Re:This is (now) a famous number-theory integer!
on
Censoring a Number
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· Score: 1
You were not a nerd at all. You were a geek.
Ok. I've heard that distinction before, yes. It's just that I don't recall people in my high school doing so (that was before Wargames), and I'm not 100% sure that the public at large is consistent about which term is applied when. But I'll take your word for it.
Re:This is (now) a famous number-theory integer!
on
Censoring a Number
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I realize you are trying to cutely defend the liberal quoting of this number by suggesting that this number is somehow mathematical fascinating, but you really haven't made your case. The number is not that fascinating.
2^6 is not prime. The number is divisible by 2 exactly 6 times. If you somehow are suggesting that it is interesting that a number can be expressed as the product of prime numbers then you have must have not studied higher mathematics at all, for the fact that any number can be expressed as the product of primes is the fundamental theorem of arithmetic.
If you were as smart as you think you are, you'd realize that anyone to whom it occurred to post something like this, and was able to figure out that factorization and the adjacent primes within minutes of the story being posted, well, fucking OBVIOUSLY any such person would trivially already know what you are trying to point out.
Literally all numbers are interesting, as was first pointed out many decades ago, and by the same token, vanishingly few are actually fascinating.
As for the sixth power of two, you're being tedious in mis-reading. My factoring program (i.e. the huge integer factorization program I designed and wrote, not merely "the one I'm using") actually printed "2 * 2 * 2 *..." and I abbreviated by substituting the synonymous "2^6". My phrase "product of the following primes" is obviously true for "2 * 2 * 2..."; since you're such a mental giant, now figure out why my phrasing is true for the synonym "2^6".
And even if my phrasing were strictly incorrect, it's completely fucking obvious what I meant. You're just being incredibly tedious to no purpose whatsoever.
If you want to talk about higher math, just say so. With any luck you're not as stupid as you sound, maybe you're actually a math grad student or something, and maybe I could learn something from you. For instance, I'd like to know more about Frobenius automorphisms, in the context of number theory. Or about n-categories. Or recent developments in paraconsistent logic that might be applicable to pragmatic automatic theorem provers. Or anything, really.
I should be so lucky. People who put other people down completely unnecessarily, and contend they know nothing, when they don't even know the person -- such tedious people inevitably know little themselves, so they try to bolster their poor self-image by attempting to make other people smaller. Pathetic. Not to mention rude.
Re:This is (now) a famous number-theory integer!
on
Censoring a Number
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· Score: 5, Funny
Did you get beat up a lot in school?
You're making fun of someone for being a nerd on slashdot? You must be joking.
Yes, I was a famous/infamous nerd in high school, and I gloried in it. I also had girlfriends in high school; did you, O anonymous coward?
As for your literal question of getting beat up a lot, I was not just a big time nerd, I was also 6 foot 2 inches, an athlete, was a friendly extrovert, and had social skills; not all nerds fit your stereotype. Now my nerdiness supports my career as a computer engineer. How's your fast food job treating you?;-)
(You could have just come right out and asked what a prime number is, you know; you don't have to launch an attack each of the many times every day that you feel ignorant.)
"He who laughs last laughs best."
This is (now) a famous number-theory integer!
on
Censoring a Number
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· Score: 5, Funny
This is merely a very famous (from now on, hint, hint) number theory curiosity:
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
is the hexadecimal representation (with leading zero to round off to 32 hex digits) of
13256278887989457651018865901401704640 decimal
which amazingly enough, is equal to the huge prime number
You can't have a university without professors (by definition). You can't have a university network without a university (by definition). Therefore, without professors there is no university network.
If that's all you meant, then sorry, that's completely vacuous. By similar logic, since a university needs students, then without students there is no university network -- an observation irrelevant to the discussion.
The physical network depends on IT staff, and is used by staff, students, faculty, etc. The content of the university web site(s) sometimes (but not always) includes content generated by professors, but without exception includes content contributed by students (including serious research by post docs, grad students, and indeed by some undergrads) and non-faculty staff.
The truth of the matter is that university networks and web sites, in any sense of the term, would continue to exist even without contributions from professors.\
It is a frivolous digression to point out that the university wouldn't exist if professors didn't exist. Imagine if all electrons disappeared; no university network! Please.
On the other hand, it certainly is true that use (e.g. for research and teaching) of the university network/web sites/etc by professors is an important function and goal of those facilities, which is perhaps closer to what you ultimately meant.
I think Apple will sell a lot more than 10 million iPhones in 2008 when they add the iPhone nano to their lineup a year from now. You heard it here first.
That's nothing, wait for the iPhone Shuffle! Just think, no screen at all, just tap the touch-sensitive case and it randomly selects someone in your address book to call...
Or possibly two random entries at once -- your GF and your mom/ex-/second-GF/etc.
Prolly no microphone, to get a smaller form factor. Just an earpiece.
Unfair to Ed Woods
on
Driving Plan 9
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Bela Lugosi really deserved better than Ed Wood. It's a shame to see this man who scared the living daylights out of so many people with his Dracula and really made a mark on movie history be reduced to lap-dog in the hands of a complete hack. I guess Wood helped him make another mark on movie history.
In some sense, sure, but on the other hand, that is grossly unfair to Ed Wood's beneficial relationship to Lugosi. Consider the following (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bela_Lugosi, but which agrees with similar details from some films on the subject, including one with Johnny Depp as Ed Wood, from some years back):
Later on, the acting jobs dried up, and Lugosi became addicted to morphine...Late in his life, he again received star billing in movies when filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr., a fan of Lugosi, found him living in obscurity and near-poverty and offered him roles in his films, such as Glen or Glenda...in Bride of the Monster...and in Plan 9 From Outer Space [*]
( [*] Plan 9 was a posthumous performance, and note that the death of Lugosi early in filming was precisely the reason that Plan 9 became "the worst film ever made" rather than merely the usual Ed Wood grade B movie.)
Yes, Wood was a hack (albeit a fun one with a cult following to this day), but he did his best to rescue Lugosi when the rest of the world had given up and no longer cared. Give credit where credit is due, rather than simply sneering at the charitable, no matter the flaws you see in the good samaritan. By all accounts, Wood seems to have done the best he could by Lugosi.
My uncle had all his ham licenses when I was a kid. I was 9 and didn't see why it was fun then either. Looking back, it kind of seems like lame social networking for geeks.
Keywords: "geeks", "lame social networking"...there's another kind? Something non-lame like myspace or IRC or texting or FPS taunting post-frag or masquerading as a female in a chat room or...?
The article says that any planets which form are likely to be uninhabitable because they're, to put it bluntly, made out of reactor waste
Yes and no, mostly no. The initial material is pretty radioactive, but that doesn't last long. Most of the radioactive isotopes have very short half-lives. Half-lives in the millions of years is rare.
This means that a planet formed from the debris of a star that went supernova 100 million years earlier will not be that much more radioactive than Earth.
So for all practical purposes, no. The radioactivity dies out around the same time as planet formation.
Could you explain what you have in mind? What sorts of ideas do you think should be borrowed/stolen/liberated from tropico games? Do I have to play certain particular games to know what you mean? If so, which ones?
This is America. The nation that led the world in technological development for two hundred years
Nitpick: no, not 200 years; the U.S. was a math/science/engineering backwater for most of that time. It was pretty much World War II that was the pivot, so call it 50 years.
(Your main point seems pretty glaringly obviously true.)
... grandfather liked it," said Chester, averting his eyes from a lithograph titled Rush Hour at the Insemomat.
"The Great Time Machine Hoax" by Keith Laumer. Great book; that was a funny scene. Grandfather was quite the eccentric.
No, it's not safe to say. I very strongly doubt it, in fact:
he couldn't find anyone at Verizon or ESPN who had heard of it and could help him with his problem.
That's because it was probably our little mobile group at Disney (owner of ESPN and ABC), oops. We took content such as sports stories and sent it out to all kinds of mobile devices, including cell phones and SMS devices.
If we ever screwed up during our testing (bugs? what bugs?), we could very easily have been the source of a "null@" sort of address.
Zillions of companies send things to SMS, just like they send email; you can't be sure the fault is ever with the SMS service!
On a related theme, my pre-web Internet (yes, there was such a thing:-) email address was "doug@a_big_isp.com", and so naturally I got a certain amount of misdirected email. Email traffic was comparatively low back then, so it wasn't an awful lot.
But one time I ended up being CC'ed on some corporate email that was CC'ed to dozens of people and had many followups. It was intensely boring material, but very private, too, and somewhat high volume. I kept replying, telling them what was going on, and "please stop", and a few people would take me off their CC list, while dozens of others didn't...
So finally I said, "I'm not going to release all of this highly sensitive information about your corporate plans and finances to your competitors or the press or to an ftp site, because I'm a good guy. But YOU don't know that!" That did the trick, the CC's stopped instantly.
No, as the article says, Dennis Gabor invented holography and coined the term "hologram", in 1948.
Leith created the first laser holograph, which was a big deal, and made holographs vastly more practical, and he deserves tons of credit for that, but not the same as inventing the field. There's a reason Gabor won a Nobel prize.
Using such a package can save you the trouble of performing error analysis
Absolutely false. Let me explain that in simpler terms: wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong wrong.
A good package will help a programmer avoid the worst problems in the simplest situations.
The worst situations are not solvable even by human experts backed by state of the art theory.
The bottom line is that numerical analysis is a very deep speciality, roughly like compiler design is a very deep specialty. In neither area is there some package that will solve your problems for you.
Standard math libraries that implement functions like square root, exp, ln, etc, long ago were implemented by people like you, who didn't know nor care that those functions might be somewhat inaccurate.
Math libraries for standard languages, for the last 20 years or so, have instead been designed and implemented by specialists who guarantee that the last bit of every result is as accurate as possible -- whereas some non-specialist like you might merely be able to guarantee that each function kind of sort of yields almost the right result, as long as "right" means maybe 16 bits of accuracy.
Numerical analysis is a deep subject. If you aren't a specialist in the subject, you may as well shut up about it, because everything you say will be wrong, and you will spread misinformation.
In particular, you cite an interval arithmetic package. Such things are certainly very important in numerical analysis.
But the notion that such things completely solve all numerical analysis programs is completely laughable. Take a course in a subject before you conclude that a subject has been solved!!!
I once had a high tech compnay tell me they "didn't have much call for physics", I didn't have the heart to tell them it was physics than made their computers work and not magic
I completely sympathize -- to a point. You didn't say whether
that was the kind of company that could have taken advantage
of basic physics for their business.
If the company were e.g. Intel, they'd be fools to respond that way, but if the company were, oh, BEA, or Microsoft, or Adobe, then the fact that physics makes their computers work would be utterly irrelevant; their business models are many levels of abstraction above physics.
Now 1) is a clear breach of copyright (and should be settled in a civil court as such) but 2)...I cant help but think of that as a derivitive work and as such NOT in breach of copyright.
I dont know though - could someone enlighten me please?
Nope! That's a common misunderstanding, but actually derivitive works are still copyright of the original copyright holder; there's not really a difference between your two examples, for this purpose.
Derivitives do add one complication, which is that the changes may be copyright of the person who
made the changes -- in addition to the
original copyright. In such cases, neither the
original copyright holder, nor the derivitive copyright holder, can do anything at all with the derivitive work unless both parties agree.
That doesn't come up that often, comparatively.
Example:
If you translate Bohemian Rhapsody into Latin
in a creative way, the copyright holder of Bohemian
Rhapsody can indeed forbid you from making any
copies of your translation; they don't lose any
rights.
On the other hand, they cannot make copies of
your translation into Latin, either,
without your permission.
It doesn't come up all that often, because
why would they want to do anything with your
Latin translation? Usually they don't, usually
they just want to enforce their own original rights.
P.S. the above assumes that the derivitive work
required creativity to create. If it was e.g.
a very mechanical translation that required no
creativity, then the original copyright holder
may have rights to that non-creative derivitive as
well. Phone books, for instance, are not creative
works.
Coming in to the discussion much too late, but since no one else seems to have said it:
Some years ago I was told by a guy at an RTOS (Real Time Operating System) company that the original major problem was that they were too clueless to use an RTOS, and that this was incredibly dumb, since it was a real time problem, with baggage whizzing around at comparatively high speeds and needing to be routed right/left at various junctures at just the right time.
Non-real-time OSes have thread/process delays that effectively follow something like a Bell curve; arbitrarily large and unpredictable delays can happen randomly.
He refused to name the OS they did use (this was in a public setting, on the record, where there might have been some legal liability), but general context strongly suggested it was a Microsoft OS (and whether you like or dislike Windows or NT, Microsoft most definitely doesn't do real time). (Nor does MacOS nor the most common flavors of Unix/Linux, although there are real-time variants.)
On the other hand he also said that they switched to an RTOS, at a huge cost of money and time, before they could seriously try to bring the baggage system fully live at all, so apparently that wouldn't have been the final issue, only the first disaster.
The story summary pissed me off, but the actual article is nowhere near so bad. A key quote:
This guy in the front row says "You've got to stop banging on people whose motivation is something other than money." There's always a Hari Krishna in the audience: "It's illegal to make money at this. We're all garage bands, and you sold your soul to the devil for a handful of dollars." So I go, "Have you contributed anything?" and usually they say no and I stop it there.
Turns out the guy is the founder of a pretty significant chunk of Linux, so Point A goes out the door. So I say, "You are what I call amateur open-source or hobbyist open source, which is you have a job and then you do this because that's your passion." And then somebody in the audience yells "You mean amateur open source as opposed to asshole open source?"
So there's always that. It's normal. There are always a bunch of amateurs because they've never made money at it, and it kind of pisses them off that there was a way to do it.
He's not making a blanket statement about open source developers being Hari Krishnas, he's talking about hecklers in his audience.
I haven't found a comprehensive list of actions or standards that distinguish the excellent tech from the average tech. Can anyone point me toward some sources?
The obvious example of excellent tech support to follow is...BicycleRepairman! Quoted from a bicycle web site:
My favorite Monty Python skit is one called "Bicycle Repairman." In the skit, we see superman walking down the street in his splendid costume. Then he stops to catch a bus, but surprizingly, the bus driver is a superman too, in an identical costume. Then, when he turns to walk back to his seat, we discover everyone else on the bus is a superman too. We go on into town, and there we find that every person in every store is a superman.
Then we see a superman riding his bicycle, but it begins to wobble badly, and then he crashes. The bicycle needs repaired, but superman doesn't know how. Then the call goes out for Bicycle Repairman. Everywhere, supermen are frantically searching for the hero.
In a crowded laundromat, a group of supermen are waiting for their costumes to wash, when another superman announces the emergency. One of the supermen looks around to see if anyone is watching him, and then he disappears into a dark recess, where he turns into Bicycle Repairman, with his brown coveralls and tool chest.
All the supermen are excited to see him, and he goes and repairs the bicycle. The message of the skit is, of course, that all of us can play an important role; we don't have to be superman. We can play some other essential role, such as Bicycle Repairman instead!
Of course, by the same logic, they could well be a peaceful species that has never seen a war. Assuming they're hostile is placing human reactions onto a totaly alien species, which is flawed at its base. By not transmitting and missing them, we could well be missing out on a cultural and scientific flourishing just as easily as we are a war.
True. However, we are demonstrably more or less kind of getting by without the flourishing that might provide, whereas we couldn't get by in the worst case scenario where they destroyed us.
Also, it's not really a completely unwarranted assumption, nor is it a matter of "human reactions". There are an extremely large number of examples in non-human species of inter-species hostility; examples of symbiosis are more frequent than was once thought, but tend to take very large amounts of time to evolve.
There is also an argument that cultural and scientific flourishing is at its best when developed the hard way rather than borrowed. They're understood better, applied better, and engender, of course, more pride in accomplishment. There are claimed to be parallels on the subject on Earth, and of course the topic has been endlessly explored head-on in science fiction.
It might also be the case that accepting knowledge from ETs would permanently end the development of alternate, potentially valuable developments of subjects (explored in Brin's universe).
Anyway, both payoff and danger are unknown, but the maximum danger, as far as we know, is effectively infinite, so why be in a hurry to take that possible risk?
I didn't say SETI was NASA but NASA would most likely be the one to implement such a system.
Since you don't want them to, you'll be happy to know that it has never been a political possibility for NASA to get $10 billion for SETI, and never will be.
Look into the subject, and you will find out. That's why NASA stopped doing SETI in the first place; congress always hated them spending even so much as $10k/year on it, let alone $10 billion.
So no, whether technically reasonable or not, NASA will never spend $10 billion on SETI.
Besides, even if they don't, my point still stands: they need to stop spending money on useless stuff "out there" and reallocate to useful things "down here".
That's not how the budget process works. Congress slashes NASA budgets, and the money goes to...ending starvation? No. Improving education? No. Health? No...guess.
Pork barrel projects for their constituents.
Saying "they should stop spending money on XYZ and reallocate it to useful things like ABC" is, I'm afraid, naive, no matter which XYZ and ABC you have in mind. That's just not how it works.
More simply: NASA is not stealing money from your favorite programs. Killing NASA completely still wouldn't help your favorite programs. You're complaining about issues unrelated to your stated goals.
Which is why essentially everything you've said is way off topic here; it's unrelated.
[regarding "a cryogenic Allen array in space"]
Oh yes, like NASA really needs another reason to spend $10 billion [...]
SETI isn't NASA. Take a wild guess why it's called the "Allen" array. Ever hear of Paul Allen? He funded it, not NASA. Where have you been? NASA hasn't been doing SETI for ages.
...reallocate their budget to something more useful here on EARTH, like education, defense, and medical research. God forbid we work on something that could educate people and save lives, instead we waste money on something that for most people has no ROI or any other advantages or benefits.
Oh, you mean like we did before NASA existed? Or like happened each of the numerous times that NASA's budget was sharply cut?
And what are you raving about, anyway, "no other benefits" if we did detect intelligent ET life? That's insane.
At any rate, I didn't say a word about spending tax dollars. And your raving would be naive even if I had. Go rant somewhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok. I've heard that distinction before, yes. It's just that I don't recall people in my high school doing so (that was before Wargames), and I'm not 100% sure that the public at large is consistent about which term is applied when. But I'll take your word for it.
If you were as smart as you think you are, you'd realize that anyone to whom it occurred to post something like this, and was able to figure out that factorization and the adjacent primes within minutes of the story being posted, well, fucking OBVIOUSLY any such person would trivially already know what you are trying to point out.
Literally all numbers are interesting, as was first pointed out many decades ago, and by the same token, vanishingly few are actually fascinating.
As for the sixth power of two, you're being tedious in mis-reading. My factoring program (i.e. the huge integer factorization program I designed and wrote, not merely "the one I'm using") actually printed "2 * 2 * 2 * ..." and I abbreviated by substituting the synonymous "2^6". My phrase "product of the following primes" is obviously true for "2 * 2 * 2..."; since you're such a mental giant, now figure out why my phrasing is true for the synonym "2^6".
And even if my phrasing were strictly incorrect, it's completely fucking obvious what I meant. You're just being incredibly tedious to no purpose whatsoever.
If you want to talk about higher math, just say so. With any luck you're not as stupid as you sound, maybe you're actually a math grad student or something, and maybe I could learn something from you. For instance, I'd like to know more about Frobenius automorphisms, in the context of number theory. Or about n-categories. Or recent developments in paraconsistent logic that might be applicable to pragmatic automatic theorem provers. Or anything, really.
I should be so lucky. People who put other people down completely unnecessarily, and contend they know nothing, when they don't even know the person -- such tedious people inevitably know little themselves, so they try to bolster their poor self-image by attempting to make other people smaller. Pathetic. Not to mention rude.
You're making fun of someone for being a nerd on slashdot? You must be joking.
Yes, I was a famous/infamous nerd in high school, and I gloried in it. I also had girlfriends in high school; did you, O anonymous coward?
As for your literal question of getting beat up a lot, I was not just a big time nerd, I was also 6 foot 2 inches, an athlete, was a friendly extrovert, and had social skills; not all nerds fit your stereotype. Now my nerdiness supports my career as a computer engineer. How's your fast food job treating you? ;-)
(You could have just come right out and asked what a prime number is, you know; you don't have to launch an attack each of the many times every day that you feel ignorant.)
"He who laughs last laughs best."
Astonishingly, the next prime after that is only 31 away, so our famous number can also be represented as
It is also very interesting because it is also equal to the product of the following prime numbers:
Truthfully, when was the last time you saw any remotely similar number? Never, right? We better record this for mathematical posterity!!! :-)
If that's all you meant, then sorry, that's completely vacuous. By similar logic, since a university needs students, then without students there is no university network -- an observation irrelevant to the discussion.
The physical network depends on IT staff, and is used by staff, students, faculty, etc. The content of the university web site(s) sometimes (but not always) includes content generated by professors, but without exception includes content contributed by students (including serious research by post docs, grad students, and indeed by some undergrads) and non-faculty staff.
The truth of the matter is that university networks and web sites, in any sense of the term, would continue to exist even without contributions from professors.\
It is a frivolous digression to point out that the university wouldn't exist if professors didn't exist. Imagine if all electrons disappeared; no university network! Please.
On the other hand, it certainly is true that use (e.g. for research and teaching) of the university network/web sites/etc by professors is an important function and goal of those facilities, which is perhaps closer to what you ultimately meant.
That's nothing, wait for the iPhone Shuffle! Just think, no screen at all, just tap the touch-sensitive case and it randomly selects someone in your address book to call...
Or possibly two random entries at once -- your GF and your mom/ex-/second-GF/etc.
Prolly no microphone, to get a smaller form factor. Just an earpiece.
In some sense, sure, but on the other hand, that is grossly unfair to Ed Wood's beneficial relationship to Lugosi. Consider the following (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bela_Lugosi, but which agrees with similar details from some films on the subject, including one with Johnny Depp as Ed Wood, from some years back):
( [*] Plan 9 was a posthumous performance, and note that the death of Lugosi early in filming was precisely the reason that Plan 9 became "the worst film ever made" rather than merely the usual Ed Wood grade B movie.)
Yes, Wood was a hack (albeit a fun one with a cult following to this day), but he did his best to rescue Lugosi when the rest of the world had given up and no longer cared. Give credit where credit is due, rather than simply sneering at the charitable, no matter the flaws you see in the good samaritan. By all accounts, Wood seems to have done the best he could by Lugosi.
Pathetic, isn't it? I had expected to see a list of issues like, perhaps
Instead their list of "philosophies" is more like
- Don't poison the customer
- Don't shoot the customer
- Don't bomb the distributor
- Don't ignore direct orders from the court
etc. Unbelievable.Keywords: "geeks", "lame social networking"...there's another kind? Something non-lame like myspace or IRC or texting or FPS taunting post-frag or masquerading as a female in a chat room or...?
Yes and no, mostly no. The initial material is pretty radioactive, but that doesn't last long. Most of the radioactive isotopes have very short half-lives. Half-lives in the millions of years is rare.
This means that a planet formed from the debris of a star that went supernova 100 million years earlier will not be that much more radioactive than Earth.
So for all practical purposes, no. The radioactivity dies out around the same time as planet formation.
Could you explain what you have in mind? What sorts of ideas do you think should be borrowed/stolen/liberated from tropico games? Do I have to play certain particular games to know what you mean? If so, which ones?
Nitpick: no, not 200 years; the U.S. was a math/science/engineering backwater for most of that time. It was pretty much World War II that was the pivot, so call it 50 years.
(Your main point seems pretty glaringly obviously true.)
"The Great Time Machine Hoax" by Keith Laumer. Great book; that was a funny scene. Grandfather was quite the eccentric.
No, it's not safe to say. I very strongly doubt it, in fact:
That's because it was probably our little mobile group at Disney (owner of ESPN and ABC), oops. We took content such as sports stories and sent it out to all kinds of mobile devices, including cell phones and SMS devices.
If we ever screwed up during our testing (bugs? what bugs?), we could very easily have been the source of a "null@" sort of address.
Zillions of companies send things to SMS, just like they send email; you can't be sure the fault is ever with the SMS service!
On a related theme, my pre-web Internet (yes, there was such a thing :-) email address was "doug@a_big_isp.com", and so naturally I got a certain amount of misdirected email. Email traffic was comparatively low back then, so it wasn't an awful lot.
But one time I ended up being CC'ed on some corporate email that was CC'ed to dozens of people and had many followups. It was intensely boring material, but very private, too, and somewhat high volume. I kept replying, telling them what was going on, and "please stop", and a few people would take me off their CC list, while dozens of others didn't...
So finally I said, "I'm not going to release all of this highly sensitive information about your corporate plans and finances to your competitors or the press or to an ftp site, because I'm a good guy. But YOU don't know that!" That did the trick, the CC's stopped instantly.
It's just as much of a chick magnet as it ever was!
But don't let that stop you. It's fun.
No, as the article says, Dennis Gabor invented holography and coined the term "hologram", in 1948.
Leith created the first laser holograph, which was a big deal, and made holographs vastly more practical, and he deserves tons of credit for that, but not the same as inventing the field. There's a reason Gabor won a Nobel prize.
Absolutely false. Let me explain that in simpler terms: wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong wrong.
A good package will help a programmer avoid the worst problems in the simplest situations.
The worst situations are not solvable even by human experts backed by state of the art theory.
The bottom line is that numerical analysis is a very deep speciality, roughly like compiler design is a very deep specialty. In neither area is there some package that will solve your problems for you.
Standard math libraries that implement functions like square root, exp, ln, etc, long ago were implemented by people like you, who didn't know nor care that those functions might be somewhat inaccurate.
Math libraries for standard languages, for the last 20 years or so, have instead been designed and implemented by specialists who guarantee that the last bit of every result is as accurate as possible -- whereas some non-specialist like you might merely be able to guarantee that each function kind of sort of yields almost the right result, as long as "right" means maybe 16 bits of accuracy.
Numerical analysis is a deep subject. If you aren't a specialist in the subject, you may as well shut up about it, because everything you say will be wrong, and you will spread misinformation.
In particular, you cite an interval arithmetic package. Such things are certainly very important in numerical analysis.
But the notion that such things completely solve all numerical analysis programs is completely laughable. Take a course in a subject before you conclude that a subject has been solved!!!
I completely sympathize -- to a point. You didn't say whether that was the kind of company that could have taken advantage of basic physics for their business.
If the company were e.g. Intel, they'd be fools to respond that way, but if the company were, oh, BEA, or Microsoft, or Adobe, then the fact that physics makes their computers work would be utterly irrelevant; their business models are many levels of abstraction above physics.
Nope! That's a common misunderstanding, but actually derivitive works are still copyright of the original copyright holder; there's not really a difference between your two examples, for this purpose.
Derivitives do add one complication, which is that the changes may be copyright of the person who made the changes -- in addition to the original copyright. In such cases, neither the original copyright holder, nor the derivitive copyright holder, can do anything at all with the derivitive work unless both parties agree.
That doesn't come up that often, comparatively. Example: If you translate Bohemian Rhapsody into Latin in a creative way, the copyright holder of Bohemian Rhapsody can indeed forbid you from making any copies of your translation; they don't lose any rights.
On the other hand, they cannot make copies of your translation into Latin, either, without your permission.
It doesn't come up all that often, because why would they want to do anything with your Latin translation? Usually they don't, usually they just want to enforce their own original rights.
P.S. the above assumes that the derivitive work required creativity to create. If it was e.g. a very mechanical translation that required no creativity, then the original copyright holder may have rights to that non-creative derivitive as well. Phone books, for instance, are not creative works.
Some years ago I was told by a guy at an RTOS (Real Time Operating System) company that the original major problem was that they were too clueless to use an RTOS, and that this was incredibly dumb, since it was a real time problem, with baggage whizzing around at comparatively high speeds and needing to be routed right/left at various junctures at just the right time.
Non-real-time OSes have thread/process delays that effectively follow something like a Bell curve; arbitrarily large and unpredictable delays can happen randomly.
He refused to name the OS they did use (this was in a public setting, on the record, where there might have been some legal liability), but general context strongly suggested it was a Microsoft OS (and whether you like or dislike Windows or NT, Microsoft most definitely doesn't do real time). (Nor does MacOS nor the most common flavors of Unix/Linux, although there are real-time variants.)
On the other hand he also said that they switched to an RTOS, at a huge cost of money and time, before they could seriously try to bring the baggage system fully live at all, so apparently that wouldn't have been the final issue, only the first disaster.
He's not making a blanket statement about open source developers being Hari Krishnas, he's talking about hecklers in his audience.
The obvious example of excellent tech support to follow is...BicycleRepairman! Quoted from a bicycle web site:
1. Profit!
2. Cars that don't crash.
3. Software that doesn't crash.
Microsoft's "crazy like a fox" reverse scheme...
True. However, we are demonstrably more or less kind of getting by without the flourishing that might provide, whereas we couldn't get by in the worst case scenario where they destroyed us.
Also, it's not really a completely unwarranted assumption, nor is it a matter of "human reactions". There are an extremely large number of examples in non-human species of inter-species hostility; examples of symbiosis are more frequent than was once thought, but tend to take very large amounts of time to evolve.
There is also an argument that cultural and scientific flourishing is at its best when developed the hard way rather than borrowed. They're understood better, applied better, and engender, of course, more pride in accomplishment. There are claimed to be parallels on the subject on Earth, and of course the topic has been endlessly explored head-on in science fiction.
It might also be the case that accepting knowledge from ETs would permanently end the development of alternate, potentially valuable developments of subjects (explored in Brin's universe).
Anyway, both payoff and danger are unknown, but the maximum danger, as far as we know, is effectively infinite, so why be in a hurry to take that possible risk?
Since you don't want them to, you'll be happy to know that it has never been a political possibility for NASA to get $10 billion for SETI, and never will be.
Look into the subject, and you will find out. That's why NASA stopped doing SETI in the first place; congress always hated them spending even so much as $10k/year on it, let alone $10 billion.
So no, whether technically reasonable or not, NASA will never spend $10 billion on SETI.
Besides, even if they don't, my point still stands: they need to stop spending money on useless stuff "out there" and reallocate to useful things "down here".
That's not how the budget process works. Congress slashes NASA budgets, and the money goes to...ending starvation? No. Improving education? No. Health? No...guess. Pork barrel projects for their constituents.
Saying "they should stop spending money on XYZ and reallocate it to useful things like ABC" is, I'm afraid, naive, no matter which XYZ and ABC you have in mind. That's just not how it works.
More simply: NASA is not stealing money from your favorite programs. Killing NASA completely still wouldn't help your favorite programs. You're complaining about issues unrelated to your stated goals.
Which is why essentially everything you've said is way off topic here; it's unrelated.
Oh yes, like NASA really needs another reason to spend $10 billion [...]
SETI isn't NASA. Take a wild guess why it's called the "Allen" array. Ever hear of Paul Allen? He funded it, not NASA. Where have you been? NASA hasn't been doing SETI for ages.
Oh, you mean like we did before NASA existed? Or like happened each of the numerous times that NASA's budget was sharply cut?
And what are you raving about, anyway, "no other benefits" if we did detect intelligent ET life? That's insane.
At any rate, I didn't say a word about spending tax dollars. And your raving would be naive even if I had. Go rant somewhere else.