http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/novels/ My favorite from these nine math novels is Arturo Sangalli: Pythagorean Revenge.

But any attempt to plan and direct breakthroughs will only serve to prevent them.
What about nuclear energy or getting to the moon? These were planned and heavily directed breakthroughs.
Breakthroughs cannot be planned
Is this really true? Modern industry is full of examples where breakthroughs have been planned.
You can put a whole lot of smart people to work, give them everything they want, and maybe you will get lucky.
Isn't this also a form of planning? Maybe we should say that breakthroughs can not be micromanaged.

since when is stagnation the beginning of the end? We have saturation and the mobile market become more and more an upgrade game.

the 120 lines of code under review actually need a pay version of Tao. The free evaluation version does not work with the example code TFA shows. [Nice although that a linux version is available.]

First of all, for myself there is no linux desktop problem. I always have used a lightwight desktop manager (blackbox) which has everything I even need. What would be nice for the general public is a desktop manager which is flexible enough so that it can be tuned so that it behaves exactly like OSX or be tune so that it emulates exactly windows. Such a desktop might also not be vulnerable to patent claims because it is essentially the user who tunes the parameters. There just happen to be parameter files around which make the desktop look and feel like other operating systems. Somebody might even build a parameter set so that it looks like unity.

Here is a video from an attempt with crash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmea3odVgDE#! it seems repaired.

Anant Agarwal recently reported that at the course MIT 6.002 where textbooks are freely available for students, the textbook sales have gone through the roof. Publishers currently learn from such cases. This patent is complete nonsense. No teacher would make financial payments linked to grades.

These correlations are hardly a surprise If you are healthy, wealthy you are more likely to live longer. And its easier to have a good sense of humor and optimisitic you are settled well. It is also more likely that you have a larger social network then. The correlation between healthy and living longer is trivial. The correlation between wealthy and living longer is no secret since health systems are already selective. If you are padded well you more likely will get an experienced surgeon for example or get a vital organ faster.

the study is rather limited since 216 students is a small sample. And how did they get the students? If it was voluntarily, then the sample was already biased from the beginning. They could not have monitored the internet use of a random sample without their consent without violating basic guidelines for using human subjects in research. The later rather severe in academic setups. It must have been rather difficult to get these students also because who would agree to have all their online activities monitored and analyzed.

It will not only be important to estimate what "value" really is but how robust it is. If you make a technological leap which needs a lot of research investment and which is difficult to copy, then this is value which is robust. Real resources like oil or level of education are such robust values. FB has generated a lot of robust value in building up all the infrastructure and code. But the value of FB includes also networks of people which is also value but is fragile because it is based also on reputation and coolness. If you sit on a real goldmine, you do not have to be cool. You will make money. If you sit on a virtual goldmine like FB, you have to remain popular to please investors and make money. This makes me side more with Steve Blank in the economist opening statement. However, facebook now also has the power to grab and crush smaller competitors and harvaest their talent. The fact that they get the best in the industry might mean that they will start entering more robust markets like entertaining, news etc. This makes me believe also Ben Horowitz. We will have to wait and see.

this is the main reason, why I do not have important things only on the laptop, nor use cloud services. Both are vulnerable. The former since a laptop can so easily disappear, the later because the company could go belly up or lose the data. Backing up on hard drives and store regularly encrypted versions in a safe place looks still like the best option. My personal backup has not changed since decades: sync regularly (via cron scripts) between multiple desktop machines at multiple locations, retire old harddrives regularly and have physical harddrive backups at multiple locations too which are not overwrritten. (Adding a mac desktop in the sync loop allows to use time machine also when primarily working in linux). I also work more and more on a laptop but always sync before and after using it for some work. Yes, it is a bit expensive but the financial pain pales when comparing to the agony to lose old work.

First of all, it must be said that the word "mac fan boy" is one of the most ingenious PR actions against apple. The statement of Microsoft that "macs are not safe" is a too obvious PR spin along the same lines. Any operating system is vulnerable as long as users can modify operating systems. This is not for discussion. What matters is how fast these vulnerabilities are handled and communicated and corrected. Apple as well as Linux distributions have handled vulnerabilities in the past pretty well and I feel quite safe both using a mac or using linux boxes.

javascript is the best option. I would trust it more than any other implementation because is a language which by nature open source, i.e. http://www.peoplesliberationfront.net/anonpaste/lib/sjcl.js http://www.peoplesliberationfront.net/anonpaste/lib/base64.js All the encryption is done in the users browser and not on the server and one can see the code. So, download all the source files first, analyze whether there is something strange in the source and then everytime, before using the tool, check whether the source has changed.

What I do not understand however is for what this could be useful.

it has to be said once: there is no faster and better program for unix and gimp developers are my heroes. I I use it since gimp 1.0 and could not be happier. Sure, one has to get used to it, but things are done with the gimp before photoshop even starts up. I even prefer it on my macs, where photoshop is installed.

TV has become almost unbearable indeed. I guess that this evolution will repeat with streaming too. We see the trend also in youtube. First it was completely free, then adds appeared at the begnning. the next step is to have adds to appear during play or interrupt the movie for ads.Once TV is less relevant and streaming the only possibility, the crap will creap in too. The movies will be interupted regularly for advertisements, or adds will be injected into the movies and show and on will only be able to get rid of it by paying more.