Interesting Links for 06-08-2014

• Artist in "Saying controversial thing in order to get publicity" shock. (This time, about children)
  (tags: art children )
• Discrimination at work goes unpunished as women can’t afford to sue
  (tags: law discrimination UK )
• Guardians Of The Galaxy Had Highest Percentage Of Female Viewers Of Any Marvel Studios Movie
  (tags: marvel movies women )
• EU enlargement, the UK and immigration – a recap, and a call to move on
  (tags: Europe immigration vianwhyte )
• British influence in the EU has fallen off a cliff
  (tags: Europe vianwhyte )
• Exposure to Bisphenol A linked to food intolerances in later life
  (tags: food allergies bisphenol )
• Klingon Pleasures - I kinda want this t-shirt
  (tags: t-shirts StarTrek )
• Glaswegians warned to stop partying now
  (tags: Glasgow funny party )
• This is what the UK's "Open Door Policy" on immigration is really like (vile)
  (tags: immigration UK )
• Saturated fat in dairy may protect against diabetes
  (tags: milk fat diabetes )
• Israel's Most Liberal City Introduces Racially Segregated Kindergartens
  (tags: Israel racism children )
• Israel recruiting black students to deflect claims of racism.
  (tags: israel racism )
• 30 days with Android - a blind man takes the plunge
  (tags: android accessibility blindness mozilla )
• Comic artist uses DMCA to remove criticism of his impossibly-shaped female characters
  (tags: art comics women dmca censorship )
• How Microsoft dragged its development practices into the 21st century (Waterfall out/Agile in)
  (tags: development agile Microsoft )
• Computer Games Better Than Medication in Treating Elderly Depression
  (tags: games depression age )
• Why some schools are selling their iPads (Hint: Keyboards)
  (tags: Google laptop computers ipad apple )
• The sad truth about uncontacted tribes
  (tags: civilization society )

A quick question about TCP/IP

I was reading about TCP, congestion, etc. because of some presentation slides (which I wish I had the notes for, because I'd like the explanations that go with some of them.

And I realised that there was an inefficiency I was seeing. And the reason may be historical, or (entirely likely) something I'm just overlooking.

Why does _every_ packet requires an acknowledgement packet? Chances are that most packets are travelling as part of a set of packets - probably the maximum possible for the window size. So rather than taking up bandwidth sending back a load of them, why not delay a trivial amount of time after the first packet arrives and then acknowledge the highest number for which you have all of the previous packets?

You wouldn't want to delay long - but then you shouldn't need to - you'd generally expect that the next n packets would be arriving immediately behind each other, so acknowledging only only once every n milliseconds should work pretty effectively.

So if packets 2-6 arrive, send an ACK saying "*6" (or some equivalent signal), rather than five separate acks? I know ACK packets are tiny, but it still seems wasteful.

Anyone who's knowledgable in the area care to fill me in?