Exactly my reaction.

Space launches by private companies potentially include his own launches, and good luck to him. And yeah, Moore's Law is usually your friend.

There was a while, though, that the most effective business models for satellite communication, underseas fiber cables, and terrestrial fibers were

• 1. (Send underpants gnomes to collect all the underpants)\\\\\\\\ Send Powerpoint Gnomes to distribute lots of Powerpoints.
• 2. Other companies spend billions on capital-intensive implementation of Powerpoints.
• 3. ?????
• 4. Buy their stuff at pennies on the dollar at bankruptcy sale.
• 5. PROFIT!

There are lots of ways to get right angles with simple tools that don't require knowing the Pythagorean theorem (including the use of 3-4-5 triangles, which work fine even if you don't know that they're one solution of a large class of problems.) Back when I was taking drafting and wood shop in junior high school, the way you got a right angle was "Use a T-Square and #2 pencil", not "Calculate the area of the square on the hypotenuse."

And ~2500 years later, when the condo I live in was built, Pythagoras's theorem was very well known, but the builder still thought of straight lines and right angles as generally good ideas, not actual strict requirements.

Coworker of mine was on a drug trial jury (back in ~1990 in New Jersey.) The (Hispanic) defendant had bought some airplane glue at the hardware store, and was carrying it home in the plastic bag from the store. The cop claimed that obviously he was intending it for glue sniffing, and the plastic bag was the drug paraphernalia he was planning to sniff it in, and was obviously Guilty Guilty Guilty. Joe was not only appalled that the case was brought in the first place, but that he and one other techie were the only two jurors who thought there was reasonable doubt there (actually, thought there was no doubt at all, the guy was buying glue to fix something at his house.)

But yeah, I think that Ulricht's lawyer claiming that "This isn't the Dread Pirate Roberts you're looking for" is going to be a tough sell. Might be all he's got to go on, though (especially if he actually was DPR.)

Docker seems to be the new version of what people used to do with BSD jails. But VMs can give you more flexibility, if you're running hardware that can handle them (as opposed to running your home router/firewall/server on the old PC, and using your newer box for gaming or your laptop for work and browsing.) And there are router-oriented VMs like Vyatta out there.

Are you routing on custom hardware (e.g. a cheap router running OpenWRT)? Old Low-End PC? A basic current Intel box? Removable disks? USB Flash Stick? Mikrotik board?

Some hardware makes it really easy to switch operating systems. For instance, if you can run your router from a virtual machine (because your hardware is new enough), if you don't like it, or want something new, just shut down the VM and fire up a new one. If you only want to buy $50 worth of hardware, a Raspberry Pi has the advantage that the disk drive isn't built in, it's just an SD card, so if you want to change OS's you just pop the old one out and put in a new one.

Booting from a USB flash stick is probably the easiest choice for most Intel-based hardware. You can get 8GB for $5, set it up, boot from it, and if it's not doing what you want, remove it and reboot your old OS. Many Linux distros are quite friendly on USB sticks, and some BSDs are, though OpenBSD seems to be a bit harder to do that with (maybe that's a just problem with documentation, but it seems like Theo doesn't trust VMs or booting from USB instead of CD and hard drives.)

Some conferences are good work material. Some of them are an excuse to have the people you'd like to talk to all show up at the bar where the important conversations happen. (Back during the 80s, a surprising number of Unix-related companies started as conversations at the bar at Usenix conventions.) And some conferences are of course opportunities for networking, i.e. for finding your next job, so they might be "work" related, just not for your current employer.

Good luck to Branson - I hope he actually gets this off the ground, or at least makes major advances in practical rocket design while he's trying.

But the last few projects like this - Teledesic, Iridium, a couple of other important ones I forget - all ran into problems with markets, with costs, with technology, and with government regulation (both censorship and spectrum-control.) One of the cool things about satellite phones and data was that you could access them from anywhere in the world, even places without much infrastructure, but the problem was that they cost a lot more than terrestrial infrastructure in densely populated areas (so you couldn't make much money where there were lots of people), and sparsely populated areas are mostly poor farmers (so you couldn't make much money there), so what you really had was a niche market that cost you billions in upfront infrastructure. It's also hard to get high bandwidth from solutions like this (though lots of applications don't need to be that fast.)

Governments were also a problem, because many of them didn't want unregulated speech, not subject to wiretap, competing with monopoly or ex-monopoly local telecom providers. Remember when Blackberry was only allowed to sell their phones in India if they provided a nexus for wiretapping?

There have also been half a dozen announcements over the last decade or two about balloon-based projects, with blimps or weather balloons or tethered balloons or whatever providing low-altitude radio towers, which can deliver a lot more bandwidth (because they're close and can carry a lot more power), but somehow none of them ever turn into reality. (Good luck to Google and Facebook on those.)

Cruz was born in Canada, his mother was American, his father was Cuban. Obama was born in Hawaii, his mother was American, his father was Kenyan.

Cruz's father only became a US citizen a few years ago, and Ted was at least talking about giving up his Canadian citizenship because of all the right-wing ranters, though I'm not sure he followed through.

"Actually, I was born in Canada, I just *work* in outer space."

It's not ill-gotten data at all. Uber is a database service - you tell it where you are and where you want to go, and they charge you for the trip, and they know when your request was made, when you were picked up, and when you were dropped off.

All perfectly reasonable, by itself - it's what they do with the data that's sensitive, and how well they anonymize it before giving it to governments. Zip Code is a reasonable granularity for most purposes (assuming it's 5-digit ZIPs and not 9-digit); hope they'll anonymize the times as well (e.g. rounding to the nearest hour.)

One of the real values of Euclid's Elements is the insistence on proof of everything, which is part of what differentiates it from much of Classical Greek "science"; assertions like Aristotle's claim that heavy objects fall faster than light ones weren't good enough. And it's not like the Pythagoreans weren't mystics either; there's a story that one of their deep dark secrets was the irrationality of sqrt(2), which really annoyed them because it showed that their mathematically perfect universe wasn't.

Knowing that a 3-4-5 triangle has a right angle isn't the same as being able to prove it, or as knowing the general principle behind why it's true. It's the kind of thing you can find by trial and error, and that (both the successful and unsuccessful trials) may be a starting place for reasoning about the general principles.

Sure, the Hindu nationalist politician the other day who brought up the issue deserves your criticism, claiming that Indian mystics were flying to other planets centuries before the West was.

But the Indian mathematician who won the Fields Medal, the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize is the person were talking about today, and he gave a good discussion about what different aspects of the theorem were invented where and when. It was relatively short and sound-bitey, and there's a lot of history we really don't know about how much communication there was between different regions (so for instance, did Pythagoras and Euclid learn about it from people who'd traveled to India, such as Alexander the Great's armies or random merchants or traveling scholars? Or did they base their work on what the Egyptians had done?) There's also a lot we don't know about what was developed in each region, because only bits of it survived into the historical record. It's not like Pythagoras was the first person in the West to see a triangle; his original work was a follow-on to already known things that he'd learned.

Science does work that way, after all - we need to keep communication as open as possible so people can benefit from it.

I'll give the Indian politician the amount of credit it was due, along with mystical spacecraft flying to other planets and such. But this article by a guy who won the bloody Fields Medal not only deserves a lot more credibility before reading it, but also after - he talks about the discoveries of various parts of the idea in different parts of the world. And Indian and Arab mathematicians did contribute a huge amount to culture and civilization; you can't even claim they made zero contributions without using the zero they contributed,

You don't need the Pythagorean Theorem to construct a right angle. You don't even need the theorem to know that a 3-4-5 triangle has a right angle. It's a nice explanation of why those proportions get you a right angle, but that's a different issue; once you know you want a right angle, and a triangle with integer-proportion sides so you can easily reproduce it, trial and error will get you there. Furthermore, the classical geometric proof doesn't automatically give you integer solutions; Diophantine equations were Diophantus's trick, not Pythagoras's.