Some conferences are good work material. Some of them are an excuse to have the people you'd like to talk to all show up at the bar where the important conversations happen. (Back during the 80s, a surprising number of Unix-related companies started as conversations at the bar at Usenix conventions.) And some conferences are of course opportunities for networking, i.e. for finding your next job, so they might be "work" related, just not for your current employer.

Good luck to Branson - I hope he actually gets this off the ground, or at least makes major advances in practical rocket design while he's trying.

But the last few projects like this - Teledesic, Iridium, a couple of other important ones I forget - all ran into problems with markets, with costs, with technology, and with government regulation (both censorship and spectrum-control.) One of the cool things about satellite phones and data was that you could access them from anywhere in the world, even places without much infrastructure, but the problem was that they cost a lot more than terrestrial infrastructure in densely populated areas (so you couldn't make much money where there were lots of people), and sparsely populated areas are mostly poor farmers (so you couldn't make much money there), so what you really had was a niche market that cost you billions in upfront infrastructure. It's also hard to get high bandwidth from solutions like this (though lots of applications don't need to be that fast.)

Governments were also a problem, because many of them didn't want unregulated speech, not subject to wiretap, competing with monopoly or ex-monopoly local telecom providers. Remember when Blackberry was only allowed to sell their phones in India if they provided a nexus for wiretapping?

There have also been half a dozen announcements over the last decade or two about balloon-based projects, with blimps or weather balloons or tethered balloons or whatever providing low-altitude radio towers, which can deliver a lot more bandwidth (because they're close and can carry a lot more power), but somehow none of them ever turn into reality. (Good luck to Google and Facebook on those.)

Cruz was born in Canada, his mother was American, his father was Cuban. Obama was born in Hawaii, his mother was American, his father was Kenyan.

Cruz's father only became a US citizen a few years ago, and Ted was at least talking about giving up his Canadian citizenship because of all the right-wing ranters, though I'm not sure he followed through.

"Actually, I was born in Canada, I just *work* in outer space."

It's not ill-gotten data at all. Uber is a database service - you tell it where you are and where you want to go, and they charge you for the trip, and they know when your request was made, when you were picked up, and when you were dropped off.

All perfectly reasonable, by itself - it's what they do with the data that's sensitive, and how well they anonymize it before giving it to governments. Zip Code is a reasonable granularity for most purposes (assuming it's 5-digit ZIPs and not 9-digit); hope they'll anonymize the times as well (e.g. rounding to the nearest hour.)

One of the real values of Euclid's Elements is the insistence on proof of everything, which is part of what differentiates it from much of Classical Greek "science"; assertions like Aristotle's claim that heavy objects fall faster than light ones weren't good enough. And it's not like the Pythagoreans weren't mystics either; there's a story that one of their deep dark secrets was the irrationality of sqrt(2), which really annoyed them because it showed that their mathematically perfect universe wasn't.

Knowing that a 3-4-5 triangle has a right angle isn't the same as being able to prove it, or as knowing the general principle behind why it's true. It's the kind of thing you can find by trial and error, and that (both the successful and unsuccessful trials) may be a starting place for reasoning about the general principles.

Sure, the Hindu nationalist politician the other day who brought up the issue deserves your criticism, claiming that Indian mystics were flying to other planets centuries before the West was.

But the Indian mathematician who won the Fields Medal, the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize is the person were talking about today, and he gave a good discussion about what different aspects of the theorem were invented where and when. It was relatively short and sound-bitey, and there's a lot of history we really don't know about how much communication there was between different regions (so for instance, did Pythagoras and Euclid learn about it from people who'd traveled to India, such as Alexander the Great's armies or random merchants or traveling scholars? Or did they base their work on what the Egyptians had done?) There's also a lot we don't know about what was developed in each region, because only bits of it survived into the historical record. It's not like Pythagoras was the first person in the West to see a triangle; his original work was a follow-on to already known things that he'd learned.

Science does work that way, after all - we need to keep communication as open as possible so people can benefit from it.

I'll give the Indian politician the amount of credit it was due, along with mystical spacecraft flying to other planets and such. But this article by a guy who won the bloody Fields Medal not only deserves a lot more credibility before reading it, but also after - he talks about the discoveries of various parts of the idea in different parts of the world. And Indian and Arab mathematicians did contribute a huge amount to culture and civilization; you can't even claim they made zero contributions without using the zero they contributed,

You don't need the Pythagorean Theorem to construct a right angle. You don't even need the theorem to know that a 3-4-5 triangle has a right angle. It's a nice explanation of why those proportions get you a right angle, but that's a different issue; once you know you want a right angle, and a triangle with integer-proportion sides so you can easily reproduce it, trial and error will get you there. Furthermore, the classical geometric proof doesn't automatically give you integer solutions; Diophantine equations were Diophantus's trick, not Pythagoras's.

5 postdocs per research position is great, compared to the number of potential candidates per tenure-track professor position. Getting rid of people at the postdoc stage means they're not stringing them along pretending there's an upward career track in academia, and means they'll be less tempted to take an adjunct job while waiting for the real thing. (And yes, it sucks.)

You can do a lot of basic testing with cheap X10 stuff, then if you decide it's not a waste of time, go find something better. I played with X10 stuff a decade or so ago, and while it was pretty easy, I found that my home didn't have much that benefited from automation. (A previous place I lived had a hot tub that took an hour to heat up, and it would have been useful to be able to fire that up remotely. But that was gas-powered, and the landlord owned it, plus that was back in the days that it would have been a telephone relay.)

Or maybe the Internet doesn't browse at all.

Ok, I do live a couple of miles from the Googleplex; YMMV. But the things drive by my block all the time :-)

I doubt I'll ever buy one, but I'll be very interested to see when Google thinks it's time for their robocars to compete with Uber, or in general, for Transportation As A Service to supplant individually owned cars for day-to-day transportation needs.

If it bought meth or Nigerian Herbal Fake Viagra and let you use it, then yes. (Bad robot!)

If it bought cannabis or some other safe but politically incorrect substance, then it might have violated the Second Law, depending on whether Swiss law commands robots and other non-humans not to buy them, or only humans. (Also, if it bought cannabis and let you drive under the influence, that'd be a First Law problem, but any robot smart enough to buy dope online is smart enough to emulate an Uber app and call for a ride.)

Under US law, property that commits crimes or torts (such as a car used to buy drugs or a dog that bites people) is subject to civil or criminal forfeiture, so your dope-buying robot might be subject to arrest, and might end up as a slave of the US government, buying dope for them instead of you, but I assume Swiss law isn't quite that silly.