Please read the first paragraph of my post more carefully (the paragraph that you didn't quote). In essence, I said that that the EM drive did not work as advertised -- and although a force was measured, it was due to more pedestrian physics and the Earth's Magnetic field, hence not suitable as a Space Drive.

I suppose, I should spell things out in more detail for Americans (scary so many voted for Trump).

They found the EM force was real, in once sense at least. It was actually the force on the wires leading to the apparatus -- hint, what happens to a wire carrying a current when it is in a magnetic field?

I have invented a starship drive that follows real Physics -- but, for practical purposes, requires impossible Engineering, at least for the foreseeable future (I recall Einstein was convinced that Gravitational waves that he predicted would never be detected!).

Even in Newton's theory of gravity, photons are deflected from the Sun. Interesting, even some Physicists forget this! However there is a difference of a factor of 2 between the predictions of Newton's theory of gravity and Einstein's general relativity, in the amount of the affect.

https://briankoberlein.com/201...
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The catch is that the amount of bending predicted by Newton’s model is half what Einstein’s model predicted. Eddington actually demonstrated not only that light was gravitationally deflected, but that the amount matched Einstein, and not Newton.
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https://www.researchgate.net/p...
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Jerry Decker
Private Research
Newton Gravity can be manipulated to give an approximation of bending light, but was not done in advance of Einstein GR. So it is just an exercise with approximate results.
Local gravity acceleration does not depend on the small mass of a falling object, only the mass of the sun or other large body. Then curvature is implied.
g = MG/r2
Radial velocity changes according to curvature
dvr/dt = g
  Taken into the usual hyperbolic geometry, it leads to an answer for bending of light that is only half as large as GR and the accepted observations
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I think that the probability of intelligent Life on other planets is near certainty, but that the probability interacting with intelligent Life on other planets is near zero.

Of course I'm excluding the possibility of any intelligent Life on Earth going to other planets. I'll refrain from discussing the existence, or non existence, of intelligent Life on Earth!

Careful, you might start a new Woo-Woo trend like Flat Earthers, Global Warming Denialists, Moon Hoaxers, and Creationists -- all people who prefer beliefs over reality.

The Warming Denialists and Creationists, are probably the most well organised and dangerous.

I was making no comment wrt 'functional programming', merely that I had found lamdas useful in Java.

I think var should be banned in any sane development environment, and should never have been put into Java.

I have found lambdas very useful in a couple of use cases, such as when you need to pass a function for special functionality -- far better than defining a class to hold the function.

Java is now version 11, with 12 out Real Soon Now.

Java 9 did have a major, but necessary breakage. But Versions 10, 11, and 12 should not create too many problems for code that run on Java 9.

None of my Java programs, a few at least 15 years old, had any problems on on Java 9 or later!

Probably only developers that broke the rules, and used non public APIs had significant problems with Java 9.

If you want a program to execute under a second, then write it in C, or another compiled language.

However, if the program is likely to be running a minute or more, than a well written Java program will most likely out perform a well written C program. Because in Java, the code parts that are executed intensely, will be compiled into native machine code optimized for that run time profile by the Just-in-Time Java compiler that is part of the JVM. The JIT can even in-line code that is at the end of a long pointer chain.

Big enterprise applications running on on big multi-core count computers with a terabyte of RAM can make effective use of Java for long running programs. As the JVM makes good use of the multicores and gobs of RAM.

I once ran a silly benchmark, and found that the JVM/JIT had created 2 threads to run code in the same method, because it had found that my 2 large for loops could be run in parallel.

I have programmed in over 25 languages, including COBOL, C (I actually was paid to teach C to experienced programmers one year), ARM3 assembler, and Python. Found Python had some good points, indenting eliminated brackets and no need for lots of semicolons, but I found it too gimmicky and didn’t handle multi-threading very well compared to Java.

I’ve found Java quite effective for writing short programs of less than 100 lines to explore mathematical ideas, like how many polygons can meet at a snugly at a point(see http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/...). So Java does not need massive projects to be really useful.

Cross platform support is also good. I wrote a Java Application to find duplicated files on my Linux box, and a friend had no problems running it on his Microsoft box.

I find Java is my favourite language, though I also have things I don’t like about it. No language is perfect, and there are many considerations to be taken into account for selecting a language for development.

Don't worry, the Chinese will develop the Martian colonies -- so no need for American tax dollars!

Within a relatively short time, under 10 years from first landing humans, Mars would be self sufficient in terms of air, water, methane, and bulk building materials -- though band aids etc. may take tens of years. note that they will probably develop other materials and not need 'rubber', so no need for rubber trees.

Some minerals and goods will be obtained elsewhere in the Solar System, other than from Earth.

Most people, who haver given self sufficiency any real thought, are thinking of centuries for sufficient self sufficiency. Some luxury items we take for granted on Earth may never be practical to create off Earth, but you don't need luxury items to be self sufficient!

Controlling the L5 And L6 points is probably far more significant!

https://www.space.com/30302-la...

I used to think that a Moon base was essential for the sustained exploration and colonisation of the rest of the Solar System, or at least for Mars.

But Elon has convinced me that a Martian colony could be started from Earth directly. Although, a Lunar colony may help, providing it doesn't divert necessary funds for the Martian colonies.

Hmm...

Long term, we need a viable self sustaining population of humans off Earth.

This may well take a few centuries to achieve -- but if we don't start, then it will never happen.

I doubt that a Lunar colony by itself would be sufficient -- nor for that matter, a Martian colony. The latter, because currently we have no confidence that human females can reproduce effectively on Mars (does gestation require Earth normal gravity?), nor that sufficient babies would be able to develop properly to fully functioning adults. On the other hand, I'm not aware of evidence that it can't happen either!

Pregnancy, and early, childhood may need to done in large rotating space stations to maintain sufficient g forces to enable reliably producing and raising generations of humans off Earth. I'd love to be proved overly pessimistic!

Am making the reasonably assumption that radiation shielding is a mere engineering detail, along with the necessary ability to make the space stations self sufficient in terms of air and food.

There is abundant free energy in space from solar radiation, and raw materials can be mined from planetary surfaces.

Would not surprise me that that Mercury ended up with mining camps for metals and heavy industry. There is water ice in the Mercurian polar craters, and bountiful solar energy, plus no locals will be complaining about industrial pollution!

Mars can supply more than sufficient, water, oxygen, and methane for the colony, plus probably many of the minerals it needs. Suspect that the Martian colonies collectively, will be self sufficient in terms of basic food, water, air, and fuel within 20 years. Luxury food categories may take a few more years.

I see that asteroid mining will become economically viable within 50 years, and most probably a lot sooner.

In about 200 years will have colonies on the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus (cloud cities), and probably other places. Also manned expeditions to Pluto and beyond.

So long as the forces of ignorance are kept sufficiently in check, but unfortunately Creationists and their ilk, are hell bent on promoting belief over understanding.

SageMath is free and is easily accessible from Python. It runs on Linux, and other O/S's including those from Microsoft.

SageMath is very powerful and is a good alternative to MatLab and Mathematica.

http://www.sagemath.org/
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SageMath is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more. Access their combined power through a common, Python-based language or directly via interfaces or wrappers.

Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab.
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