Personally, I find Scilab pretty awful (and for the record, I'm french).

As a physicist, I use hearphones just to "enter the zone". Usually, after a while, I find them distracting. Kind of as if they were consuming brain cycles that aren't free anymore. I know it's time to remove them, hoping the phone doesn't ring or som jac^h^h^h coworker doesn't pop up...

If he knows, he's responsible. If he doesn't, he's incompetent. Which do you prefer ?

Pick up an instrument, or if you used to play an instrument when you were a teenager, time to get it out of the attics.
(Re-)learn how to play (we have great softwares and books/CD for this, nowadays) and learn by listening to the masters. Learn also some theory.
At some point, get out and find yourself a band, suited to your skills (a bit better, ideally) and taste. At the very least, you'll have fun but you could even end up being a good musician. Depends on the time you want to spend on it.

Woosh

True. And I have a hard time convincing myself that these guys are doing it alone. For sure, they get some help. China ?

n/t

Amen to that. I also have a HP48s, which I still use. Back when I was in school, I sometimes used it to cheat. To do this, I add to input many formulas or reproduce drawings, or write programs to perform some calculations (atomic physics comes to my mind). But in the process of doing that, you learn a lot. Eventually, you don't have to cheat anymore because you know pretty well the subject. And even if you didn't work enough to learn all you were supposed to, you've still learnt some of it. This makes a huge difference compared to, say, using a smartphone to browse the internet and find your answers.

Obligatory xkcd link
I for one find this cartoon incredibly insightful and disturbing (and I do use google services, although I wish I wasn't).

At the moment, the French economy is not doing well, to say the least: austerity has become the rule in the EU and so far, no signs of recovery have been observed (I for one don't think austerity is the right answer, but let's stay on-topic). As a FOSS enthusiast (and, incidentally, as a French...), I'm glad to see this kind of effort finally happening. But I also suspect our government sees this as a cheap way to cut licence costs and won't invest sufficiently in the migration. I think it makes sense from a economic standpoint in the middle/long term, but there is a transition period which I'm not sure they'll be willing (or able) to handle with sufficient resources.

Except that in this case, you need to put the thing in LEO using several Saturn 5 propellers. And this is so expensive (not too mention the risk) that it basically ruins the whole concept. No, really, I used to like Project Orion too but there's no way it could work. Too dangerous, too expensive. Let's put it to rest, already.

And some of us quiet readers just have a lot of respect for guys like you (which is not exactly the same as "idolize").

Yeah, yesterday, I was just asking myself "Why is this RUBBISH on Ars Technica" ?

I used to be a devout user of WindowMaker around ~2000 (I had used fvwm, olvwm and afterstep before). After that, I've used Gnome 1, then Gnome 2... I found Gnome 3 to be an abomination and I went to XFCE. It does what it is meant to do and quite frankly, I don't see why I would want to go back to WindowMaker. And no, nostalgia isn't enough...

I've always wondered if he would have been so successful without his illness. If he hadn't suffered from MND, I imagine he would have had various activities and maybe he would have diluted his precious time between numerous tasks. I suppose that to qualifiy as what people call a "genius", you have to be very smart and work all day (either by discipline or by being forced to do so, as in his case). In other words, what if myself, a modest scientist was suddenly forced to think about physics all day long rather than share my time between scientific work, administrative burden, and more mundane tasks (including family and leisure), would I be more successful ? I've always doubted that, but I don't think I'll never get an answer to this.