Of course it's not literally slavery or indentured servitude, but it does share some common elements that are useful for our analysis. In particular, they both involve voluntary commiting yourself to restrictive labor in exchange for coming to the US.
It was a wonderful class! When I took it, the class sessions were basically open problem solving sessions involving said advance data structures. Apparently, the class leads to at least 2 or 3 published papers whenever its held.
Sure, you can prove a minimal distance. Think of this problem as a metal chain. Each link of the chain enforces a maximal distance on the nodes it adjoins. The chain is bound on either end to some fixed point.
In an non-constrained case, sure, there's no-minimal link distance. You just have a pile of chain.
However, if you make the chain taut between the two points, say by decreasing the number of nodes in the chain or the maximal distance of links, the minimal distance between nodes then approaches the maximal distance between nodes. When you have a chain constrained to the straight line between the two points, the maximal distance between nodes is equal to the minimal distance between nodes.
You could use this to prove that N devices are spread fairly geographically evenly near the line between two devices you know the location of, if the transport latency was fairly constant.
If you cross this line over multiple countries, you now have a system where you can prove that the devices are spread across some number of the different countries, which probably has some useful properties, like making nation-state attacks slightly more difficult.
I also prefer having a thicker phone in exchange for durability and battery life, so I current have the Galaxy S8 Active, which does very well on those fronts.
Sadly, it appears it didn't sell particularly well, thus no S9 Active.
Agreed. For example, the Media Lab and administration took opposing sides during the whole Senior House fiasco.
The MIT administration overall is incredibly lawsuit/risk averse after a bunch of heavy settlements, such as the Shin case, the sodium case, and the Wellesley girlfriend stabbing.
edit: Did not expect downvotes on this. Curious why