an open-source collection of integrated, but reusable apps for Django - While our initial development is focused around a demo Social Networking site, we are also working on number of editions tailored to Intranet-s, learning management (LMS?), Software Project Management and more. (more)

type of Nuclear Energy (more)

Stewart Brand summarizes a Dialogue between Peter Schwartz and Ralph Cavanagh on Nuclear Power. Cavanagh asked, "What about the storage of nuclear waste?" "We defined the problem wrong," Schwartz said. "Storage for thousands of years is not needed. The present storage on site in concrete casks is working, and the "waste" is available as a further energy source with later technology."... Schwartz asked Cavanagh about the large government subsidies (Subsidy) for Solar Power research while there have been none for nuclear (except Nuclear Fusion). Cavanagh said the subsidies were declining, and should. There should be more funding for R&D in biofuels and other alternatives (Alternative Energy), but the main role for government should be in setting emission standards and then let the private sector duke it out for the best solutions.

*Kenneth feels the weight coming down on him again. What he doesn’t understand just yet is that he will come to look back on these days as the uncomplicated ones, when his scary-smart son was into simple things, like rocket science. This is before Taylor Wilson would transform the family’s garage into a mysterious, glow-in-the-dark cache of rocks and metals and liquids with unimaginable powers. Before he would conceive, in a series of unlikely epiphanies, new ways to use neutrons to confront some of the biggest challenges of our time: cancer and nuclear terrorism. Before he would build a reactor that could hurl atoms together in a 500-million-degree plasma core—becoming, at 14, the youngest individual on Earth to achieve Nuclear Fusion. (more)

FON has 5 Million WiFi HotSpot-s around the world. Much of Fon’s growth can be attributed to strategic partnerships with companies like SFR, British Telecom, and Belgacom, all of whom have folded support for Fon’s network into their consumer-facing hardware.

aka Alternative Energy, Clean Tech

Villains - Content Management System, CRM, ERP (more)

Tyler Cowen Thin Book. (more)

I was reading about Elon Musk. Though he is only 35, Mr Musk has already made surprising progress toward the three modest goals he set for himself when at college: to transform the internet, make a breakthrough in Clean Energy and propel mankind towards inter-planetary travel. He arrived at Stanford University intending to do a doctorate on batteries for electric cars, but dropped out to jump on the internet bandwagon. He struck gold when he sold PayPal, the online payments firm, to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. (more)

Venkatesh Rao believes we will end up with a Steady State Economy whether we want to or not. (more)

Venessa Miemis gives a directory of "SuperheroSchool-s" or "Collaboratory" spaces (Work Community). I can see it as being an innovation hub and retreat center, wrapped in a creative learning culture. Just 90 minutes by train from NYC, a welcome change of scenery for Silicon Alley.

49 of 50 states have agreed to join the so-called Fore Closure Mortgage Settlement. Yves Smith gives 12 reasons to hate the deal.

An evaluation of which states are tech-friendly. (Um, actually, it's most tech-intense, which doesn't necessarily point at Red Tape/tax issues, though it may be a flag...) The NSF combed through the most recent Census data, which was collected in 2008, and classified industries as "high-tech" if they employed twice the average number of scientists, engineers, and technicians. It's a wide net that captures 45 sectors total, including heavy machinery manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, software design, and oil and gas extraction, just to give you a sense of the variety. So, we're not just talking about states full of Facebook app designers... On that score, Dela Ware, home to chemicals manufacturer Du Pont, leads the nation. As depicted on the map above, it's part of a mid-Atlantic tech-corridor, including Virginia, Mary Land and Washington DC, where science and engineering play an outsized role in the regional economy. (DC would have topped the rankings, but because it's not a state, and is such a different type of economy, I've omitted it.) And before you ask, no, government labs aren't included in the figures. Although having Uncle Sam around hasn't hurt its development into a tech mecha, the region now has a dense network of private firms. (more)

Are all Economic Stimulus packages just an attempt to continue Consumerism as usual? (more)

Mae Mo and Mob Lin are being merged into MeeGo.

John Gruber and others have gotten a preview of the next MacOs X called Mountain Lion. (more)

There's a pure-OpenSource LinuxOS Tablet being developed by Spark, based on MeeGo. If the tablet is, as Kjetil Kilhavn, a SAP consultant and KDE user, speculates, is built around the A9 Zenithink ZT-280 C71 tablet, it has a 7″ (16:9) screen size with 800 x 480 resolution. It also would have a 1.3 MPixels front camera, built-in microphone and stereo speakers. As for the software, on top of Mer, the Spark will use KDE Plasma Active for its user interface (UI). Plasma Active runs on the traditional Linux desktop stack, including the Linux kernel, QT, and KDE’s Plasma Framework. The UI uses Plasma Quick, a declarative markup language. This, in turn, is based on Qt Quick, an easy to use interface software development kit and framework. An alternative to Android.

Nassim Taleb on how attempts to use Public Policy to reduce volatility only increase the effects of Black Swan-s by reducing Resilience. Examples: (more)

Site collecting data on candidates for elected US office, like for the coming Presidential Election. (more)

I run a Private Wiki using PikiPiki on my MacOs X Lap Top. (Currently 1750 nodes, each a PlainText file with no file extension. Total 9MB (really 3MB plus file-block overhead).) (more)