Kids have the science gene first, that causes the emotional response to such films. Science is about thinking about how stuff works, it doesn't need any external catalysts to kick it off. (Preaching to the converted here I know bit hey).

Mind you, hoping the cricket highlights tomorrow morning will inspire my little boy :)

Not all of it is high school calc. IIRC the integral of 4sin(x)/x has to be solved with Taylor series, and I only got those in the second semester of university calculus. One then has to take the limit to infinity of the resulting series, which may or may not be doable for a high school kid (not sure how hard the limit is; I'm too lazy to solve / look up the series)

Or you could just look up the answer on Wikipedia. Which is probably what the creators did when they were trying to come up with an alternative way of writing Pi.

BTW how did they find the factorials for such a big number?

Almost all application software is effectively single threaded: either there is an explicit single execution path or the app has attempted threading but the threads depend on a core path that is single threaded.

That's quite a bizarre claim. I've looked at hundreds of Java dumps from hundreds of different customers and the vast majority are doing multithreading on a massive scale with no issues. If there is contention it's usually pretty obvious from the dump.

I can only assume that your company's software is quite poorly designed from a threading perspective.

Yep. For those that haven't tried it without the patch, a multithreaded kernel compile will typically peg a modern multicore CPU at 100% and will even give you drunken mouse syndrome. Just being able to scroll around a browser window while doing a lengthy make -j64 is impressive. Being able to watch 1080p video smoothly is ... astounding.

For an OS that has been around for nearly 20 years and has had thousands of very bright programmers poring over it, it's quite astounding that only now has someone finally figured out how to let gui-related activity have top priority.

Wait until he puts his robot hydraulic foot on an IED.

Er, yes, that's because the copy is from a disassemble and so it's quite possible the order of the methods changed. It's presented in a way to make it clear that it is a copy/disassemble. Which is pretty undeniable, no matter how much you hate Oracle.

Have you looked at the files? They are here. The argument is not that the two files are decompiles. All they have done is strip comments out of the files so that the structure (and similarities) is clearer. What you might be thinking of is the fact that the Android version appears to be a decompile of the Sun version. You can tell this because the method arguments in the Android version are generic names (e.g. "i" instead of "depth"). Plus other little clues. Take a look, it's quite obvious.

And decompiling _is_ effectively copying.

Indeed. This is the relevant quote from the link:

And that's not the worst of it: David Willetts, the science and universities minister, said before Cameron's speech that he would investigate making it easier to obtain software patents. "In the US, it's easier to obtain software patents, and Google was able to patent some work - using a federal grant, I might add - that it might not have been able to patent in the UK. The US rule is that 'anything man has invented under the sun you should be able to patent'. That's something we do wish to investigate."

I think you'll find an awful lot of short-lived objects these days are allocated on the stack. Modern JITs use escape analysis to figure out whether the object ever "escapes" from the current stack frame. I.e. is the object still referenced when the current method returns. If it isn't (which is often the case with short-lived objects), the object is allocated right there in the stack frame (just like alloca) and there is zero GC cost. Part of the beauty of Java is that you can do this kind of escape analysis because everything is so well-defined.

Except the private variables in the beginning, I would lean towards clean room implementation.

Absolutely no way. Even a quick scan of the code shows it is clearly a copy with a pretty poor attempt at cosmetic changes to disguise the fact. Take a look at the method getPolicyNodesExpectedHelper. This is a private method, by definition not part of the API. And yet there it is almost identical in structure in both copies. The Android version cleverly changes the name of the parameter depth to i and matchAny to flag but that's about it. Good luck with defending that in court!

Ah, that explains why I was getting dozens of firewall access requests from Google Updater earlier this week.

ran it for long periods of time [...] exploring the beautiful world

Yeah, but when you've seen one part of the Mandelbrot set, you've seen it all.

To take the simpler example quoted elsewhere:

1. 1/9 = 0.111111111111111111111111111111.....
2. Multiply each side by 9
3. 9/9 = 0.999999999999999999999999999999......
4. Simplify fraction
5. 1 = 0.999999999999999999999999999999......

The error comes at step 2 (or even step 1). We just mentally brush under the carpet all the other 111s stretching off to infinity. But what does it mean to multiply an infinite set by 9? Imagine we get a computer to do it for us. So we have a program to multiply our infinite series of ones by 9. It will never finish of course. And there's a big difference between finishing and never finishing. Multiplying by 1 is an atomic operation. Multiplying by 0.999... is a process that will never complete. In fact the number 0.999... is itself a process, not a fixed quantity. I wonder if maths could be recast in terms of processes? So instead of saying for instance the sum of 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + ... == 2, you'd leave it as a process which would be a bit more awkward but maybe those process numbers would combine/cancel out.

What's wrong with dying? We all do it sooner or later as individuals. Why should the race last forever?

I agree. Life has evolved billions of times on planets all over the universe. There's no more reason to preserve our species for ever than there is a particular individual. Look at it from the point of view of the universe (or god if you prefer). The lights of consciousness are turning on and off all the time. I'm sure it's all a device for creating stories and someone somewhere is sat in the dark, popcorn on their lap watching the greatest 3D movie of all time. Who wants to watch a repeat?

My first computer was an 80386 running MS-DOS, and I think I am not alone here (at least with the C64 crowd et al.) with how what I did mostly with it was spending hours and hours in the BASIC implementation, crappy as it as, it was definitely a thing I had a blast on, even if it wasn't a real programming language in all honesty. I remember just how astounding it was to look at the numbers when I migrated to a Tualatin Celeron with a jaw-dropping 1.2 GHz of raw processing power compared to something that didn't break the hundreds. And a GUI? And this strange mouse? What just invaded my desk? And... where did my system's guts go, over everything?!

If you are seventeen, then one year before you were born I was using a 68040 NeXT machine, programming in Objective-C and Display Postscript.