Let me guess, you don't have children? Come back in 20 years and see what you think then.

I am sure that in the fullness of time you will understand why loss of ones so young is more of a tragedy.

Could I contribute while mountain-biking? Could I contribute by ballroom dancing? Could I contribute while driving miniature steam engines in the park on Sundays? Could I contribute while acting in local Shakespeare plays? Could I contribute while woodworking? Could I contribute by going to the movies?

It is simple, most people have hobbies that they enjoy spending their spare time on.

Just because some people have a passion for Open Source and others find utility in it doesn't impart any sort of onus to assist development. Isn't that the ethos of Open Source - you can use it with no strings attached?

You might as well ask the opposite - Why are there so few FOSS coders just dropping in at rest homes to talk to the elderly? Why are no FOSS coders painting murals in public spaces? Why are no FOSS coders picking up rubbish in the park? Why are no FOSS coders building mountain bike trails in the weekend?

All I got from it was that they were going to use the radioactive material as a random number generator for securing communication between components, so nobody could hotwire it.

Well, I think that is what was said!

If you only want to carry one slim book, I would recommend "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" by Alfred V. Aho, Monica S. Lam, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman. It might be old skool, but there is sure to be enough ideas in there to keep you busy on cold nights.

It has two completely opposite meanings:

1: commonly named e.g. "the so–called pocket veto"
2: falsely or improperly so named e.g. "deceived by a so–called friend"

It drives me crazy!

That argument could be extended to suggest that crew should be only people with Dwarfism. Everything could be smaller!

Then you could name the spaceship "Snow White", and sell the movie rights to Disney.

Bits... in my world comms is always in bits per second :-)

3840 H pixels x 2160 V pixels x 24 bits per pixel x 300 frames per second = 59,719,680,000 bits per second

I've had a few short chats with one of the members of the team, and the tech is simply gobsmackingly droolly. The data bandwidth required for readout from the sensors alone is massive - 300 fps of 4k video, even without deep colour is 20 x that of 1080p.(around 60Gb/s).

Congratulations for what has been years of effort!

We had a 7.1 10 kms (6 miles) down the road... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...

We had plenty of food and water, we were a bit cold as we didn't want to light the woodburner until we checked it out properly. Had a nice BBQ with the neighbours and enjoyed a bit of quiet time and early nights as power was out for three days.

It hit at 4:35 am. However I still don't sleep approriately attired for running out of the house in the night, nor do I have shoes by the side of my bed for walking over broken glass. Most probably the two most important lessons right there (oh and don't put your bed beside a brick chimney, not that we do...).

Can you give one example of Open Source Hardware that is "open hardware all the way down"?

If I could make an "Open Source Hardware" design using the actual propeller chip, then sure this makes that design "even more open", and so is a good thing IMO.

Sure, but it is a big bonus for people who need a few custom periherals and a nice, open, stable controller with a good toolchain.

Video processing? Audio processing? Driving oodles of servos? Driving oodles of Neopixels? Does your design need really tight feedback loops (e.g. high speed power control)?

The best book I have ever read on DSP is "The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to
Digital Signal Processing" - pdfs are on http://dspguide.com/. All of the sample code is in BASIC - yes, BASIC! I have successfully then gone on and implemented many of the ideas presented in many languages, and even in hardware. This highly useful maths can be presented in the what is arguably the worst of programming languages, and it is still very informative,

Some important areas of programming have very little maths at all. For example math does not care if you just name all your variables "aaaaaa" through "zzzzzz" - the answer is just the same.

In short both sides of the argument are wrong. Programming and math sit beside each other, with quite a bit of overlap. When working on problems that are in this overlap, you have a bias towards seeing it as solving maths with a programming tool, or programming with maths as a tool.

I wonder if they will sell them special space-rated coffee beans at highly enflated prices in order to move any profits back to tax havens?

(See http://www.ukuncut.org.uk/targ... if you miss the joke)