ErsatzVerkehr

Ahhh - now it makes so much more sense. :-)

The Google etymology thing (I didn't even know it existed - just search for "stuff etymology" and you get a nice little graph) tells me that the word "stuff" came to English from Greek (stuphein) via Old French (estoffe). So maybe it is not correct to say it's not a French-derived word?

But it's also present in German- stoff means something like "material". Amusingly, there's a wikipedia article titled "List of stoffs". The elements have names like Wasserstoff = water stuff = hydrogen. In the attached essay (which claims to be written without German derivatives), it seems strange to prefer "waterstuff" to the very Greek "hydrogen"... ?

I thought this was interesting (both that the space shuttle still used core memory, and that the challenger memory was retrieved and its contents recovered):

> Core memory is non-volatile storage—it can retain its contents indefinitely without power. It is also relatively unaffected by EMP and radiation. ... For example, the Space Shuttle flight computers initially used core memory, which preserved the contents of memory even through the Challenger's disintegration and subsequent plunge into the sea in 1986.

(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory#Physical_c... )

Note that this core memory is a little different than the rope core memory described in the linked article.

It always pains me to see the space program justified on the basis of its spin-offs. The main (civilian) problems that the space program solved were in getting to space, putting a man on the moon, developing a re-usable orbiter, and building the space station. Similarly, if we really want to solve problems of energy or hunger, why not create a dedicated alternative-energy or anti-poverty 'Apollo program'?

One of the greatest engines of technological development in the 20th century was WWII. Fortunately few people argue for new wars by citing the potential for spin-off technologies. But the logic would be about as good. (Arguably the space program itself was a product of the Cold War.)

Aside from that - the linked article doesn't say anything about spin-offs. It says that very prosaic, existing technology for daily life on Earth was adapted for use in the space program.

> Is it 500EUR per week or per month?

I LOL'd at this - only someone in the SF bubble could mistake EUR 500 for a weekly rent.

My one-bedroom apartment in Germany is around EUR 350 per month.

Do you really consider the iPhone 4/4S obsolete? To me this sounds like an unrealistic idea of real-world upgrade schedules. The iPhone 4S was released in October 2011. I would hope that a device of cost O($1000) would last more than 2.5 years.

In German, the word "Land" is used for both states (as in the federal states of Germany, Bundesländer) and countries.

Berlin is a City-State in Germany, entirely surrounded by the state of Brandenburg. Thus it's not too surprising that Berlin's big airport is "in another state."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_of_Germany

This happens in the U.S. too - Cincinnati airport is actually in Kentucky, etc.

Important details are really hidden on the webpage. For example, who are the mentors? Second: unlike the Hacker School, it's not free. Both of these items should be addressed under "The Essentials".

> A nautical mile at the pole would be quite short, a nautical mile at the equator would be quite long.

No, this is emphatically not the case. You're confusing a minute of curvature -- a minute along a great circle path -- with a minute of latitude.

"Successful people affirm the consequent" - Not sure what you mean here; you're linking to a description of a logical fallacy.

> Why not have an atomic (nuclear) battery that will be able to send out sonic pings for a year?

Are you really proposing to have every commercial airliner fly around with a relatively large lump of plutonium?

This article makes no sense.

LIGO has not failed. The second generation of LIGO detectors, called "advanced LIGO", is currently under construction. It will be around ten times more sensitive than the earlier configuration of LIGO, and is very much expected to yield astrophysical discoveries. More info at: http://ligo.org/

Furthermore, what LIGO seeks to do, and what the BICEP project has done, are quite different. LIGO is something like a "radio" that receives gravitational waves. We'll be able to listen to gravitational waves as they arrive at Earth. The discovery announced today is of the "fossilized" imprint of primordial gravitational waves on the cosmic microwave background radiation. Very important, but complementary to LIGO.

I completely accept and agree with your criticism of my criticism.

My gut sense is that this proposal is simply too amateurish to be worth the effort of thoroughly debunking. Floating point is kind of like cryptography: the pitfalls are subtle and the consequences of getting it wrong are severe (rockets crashing, etc). Leave it to the experts. This is not a domain where you want to "roll your own."

Also, he defines 0*NaN=0, but 0+NaN=NaN.

> In any case, I don't think DEC64 is intended for those users that need to use cos() et al

He apparently has other ideas: "DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages."

Just curious, what is your use-case in which you need better support for fractions?

Worse:

> DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages.

> I think float will be around for a while, what with the blinding speed in today's processors, and the availability of 80 bit intermediate precision.

...and well-understood numerical behavior...

As a "specification" this document is laughable. For example, rounding modes and overflow behavior are not addressed. The comment that object pointers can be stuffed into the coefficient field (usually called 'mantissa') is completely non-sequitur. Frankly I am surprised to see such a big name behind it.

I imagine this project is inspired by the sad state of numerical computing in Javascript, but this proposal will surely only make it worse. The world certainly doesn't need a new, incompatible, poorly-thought-out floating point format.

Compare the level of thought and detail in this "specification" to the level of thought and detail in this famous summary overview of floating point issues: https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~dwharder/NumericalAnalysis/02Numer... ("What every computer scientist should know...")

> DEC64 is intended to be the only number type in the next generation of application programming languages.

Jesus, I certainly hope not.

Integers are also exactly represented in the standard floating point formats, so this isn't even a particular advantage of DEC64.

What is "int truncation" anyway? Overflow?

The answer is, "Yup."

> The Jersey notes are not legal tender in the United Kingdom but are legal currency, so creditors and traders may accept them if they so choose.

At best, your signal will improve linearly with the number of antennas (N), while the noise will be completely incoherent and scale like sqrt(N). Thus your signal-to-noise ratio will improve like N/sqrt(N)=sqrt(N). You're going to need an awful lot of radios...

"corrected"

I love this teleological market-speak.

Dumb Starbucks is a parody of parody. A meta-parody.

> software-defined-radio

Can you conjure up a software-defined 70-meter parabolic dish?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Space_Network#Antennas

I would love to try a "signals hacking" capture-the-flag.

TeX is written in WEB, a "literate programming" language designed by Knuth, which a pre-processor turns into Pascal. There should be nothing inherently slow about Pascal. In practice, it's compiled using "web2c" which does generate C code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WEB