Whatever happened to that "startup house" in Kansas City? Much the same idea. Google PR made a big deal about how a 1GB network connection made it possible for a house in KC to do big-time development.

There are already a few places like this in the SF Bay Area. They're mostly sweatshops for producing appcrap. Now if the Willow Garage guy was doing robotics again, it might be interesting. But Willow Garage robotics tanked, and the people involved mostly went off to a "telepresence" startup which sells a Segway-like teleoperator with a camera and screen. It's controlled from an app, of course.

The guy who made that mistake realized the next morning he'd made a serious design error. But by then, he writes, he already had three users. Really.

No, it's not, according to the USPTO. It passed their examination for similarity within classification. A key point is that Twitter did not have an image service at the time the Twitpic application was filed. So, under trademark rules, Twitter was in a different business. Twitter has filed an opposition, and the schedule for a trial before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board was set.

Twitter was afraid that Twitpic might win.

Smolin is worth reading, even if you don't agree with him. One of his comments is "Smart people should not program". He wants physicists to push the programming work down to lower-level people.

His big problem with physics is mostly with string theory. String theory is an elegant mathematical description of how physics might work. It doesn't make any predictions that are experimentally testable, at least not without orders of magnitude more accelerator power than currently available. String theory may be just an amusing mathematical exercise. We don't know. Smolin's complaint is that string theory ate physics - for a while, you had to be a string theorist to have a career in theoretical physics.

I need to read more about this. At first glance, it's kind of like BitTorrent, but at a lower level in the protocol stack. Or like Universal Resource Identifiers (remember those?) at a higher level. The general idea seems to be to make cacheing easier at the expense of making everything else more complex.

This story is from the Epoch Times, the poltiical paper of the Falun Gong movement. Anything there that's not political is filler to make it look like a real newspaper. Probably not a good source for programming wisdom.

Been there, done that, 30 years ago.

Every Windows driver with WHDL certification has passed the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier, which is a proof of correctness checker. Passing means that the driver won't blow away the rest of the OS with a bad pointer, subscript error, or other fatal error. Since Microsoft started requring this in Windows 7, Windows OS crashes have been way down.

About 5% of verifications either require too much time or too much memory. Any formally undecidable program would hit one of those limits. If it's that hard to tell if a driver has a bug, they assume the driver has a bug.

So there. Solved problem in practice.

They mention Cadillac's self-driving car, recently demonstrated to lawmakers in Washington. Cadillac is confident enough now to let members of Congress ride in the thing as it drives from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon in traffic. That's impressive. There's video, but it's all chopped into short pieces for short attention span TV viewers. I'd like to see an uncut half hour of automatic driving in traffic.

The problem here is that the press reports are just rehashes of what the cops are putting out. Somebody should find this guy and interview him. He may be in hiding for reasons of his own.

His book is self-published on Amazon. It's been out since 2011, and you can read a sample there. This guy is not the next Steven King. A typical sentence: "As Zea approaches her partner she cannot restrain herself from hyperventilating as she peers at the black embossed letters on the translucent glass sign above the entrance to the central atrium".

Today, the Los Angeles Times quotes cops as saying "Everybody knew about the book in 2012", and that this is more about a four-page letter he recently sent to officials in Dorchester County, containing "complaints of alleged harassment and an alleged possible crime". There may be more clarity over the next few days, now that the story is getting attention.

In Israel, it's very hard to leave. There are extensive Government benefits for ultra-orthodox, including subsidized housing, pay for religious study, and unlimited draft deferments. This is on top of the heavy social pressure, the lack of marketable skills, and the language barrier (the ultra-orthodox in Israel speak Yiddish, not Hebrew.)

Small drones don't have much inertia. They can be easily flipped by a small local wind gust. This is a big problem for drones that operate close to buildings, where there are eddies and turbulence as air hits the building. Pass the corner of a building and the wind situation may be completely different.

Very smart and aggressive stability control systems are able to overcome this. See this drone from PSI Tactical, which weighs about 0.5Kg and is supposed to be able to operate in winds up to 30MPH.

Battery storage for bulk power has been talked up for years. Mostly by the wind industry. With solar power, you get peak power and peak air conditioning load around the same time. Wind varies about 4:1 over 24 hours, even when averaged across big areas (California or the eastern seaboard). So the wind guys desperately need to store power generated at 4AM, when it's nearly worthless, so they can resell at 2PM. When the wind farm companies start installing batteries at their own expense, this will be a real technology.

With the US glut of natural gas, this isn't needed right now. Natural gas peaking plants aren't all that expensive to build, and make money even if they only run for maybe 6 hours a day. That covers most peak needs.

There are other ways to store energy. Some of the dams of the California Water Project have reversible turbines, which can run either as pumps or generators. They pump water uphill at night, when power is cheap, and let it down during the afternoon to generate power. Since the dams and pumps are needed for water handling anyway, this adds little cost.

A few years ago, those Google NFC payment terminals were all over Silicon Valley. Nobody used them. Newer credit card terminals show no sign of supporting them, although some apparently have the hardware inside for it.

Another problem is that if the technology just requires the phone's presence, not interaction on the phone, it's insecure. "Near field communication" is only supposed to be up to 20cm, but a 2013 paper at Black Hat demonstrated connectivity at 100cm, which is good enough for crime. If it does require interaction on the phone, the user has to activate the phone, navigate to some app, and deal with the app. This is slower than swiping a credit card.

It's easier to do than card-reader skimmers.

Many ultra-orthodox rabbis who demand their followers not use uncensored smartphones or uncensored internet access. In 2012, a big anti-Internet rally for ultra-orthodox Jews was held in New York. "The siren song of the Internet entices us! It brings out the worst of us!" The event was streamed live and is summarized on YouTube.

There are ultra-orthodox ISPs with filtering. The filtering is very stringent, based on a rabbi-approved whitelist. "That's all you get, and nothing else."

There are kosher cell phones. "Kosher Phone has no camera, no Bluetooth capabilities, no memory card slot and cannot be connected to a computer."

That's in the US. In Israel, kosher cell phones are so locked down that only approved numbers can be called. Even rape crisis centers are blocked.

Right. NASA also still has way too many "centers". Ames (except for the big wind tunnel) and Glenn (except for the test facilities at Sandusky) ought to go.