The big problem with Massive Open Online Courses is that, in most cases, the content is recycled lectures with no quality control. Stanford's machine learning course is mostly watching Andrew Ng at a blackboard, with bad handwriting. I watched a Khan Academy course on moments of inertia, and it was full of basic errors - clockwise and counterclockwise reversed, no distinction between a free body and a pinned one - errors likely to confuse anybody new to the subject.

Where's the post-production? Where's the production value? Where's the checking and Q/A? Of course students are dropping out and failing. The product quality sucks.

We have all this compute power and aren't using it to help with the process. Most of these "courses" are just streaming video with some textual material to go with it. We're not seeing systems where users solve problems and, when they get the wrong answer, the system tries to figure out what they did wrong and coach them. The Plato system did that in the 1960s. There have been systems for teaching programming which did that. But no, we just have lectures and texts.

if you want to see how to train people, look at the US military. The military has to train huge numbers of not-super-bright people in complex technical skills, and they've been doing it for decades with good success. Their approach isn't cheap; there are lots of visual aids, simulators, and setups for practicing skills. "Tell, then show, then do" is the mantra of military training.

More significant events:

• Hon Hai Precision Industries, parent of Foxconn, has installed the first 20,000 of the "million robot army" they plan to use in their factories. (Hon Hai makes the iPhone. Apple just does the design, marketing, and some of the software. Hon Hai also makes Sony's PlayStation 3, the Nintendo Wii, Amazon's Kindle Fire, and lots of other stuff.)
• Amazon bought Kiva Robotics. All those new warehouses Amazon is building will have many robots and few people. Jim Bezos has another robotics company working robots to replace the remaining people.
• Most of the high-end car makers have demonstrated at least semi-automatic driving. Cadillac, BMW, Volkswagen, Mercedes, Nissan, and even Ford have demos. Tesla is still just talk.
• The Baxter robot, from iRobot, may bring robotics to short-run production. Cost is low, and it's supposed to be easy to teach.

I just read the article. I'm not impressed.

First, the author is trying to make his case look good by framing the issue in terms of "open robots". The paper could equally well be titled "Let's Legalize Killer Robots!". What he wants to to is provide legal immunity for manufacturers against harm caused by their robots. His justification for this is a law Congress passed, at the urging of the pro-gun crowd, to immunize manufacturers against suits by people injured by their guns. Even that immunity is quite limited - if a criminal shoots you, you can't sue the manufacturer. But if your gun blows up when fired, you can.

Second, robotics is open now. You can buy lots of devices you can program. At the hobbyist level, there are companies like Lynxmotion. Most of the hobbyist robots tend to be on the wimpy side, but you can buy industrial robot arms if you want.

Third, the main reason consumer robotics hasn't taken off is because the devices don't work very well. None of the robotic vacuums are very good vacuum cleaners. Even the expensive Willow Robotics robot the article mentions isn't capable of doing very much. Progress is being made, but slowly.

I suspect this guy saw the DARPA robotics challenge video (probably the jazzed-up edited version for popular consumption, not the raw videos of painfully slow teleoperation) and started pontificating.

They've built a big R/C car. All they did was put R/C servos on steering and throttle. (They don't show how they actuated the brakes.) Running this through WiFi and an iPad instead of just using a regular R/C transmitter adds lag.

Their setup looks dangerously flaky. They have an R/C servo on the throttle, with nothing to force a closed throttle on failure.

Google has managed to come up with something even more intrusive than this classic evil scheme from The Phone Company.

Plugging something into a USB port is only effective as an attack if autorun is turned on in Windows. You can turn it off for all pluggable devices. A file system device is still recognized as having a file system, but something has to go to the device and get a file before anything happens.

Running Windows on an ATM is lame, but common. Running a desktop version of windows, instead of Windows Embedded (which allows removing all the stuff that shouldn't be there) is just stupid.

It burned up before it hit the ground, so it probably wasn't anything very big or very solid. Ice or rock, probably. Yawn.

Some space junk does make it all the way down. Titanium or stainless steel pressure tanks often make it relatively intact. Less solid stuff rarely does.

Maybe we just need a Android app that lets you run Windows applications. You know, for those times you need to run some ancient CRM app from the corporate network on your tablet. That's probably more useful than the other way round.

Fairly obvious statement, but one some newer programmers don't know. Koenig is talking about white-box testing, which is well understood.

It's not that Facebook is complicated. It's that most of the new features involve either advertising or collecting data about you. They have value for Facebook, not the user. Facebook is pulling a Myspace. Worse, they're doing it in the phone era, where ads are more annoying due to the limited screen real estate.

Snapchat is still in the "no ads, no revenue" phase, when it's fun to use. Originally, Google didn't have ads. Originally, Facebook didn't have ads. Until recently, Twitter did not have ads. Once the ads appear, the downward spiral begins.

It would be amusing, and perhaps useful, to create a social network system that looks to the user like Twitter/Snapchat/WhatsApp, but uses XMPP/email/IRC/SMS for transport and doesn't need servers of its own. Sell the app once for $5 or so. No ads. Phone providers usually give you a mail account and an SMS number. That's all you really need. WhatsApp comes close, but they have servers and an overreaching EULA, like everybody else. The trick is to make it spam-free, which probably means you have a friends list and only they, and maybe friends once removed, can reach you.

Building cinder-block walls around transformers in the transmission power grid might not be a bad idea. Cheap, and if concrete-filled, will stop most ammo. After a decade of anti-terrorism hype, it's surprising this hasn't been done yet. Most anti-terrorism studies of electric power grids mention transformers in the transmission system as a vulnerable point. It's not necessary to heavily protect the whole switchyard. Switchgear is easier and cheaper to replace than transformers, and less vulnerable. The transformers occupy only a small fraction of substation area.

Transformer substations are something that people, even in the utility industry, don't think about much. They're very reliable, need little attention, and are usually unmanned. So they tend to be ignored unless there's a problem.

It's embarrassing that PG&E has such poor surveillance of a major substation. The video, grainy analog black and white with slow VHS-type artifacts, means they haven't upgraded since the 1980s or 1990s. It's not like color HD cameras are expensive any more.

Probably. In the entire history of the Federal prison system, only about 10 people have escaped and were not eventually caught.

He'd already served 3/4 of a 4-year sentence. Less than a year to go.

That was an important design consideration with the Honeywell Round. The outer plastic ring was originally available in many colors, back when Making Everything Match was considered very important in home decorating. It's still available ($26.98 at Home Depot for the heat-only model), only in beige. But you can remove the plastic ring and paint it to match the wall if you like.

Honeywell has a touch-screen, WiFi, Android/IOS enabled thermostat which also measures humidity and can decide when to run in fan-only mode and save energy. True to their color history, Honeywell lets you change the touch-screen's background color to match your decor.

The Nest isn't a bad product, but it is overhyped for what it does.

The "old fashioned thermostat" shown is the famous Honeywell Round, usually credited to Henry Dreyfuss. It's one of the iconic objects of 20th century industrial design. The Nest thermostat copies that design. That's it's big selling point. There are other thermostats with Internet connections.

All it does is turn the HVAC on and off. It's not for use with systems where outside air intake is controllable with a damper or fan. It doesn't control fans separately from heating and cooling. It doesn't sense CO2 and humidity, and increase the air change rate when more people are present. (That last feature is a huge win for classrooms, conference rooms, and hotel function rooms.) Newer commercial building systems do all that. The Nest could have brought that technology to the home. But it didn't. It mostly just looks cool, and performs like other semi-intelligent thermostats.

Early cars did have all sorts of control schemes. Some had steering tillers instead of wheels. There were throttle levers on the steering column on many vehicles. A Model T Ford has three pedals, two of which control the transmission. By the 1940s, things had settled down into something close to the current arrangement, but automatic transmission quadrants were not standardized until Congress stepped in. (GM had P-N-D-S-L-R, Ford and Chrysler had P-R-N-D-S-L). Standardization occured long after any relevant patents would have run out.