Differential GPS gets accuracy to up to 10 cm, which is just above 4 inches I think. It seems that it is possible to obtain even sub-millimeter accuracy from GPS, although I gather the techniques used aren't real-time, and as such unsuitable for mobile robotics. :( They work well enough for surveying though.

Well, at least Diaspora wasn't designed from the ground up to facilitate this sort of spying, and has as one of its design goals attempting to prevent such unwanted breaches of privacy. They may not always be successful, but such efforts I consider a fair sight better than Facebook, which was on the other hand designed from the ground up to convert its users' privacy into revenue.

Really, Freedombox? I'd never heard of that project before now, but I have most definitely heard of Professor Eben Moglen. I know him as the Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, providing legal assistance to non-profit Free/Open Source Software developers, including among its clients the FSF (Moglen worked on drafting the GPLv3 for one), Wine, BusyBox, and Plone among others. I do think that this is a much more significant thing to mention about him.

And yes, he is absolutely right about Facebook and modern social media. All of the things he's said are obvious to anyone.

Some years ago, Richard Stallman would have supported that idea. But now, with the changes in the world lately, he sings a rather different tune. There's that pesky distinction between source and object code to think about and the fact that the copyright licenses for Free Software are also used as a defense against software patents.

I suppose it's the same Jean-Louis Gassée? who used to work at Apple in the 1980s and created BeOS after that. It seems he got into the tech blogging world in between his work at that Silicon Valley VC firm he's in today.

Presumably they're talking about the Meissner Effect, since they're also talking about superconductors. Flux pinning is another phenomenon also related to the Meissner Effect. The Casimir Effect doesn't seem to have any relationship to the levitation mentioned (and the phenomenon doesn't seem to have had much in the way of applications outside of nanotechnology).

The one-dimensional division of left-right is not very informative. A better way of classifying political leanings would use a two-dimensional spectrum, with the two dimensions being economic liberalism and political liberalism, such as embodied here. On one axis we have economic liberalism, where on one side one would advocate complete state control of the economy, and on the other side would be a complete laissez faire free market. On the other axis would be political liberalism, where on one side would advocate authoritarian government, and on the other anarchism. Each of the four quadrants would thus cover command economy + authoritarianism (Marxism-Leninism, e.g. Stalin, Fidel Castro, etc.), free market + authoritarianism (Fascism, e.g. Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet), command economy + anarchism (Libertarian socialism/democratic socialism, e.g. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, etc.), and free market + anarchism (pure libertarianism, e.g. Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, etc.).

It's not like Microsoft gets really penalized for every patent suit that fails. From reading the article they managed to get one patent to stick, and that's all they need to collect royalties from whoever they sued. Sounds a lot like success to me. The only way that Microsoft or any other patent troll could really fail is if all their claims are thrown out.

Calibration is one thing, and actually seeing shit is something else. Maybe they just wanted to make calibration easy with a big easy target to calibrate against.

Well, from reading the article, I gather that it's because they might have needed something bigger because the resolution on their spy satellites is not that good. FTFA: "The calibration targets are larger than might have been expected, he said, suggesting that the satellite cameras they are being used to calibrate have surprisingly poor ground resolution."