked â" and how hot they were. Even then, Google was running its website on dirt-cheap, stripped-down servers slotted into extremely tight spaces. They didnâ(TM)t even have plastic cases.

This was at least as central to Google's business model as their brand-building Page Rank algorithm. And it requires building a robust data-center OS.

If I had to name one thing that Apple innovated outside of brand/fit-and-finish (and gleanings from NeXT) while doing the lion's share of the work themselves, it would be this:

The combination of the LaserWriter, PostScript, PageMaker and the Mac's GUI and built-in AppleTalk networking would ultimately transform the landscape of computer desktop publishing.

For me the iPhone is a story of execution, balls, and charisma. I regard the LaserWriter as more innovative in its separation from competing products than the iPhone, for all its sleekness. Spending $150 million to create the iPhone should buy you some kick-ass industrial design. A little more than that buys you Titanic, Avatar or John Carter. Kudos to Apple that the end result of their big, scary investment was more like Titanic and less like John Carter. Kudos that it was the right product at the right time. Still, it's spit and polish innovation, lacking technical depth.

For innovation on steroids, take a look at $1,000 genome:

Human Genome Project 1990-2003: $2.7 billion
Full genome 2007: $1 million
Full genome circa 2015: $1000

One fresh-faced combatant, Genia, has recently received a large grant, and issued a press release proposing commercial introduction at the end of 2014. Here's an older article describing the seriously impressive shit they are slinging together:
Geniaâ(TM)s Nanopore/Microchip Technology Gains Life Technologiesâ(TM) Support

Maybe they do, maybe they don't make this work. That's another clue that real innovation has a pizza baking in the Tokamak pizza oven. For the antipode, consider how Slashcode handles simple Unicode code points.

I dare anyone, especially after mr. Snowden's revelations, to contradict mr. Stallman's points.

Snowden's unprecedented disclosed of hard evidence from the inside was in no way revelatory to those of us who have followed the NSA story since The Puzzle Palace. Stallman's tiresome drone about the collectivisation of digital works as an inalienable freedom has been equally predictable for just as long. Here's the problem. RMS's political philosophy has all the subtlety of Benito Mussolini.

Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

Let me rephrase RMS:

Everything within freedom, nothing outside freedom, nothing against freedom.

Did I miss anything? For some reason I persist in the view that the good society is far less polar in its optimal constitution. That's all I'm going to give you for a dare offered up (how generous of you) a decade after this debate widely circulated, and two full decades after the broad outlines were firmly in place.

Once again, Star Trek is ahead of the curve.

If you don't count noticing that the gear cogs of the antikythera could be made ever smaller and smaller by ongoing advances in Swiss craftsmen 1600 years later, then Star Trek was indeed ahead of its time in guessing that a large phone might become a small phone with batteries (the Baghdad Battery dates to roughly the same age as the antikythera) and a radio (1887) carried by some exotic flux such as neutrinos (as named by Fermi in 1933).

On a sidenote, imagine the horror if all women of the world would have their period exactly synchronized!

From what I've been reading lately—in recent books—about half of the crabbiness is due to women not eating enough to compensate for their increased metabolic rate during their periods. Men also get crabby when we don't eat enough to replenish our willpower reserves. It takes willpower to make the generous response rather than the first lizard response that enters our brain.