It's the other way round. Mathematics is just an abstract representation of the real world. No amount of physics, maths or theories of "everything" will cure cancer or invent the next IPhone. Patents are about (or at least should be about) the inventive step - i.e. the coming together of several elements to create something new.

Because the people at DARPA haven't heard of, or seen any of that!

See there's the thing - "a certain result" - Javascript brings about uncertain results!

Construction has very real material costs -the beams and concrete you talk about - so every component is drawn and specified. In software development the material costs are virtually zero so you might as well build it twice, once to understand it and once to productionize it, it's the same as writing a detailed spec and then coding it.

I suspect that if you put up website such that it is publically accessable then there is every expectation that people will access it and by publishing the website you have granted them permission to do so. If, OTOH you put a password on the first page, then you have denied access and any attempt to bypass the password is a mis-use

A lot of companies use coding tests as part of the interview process and pretty much there will be some time limit, whether stated or not. They are not going to let you sit there for two days to answer 20 questions or complete a 10 line routine.

As to the value of rigid timing, then that is a bit dubious.Do you want fast and sloppy or slow and accurate? Does this tell you something about the organisation and whether or not you want to work there? I feel it really depends on how they treat the results WRT the timing.

Actually I've wanted a 3d printer for a while, I've also wanted a Milling machine for longer. Having nearly gone off and bought the bits for a 3D printer I stopped and thought about it.

A milling machine with bigger overall capacity than most home-built 3D printers (i.e. about a cubic foot) can be had new for under £1000 which (all-in) is not much more than a large, rigid 3D printer kit would be. Add in a CNC set up (about another £300) and make an extruder (we now have a milling machine so making an accurate extruder should not be to difficult) and you have a milling machine and a 3D printer, for significantly less than the cost of both, and a much more capable set up.

So my current plan is to save up a bit more money and buy a milling mahine and then mod it to be a 3D printer.

In morse code there are a number of 3 letter "Q" codes for common phrases that operators use (e.g. QSL - acknowledge receipt). Q is presumably used because if it is not followed by a U in English then it must be a code and not a word. Equally X and Z are fairly uncommon letters and so may be used more commonly in abbreviations (TX/RX transmit/receive).

By focring everything to 5 letter groups means that there is some error checking in the message if the sriting is small, closely grouos, gets wet, etc. you know if letters or spaces are missing. So it is possible that this abbreviation idea is valid.

Looks like Vanity Fair is going to drip feed us this stuff for a while... does it add anything we didn't already know?

Suppose the aliens evolved on the dark side of a tidally locked planet and are busy braodcasting light signals at us?

More seriously though it's about timing. The longest a human civilisation has survived is a few thousand years. Assume the aliens broadcast "hello universe" for a few thousand years, what are the chances of SETI listening at the same time their broadcast reaches us? If the earth hadn't been hit by a random event 65 million years ago, SETI would be not be here now. SETI may have happened thousands or millions of years ago or may be millions of years on the future.

I suppose this is what one would expect from anyone with "open source space travel" in their sig. We are nowhere near approaching a "post scarcity society", go to Africa or India and tell the significant proportion of the earth's populaton that live in poverty that we are approaching a "post scarcity society"!

On the 3D printing front, gimme one that prints steel, aluminium alloys, etc. with the structural integrity of their conventially produced equivalents (i.e. not sintered) and I'll start to take this discussion seriously.