Most low-level employees today are depressed. And underpaid. In a poll, 81% of fast-food employees report having wages stolen from them in the form of unpaid time.

So what does he want CS students to learn? Embedded system programming? Control theory? Labview? System safety engineering? Mechatronics? Robotics?

If I want to see nerds talk, there's YouTube.

Order your manned flight to the ISS here. Space-X is doing various "abort tests" NASA insists on, and the first manned launch for NASA isn't supposed to happen until 2017. But Space-X may send their own private astronauts into orbit next year.

Space-X has been sending Dragon spacecraft to the ISS for some time now. The fourth one was supposed to launch this week, but the USAF had a fire at one of their tracking stations and all Cape Canaveral launches are on hold.

After reading all three articles, I'm glad the developers walked out. Now they need to stop apologizing about it. They were recruited by misrepresentation, and when they found out, they didn't like it. They have nothing to apologize for. They don't need to justify their actions. That the sponsor lost $500K is not their problem.

A solution for that has been developed at Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan. Here's the theory paper: "Bridgeless SEPIC-derived LED Driver without Electrolytic Capacitor for Multistring Application". And here's the product announcement. "Dali Power recommends led drive design without electrolytic capacitor, used mainly for bulb lamp. Life is 10 times of the original LED drivers, the design life is as much as 40000 hours or more, can be well matched with the life LED lamp, small size, only forty percent of the original LED driver area. Products are mainly used in household low power lighting, suitable scope is 3W ~ 20W." So this problem is being solved. The new approach is both cheaper and has a longer lifetime.

If those overpriced "smart" bulbs still have electrolytics inside, they're already obsolete.

At this point I'm mostly replacing CFLs.

They've replicated the one-way communication of X10, then. That seems rather lame.

Meanwhile, Cree's nice LED replacements for 60W incandescent bulbs are now below $10 at Home Depot. 10 year warranty. They draw 9 watts. Dimmable with existing external dimmers. Just buy a case of those and replace anything that burns out with one.

Somebody knows a little financial history. Early thinking about inflation involved "the free and unlimited coinage of silver". Look up the "free silver" movement.

Understanding the implications and biases of the financial system is very important. For example, introducing money into the system via the Fed is a a bias toward the banking system. Introducing it through infrastructure spending (which Japan does) is a bias toward the construction industry. Introducing it by financing export oriented industries (as China does) is a bias toward manufacturing industries.This is a political policy choice, and more than one option is possible.

That just screams "Ponzi scheme". Where's the money coming from?

If you have to kill the engine for some emergency, that shouldn't disable the air bag system. Perhaps the air bag system should be powered whenever either the ignition is on or the vehicle is out of Park.

Now that ex-employees are talking to the press and the cops, we'll find out what was going on.

The Reuters article makes it clear that Karpeles had exclusive personal control over Mt. Gox's cash. That probably means he'll be the one going to jail. I've been writing for months (ever since Mt. Gox suspended US dollar withdrawals last summer) that Mt. Gox was either incompetent, broke, or crooked. Now it looks like all of the above.

Why would Karpeles import a Honda Accord R from the UK to Japan? They're made in Japan.

I'm in Silicon Valley, and cellular just doesn't work very well. At least not Sprint's CDMA network.

At home, I have to go to a window to get one or two bars, because the local community association doesn't want a cell tower nearby. I have a Sprint Airave box, which gives me a femtocell which mooches bandwidth from my IP connection. This gets me VoIP quality at cellular prices. If I lose Internet connectivity, I lose cellular connectivity. The Airave box is badly programmed; when it loses IP connectivity it still captures local handsets and insists it's the best path to the network. You have to disconnect its power to reach a cell tower instead.

At TechShop Menlo Park, which is adjacent to a major freeway, I have to get near a window to get coverage. I'm not sure why there's a coverage hole there.

For a long time, there was no Sprint coverage on the Stanford campus, because Stanford had an exclusive deal with AT&T.

I was in San Jose recently, near PayPal HQ, and couldn't get Sprint connectivity until I drove up to a closed Sprint store. They have a femtocell so their demos work, and just outside the store, there was good connectivity.

Even when it works, cellular voice quality sucks. Sprint finally seems to have fixed their delay problem, though. For a while I was getting delays as long as a second, with delayed echoes coming back, like some low-end VoIP system.

The land line works great. Voice quality is very good, because it's only about 150 feet of copper to the big underground AT&T vault (the size of a shipping container, air conditioned, and full of racks of gear) out at the street. But there are no cellular antennas at that location; it's all wires and fiber.

How to steal car:
1. Guess username and password.
2. Log in to "https://portal.vn.teslamotors.com".
3. Send GET to "https://portal.vn.teslamotors.com/vehicles" to get list of vehicle IDs for that owner.
4. Send GET to "https://portal.vn.teslamotors.com/vehicles/{id}/command/drive_state" to get vehicle latitude and longitude.
5. Send GET to "https://portal.vn.teslamotors/vehicles//vehicles/{id}/command/door_unlock" to unlock doors.
6. Get in car and plug laptop into onboard Ethernet, where car internals are exposed, unencrypted.
...

And those guys think they're going to do automatic driving. Right.

Well, yes. I haven't seen any photo shops lately. "1 Hour Photo" is dead. Kinkos has photo printers, and so do the local CVS and Walgreens, but they're not used much. Nobody has an in-store film processor any more. Palo Alto still has Keeble and Shugat, a high end photo equipment store with pro darkroom services. Redwood City has some wedding-photographer types and some commercial printers. That's about it.