If you are really having a precision problem, even in double precision, then it means you are facing an ill-conditioned problem. And if you are facing an ill-conditioned problem, then there is nothing a technological tool can do for you. Try to reformulate the problem to avoid bad conditioning, and FP will be fine.

The tiny slashdot reader category who knows what a wife look like?

I'm actually managing an OS course for graduate students, and it's heavily based on linux (userspace and kernelspace). We do a few exercices (like writing a kernel module that computes averages), but nothing fancy. I've always been looking to propose them some projects related to kernel dev, but as I'm not a kernel hacker myself, I have clearly no idea of what seems reasonable.

So here's the deal: If you are involved on some subsystem of the linux kernel and you have something you want to get coded that can be a first experience with kernel dev, and that can be done under about 100 hours (the length of a typical project), you contact me. I'll do as much as possible as a first step filtering so that you won't get spamed. It's a win-win situation: I have great projects for my students, you get free work. For this year, it's a bit short, because projects are from September until January, but next year is ok.

I don't need to go back and look at some photos, I was born there.

It's funny to see people finally realize that the world we're headed to is very similar to that of East Germany, with the slight difference that you won't be assured to have a house, a job and food every day. Probably these points were not among the good things to retain from the Commies, whereas global surveillance was.

Exactly. My guess is that this publishing method is not the cause but the consequence of the current disfunction. Researcher are evaluated on prestige, exactly like businessmen are evaluated on money. That alone means that as a recognized researcher, you have absolutely no interest at seeing concurrent work get published, or perhaps only if they heavily cite your work. With such system, young researcher in small labs will never get any good publication (read in famous journals), whatever the quality of their work, except if they manage to attract a big name.

We have completely reproduced the capitalism system, albeit replacing money with citations. If you were "born" with a good initial capital because your advisors were rich, then you'll easily get more capital, creating dinasties of researchers. I'm not saying these dinasties are incompetent, I'm saying they are after some point barely correlated with competence, and that they mask really brilliant people, which in the end will lack proper funding and quit science.

You would have guess the world of science would have been more objective than that of business, but truth is humans are the same everywhere.

There are many cases where the symbolic formula is much simpler than the equivalent program. Take any matrix factorization for example (QR, LU, SVD, etc), the programs to obtain them are rather complex (take a look at a good implementation of the divide and conquer algorithm for eigenvalue decomposition), while the equivalent formula is nothing more than 3 or 4 characters.

I wish it could reduce to a size such that parking is no longer an issue...

I'm not really sure I want to reduce all my trust to the emotional mindset of the programer. Emotions are often proven to be very instable, and in case of critical systems the consequences will be desastrous. I'd prefer to use a well defined and robust methodology, ideally involving proven programs.

Seriously? You are judging the work of someone solely on the shape of his citation curve on scholar? Compressed sensing is all but new, right, but selling these guys as bad because they have only 2k citations (!!!) on scholar is a bit exagerated, to say the least.

You say it requires intelligence, yet you seem not to have a proper definition of it. That's a bit of a paradox, isn't it?

Moreover, the examples you give are more pattern recognition and decision making problems, tasks for which algorithms are known to be very efficient, often far better than humans.

I've always thought of Verisign&co as a very reliable evidence that I'm paying something over the real paypal and not to some Russian based thugs. I would never trust them for my privacy.

Wasn't it the same situation 2 years ago in Libya with the gov certificate being trusted by default by some OS?

Well, even if I was running Matlab 8 hours a day, it would be using a OSS desktop environment using an OSS graphic server running on an OSS kernel, which means its percentage of wasted resources cannot exceed 25%. If you add all the remaining apps (web browser, mail client, terms and text editors, and so on), I doubt it will ever be over 20%.

Well, apart of Matlab (which I could easily swap for octave or scilab, but I'm too lazy to rewrite all my code) and 2 or 3 games I use once in the year, all the other 3k+ packages on my computers are FOSS, which is probably >80%. I guess it is more or less the same for any linux user with no alternative OS.

Which brings us to the next point: If obfuscation is worthless and someone will steal you code whatever you do, just release it with an open source license in the first place.

My guess is that the short amount of time between the release and the cracking is where the management expects to make profit, and even more profit than if it was FLOSS in the first place. This highlights greatly the short-term objectives of today's business.