"In computational complexity theory, NP (nondeterministic polynomial time) is a complexity class used to classify decision problems. NP is the set of decision problems for which the problem instances, where the answer is 'yes', have proofs verifiable in polynomial time by a deterministic Turing machine, or alternatively the set of problems that can be solved in polynomial time by a nondeterministic Turing machine."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Did nobody ever fix Slashdot for Unicode?

Apple buying the vendor for the fingerprint stack might have something to do with Motorola dropping the ATRIX 4G fingerprint sensor.

The ATRIX 4G was supposed to get an ICS upgrade. There was a "leak" of a partially functional version. My guess is that the licensing issues with Authentec/Apple broke down. Guess Motorola didn't negotiate any long-term contract options.

It's a shame about how AT&T handled pricing on the LXDE subsystem. The X server implemented on the NVidia framebuffer/compositing layer was pretty nice. In theory Android 4.2.2 should support non-mirrored HDMI better, so hopefully I can get a Linux desktop bigger than 1280x720 on this Galaxy S3.

but there is no guarantee that awk is present on the remote machine, unlike grep, which is ubiquitous and part of the standard base. See, awk isn't, which experience has told me, but not you.

Which century did you have this experience in? awk has been in POSIX since, uh, 1986? It's mandatory in the SUS and the LSB. Every "charge for each utility program" Unix has been swept from the face of the earth.

If you're talking embedded systems, you're talking about busybox quirks or worse, and it's not really a good thing to lecture people about that situation without caveats.

But we aren't all bozos on this bus, and pretending "everybody contributed to it" is not necessarily the best way to fix this particular problem, or to reduce the likelihood of this kind of engineering failure in the future. Understanding how this happened is important.

My elevator version of what happened: the bellhead model of a communication service is a reliable circuit-switched connection. "Reliable" sounds good, and circuits are a familiar model. But the Internet is based on a model of best-effort delivery of packets. Every product group experienced in Internet infrastructure knew horror stories about confusing TCP. New entrants did not know this, or had system design teams tilted towards bellhead decision-making.

Cisco has all the cool toys for queue management in their routers. Are they bozos? People who have even skimmed the Linux traffic shaping HOWTO are sensitized to the issues. They're not bozos.

I have a copy of the first edition of Comer in front of me (the 1988 one that talked about the inevitable transition from TCP to OSI TP4.) The advice to implementors of gateways tells you to read RFC 1009 very carefully, which has a bunch of congestion cites, including John Nagle's (he's downthread) RFC 970 explaining why infinite buffers are a disaster. These are foundational documents of the Internet, and sure, they're from 1987 and routing to a T1 by processing over 9,000 packets a second is no longer something you would need a supermini for (you probably get faster computers free with your breakfast cereal.) But scanning forward through the RFCs you'll see lots and lots of very pointed advice to the effect of "please do not confuse TCP or you'll be sorry."

So some of the people building the network hardware with these problems weren't alive when this was being figured out. They didn't do their homework; fine. The people running the companies designing and building the hardware don't have that excuse, and it was their job to either get a clue or hire one. Their customers are going to be the ones paying to fix this.

So if you're buying Internet infrastructure, you might want to look for companies (and more particularly, product groups) hanging out on nanog and participating in IETF, since although that's not proof their products are not fighting the Internet, maybe it correlates.

My current guess is that organizational decision-making was tilted towards bellhead thinking for a variety of reasons (stereotype: they dress better and do nicer PowerPoint architecture.) Skimming through documentation of bearers such as 1xRTT makes it pretty clear that the design center was "reliable pipe first, then put packets on it." Which makes perfect sense if your company has history in non-Internet telecoms--your senior people are the ones who shipped products that did reliable circuit-switched pipes. But that's just wrong if you're doing IP, and for reasons known in the Internet communications world for decades.

I've been trying to figure out whether I wanted to link some version of this to the blog posts. I figure it's safely out of sight here and won't interfere with the public diplomacy.

You missed out on the PC Weasel 2000, a useful-looking video card that speaks RS-232.

PC Weasel 2000: Making servers run headless since 1999

You *have* to see their logo.

While technology may or may not progress, it is pretty certain that human nature will remain the same.

It's human nature that will make this a crisis, despite any amout of technological progress.
To fix the problem of procrastination causing crisis, you need to fix society not technology.
Currently fixing society is not considered doable, or ethical.

The proposal is infact disingenuous.

The honest proposal would be to say that leap-seconds are scrapped.
We will let clock time diverge from celestial time, and tackle the problem when it becomes a crisis,
or some other junior poltician in 250 years time wants to make their mark on history.

The patent law of most European countries, both EU and non-EU, is underpinned by the European Patent Convention (EPC). The EPC also created the European Patent Office (EPO) which enables separate patents for multiple European countries to be obtained through a single application process. Thus, the current UK, German, French, Dutch, Hungarian etc. law on what is patentable is intended to have the same effect as the corresponding provisions of the EPC, which are applied directly by the EPO.

However, there has been a tendency for each country's courts to interpret these provisions differently from those of the other countries and the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO). The Commission came to the view that this lack of harmony was incompatible with the single market. This is stated explicitly in articles 2 and 3 of the draft directive:

(2) Differences exist in the protection of computer-implemented inventions offered by the administrative practices and the case law of the different Member States. Such differences could create barriers to trade and hence impede the proper functioning of the internal market.

(3) Such differences have developed and could become greater as Member States adopt new and different administrative practices, or where national case law interpreting the current legislation evolves differently.

The aim of the Directive was to harmonise the jurisprudence of the EU member states with that of the Boards of Appeal of the EPO. In effect, the Directive would force courts to interpret the issue of technical contribution in line with the content of the Directive instead of by applying tests that the individual national courts had devised.

There was no intention of changing the substantive law and it is doubtful that the EU could do this because the law on patentability is derived from the EPC, to which non-EU states, including Switzerland, Bulgaria, Iceland, Turkey and Romania, are parties, with a leavening from TRIPS.

The promulgation of the Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions was never going to be the correct forum for preventing "software patents". The horse had already bolted when the EPC and TRIPS treaties were negotiated. The scope of the Directive was far too limited and the power of the EU to change substantive patent law too circumscribed by these other treaties.