Thank you! I'm actually learning Asterisk for work and I do have a Raspberry Pi. Your post is very helpful.

Mods!

You are right and it presents an interesting problem! I would love to hear a solution, other than downloading the entire database to every device.

Thanks. It doesn't seem to play the SIT tones:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mrnumber.blocker

Can you make some suggestions? What are the names of the apps that you use?

Thanks.

European.

I came to say this. How is this not obvious? Or is that the actual reasoning behind the list?

I think that this should be done in a fashion similar to how Google Chrome checks if addresses are malware. When your phone rings, md5 the phone number and send it off to be checked against a blacklist of known telemarketers. If it's not on the list and the call is marketing, then add it. Maybe I'll make an app for that.

Though an amazing bit of engineering, the Thing has nothing to do with this discussion. For one thing, the antenna would not fit in a modern cell phone. For another, the Thing has other limitations which make it impractical here, such as transmitting analogue-only information (essentially, sound only).

If you are suggesting that some 'magic' or clever engineering might come up with a way to increase the viable distance to a receiver, I would love to see it. But that argument is too general and could be made in any argument. Thus, invalid in all arguments until shown to be practical.

Thanks for mentioning that. And thanks for fleshing out the bugs in Rekonq!

Those are cut-and-paste Fosstard arguments. Sorry, sometimes proprietary software is good.

Typed in Foss Firefox on Foss Kubuntu.

Libraries only provide new functions and types. Go look at mathlab or (shudder) labview for some examples of domain-specific datatypes (not simply classes built on the common primitives) and paradigms.

Surely you are not suggesting that the field of particle physics should be using the same tools as the field of psychiatry? That materials engineers should be using the same tools as palaeontologists?

That is very true, however they still require one to express his problem in terms of lists, sets, dicts, strings, ints, floats, and complex numbers. Not all scientific concepts can be massaged into one of those datatypes.

The counter argument is that each individual domain needs its own programming language in the same sense that each individual domain needs its own jargon. Each domain has its own unique intricacies, problems, methods, and context. The tools used should reflect that.

That is a rather creative idea. I would love to see more practical examples of what you do with it, such as the Sigma example.

Guido is also an extremely competent C programmer (see recent Slashdot article) and he did not design Python for scientists, but rather for programmers.

If the work that needs to be done could be done quicker or simpler (i.e. cheaper) by paying a $1000 license rather than having a $300,000-per-year researcher to go learn Python or R, then it is worth it to pay, no? The current options aren't going away.

But this one is ostensibly designed by Stephen Wolfram, who knows what scientists and physicists need from a programing language.

Python, C, Java, et al were all designed by computer programmers for computer programmers. R and Mathlab were designed by computer programmers for mathematicians, thus works a lot better for expressing certain mathematical concepts and working with them (transformations, statistics). But there is much room for improvement, especially when looking at the problem from the scientist's point of view, not from the programmer's point of view.