It's really valuable for any new product or service to reach the hyper-geek audience, who are particularly influential. And for them, the open API is a sign of good faith, a sign that your photos and your data are not going to be locked up in Flickr--even though we don't currently offer a feature to download your photos to your own computer (we will), you could develop one.

It makes a difference for us as a business that other businesses are interested in working with us because they can tell up front how much work it's going to be. Basically third-party apps fall into one of two categories, useful or cool, and some things are both. Useful would include uploaders for a bunch of different platforms, a screensaver that pulls in your contacts' most recent photos, and an application called 1001 for OS X that grabs the most recent photos from your contacts or specified tags, and it pulls from them like an RSS reader. And then there's a bunch of applications that are just cool, like one that takes photos tagged with different colors and arranges them into the shape of a rainbow.

It makes a difference for us as a business that other businesses are interested in working with us because they can tell up front how much work it's going to be. They can have their engineers look at the API and say, "This is what I want to do, how long do you think it's going to take?"

It's shortly before dawn, and the handful of early-morning commuters on the fog-shrouded suburban highway don't see the deer meandering across the road. Luckily, though, their cars see the animal. In an instant, the closest vehicle quickly applies its brakes and turns its wheels, steering around an otherwise imminent collision. It then sends warning messages to oncoming traffic, as well as to the vehicles behind it, which dutifully apply their brakes and slow to a near-crawl as the deer passes.

None of the drivers, however, is disturbed by the near miss. A few are too engaged in their morning newspapers; a couple more are snoozing for a few more minutes before arriving at the office. All are blissfully unaware of the incident because they, the "drivers," aren't driving; they're being chauffeured by their self-navigating vehicles.

Sound impossible? Many automotive experts don't think so. The technological pieces needed for a self-navigating vehicle are already falling into place, they say. But it will take at least two to three decades before those pieces will be assembled into a car that drives itself.

"Dutch research institute TNO has unveiled what it believes is the largest digital photograph in the world. The image contains 2.5 gigapixels or 7.5 gigabyte worth of data. It is composed of 600 single images shot by a computer-controlled pan-tilt unit in 7 second intervals. Afterwards, all photos where stiched together ... using the capacity of 5 high-end pc's in about 24 hours time."

"ENUM 164" (also know as enum and e164) is a method that stores telephone numbers within the Internet's DNS. E164.org allows Voice over IP systems, such as Asterisk and SER (SIP Express Router), to place and receive telephone calls over the Internet, without using your local telephone line.

This allows businesses and people to make and receive telephone calls over the Internet and Internet style networks. Unlike other systems, your calls can be switched directly to the person you are calling instead of passing all of your calls through a single service provider. This means that congestion from busy services is reduced, providing a more reliable voice connection.

This system only requires a hostname to route phone numbers to, you can move around by simply updating a dynamic DNS service!

E164.org provides both "real" telephone and "free" number mapping to any Voice over IP address of your choosing. Presently we support multiple entries and multiple types, including IAX2, SIP, H323, TEL, HTTP, FTP, MAILTO, LDAP, ICQ, IRC, YAHOO, AIM and MSN! So if you applications can implement a DNS lookup on phone numbers you can effectively send faxes by email, email by phone number, find your friends on ICQ by their phone number, the possibilities are endless!"

Molecular nanotechnology (MNT) manufacturing means the ability to build devices, machines, and eventually whole products with every atom in its specified place. MNT is coming soon—almost certainly within 20 years, and perhaps in less than a decade. When it arrives, it will come quickly. Molecular manufacturing can be built into a self-contained, tabletop factory that makes cheap products efficiently at molecular scale. The time from the first assembler to a flood of powerful and complex products may be less than a year. The potential benefits of such a technology are immense. Unfortunately, the risks are also immense.

Even a primitive diamond-building nanofactory can create products vastly more powerful than today's versions. Electrical power can be converted to motion, and vice-versa, with one-tenth the power loss and about 108 (100,000,000) times more compactly. Computers can be a billion times smaller and use a million times less power. Materials can be about 100 times stronger than steel. This means that most human-scale products would consist almost entirely of empty space, reducing material requirements and cost. Most of the rest of the product would be structural, easy to design. Even the simplest products could be software-controlled at no extra hardware cost. Manufacturing of prototypes would be quite rapid—a few minutes to a few hours. Because manufacturing and prototyping are the same process, a successful prototype design could immediately be distributed for widespread use. A designer working with a few basic predesigned blocks could design, build, and test a simple product in less than a day. Products with complex interfaces to humans or to their surroundings—information appliances, automobiles, aerospace hardware, medical devices—would be limited by the time required to develop their software and test their functionality. However, in some fields the high time and money cost of manufacture slows other parts of the development cycle; this effect would disappear. An explosion of new, useful products could rapidly follow the widespread availability of a nanofactory.

[T]ake the number of servers that Google operates. The only figure the company will admit to is '10,000+'. They also claim to have '4+ petabytes' of disk storage, and have let slip that each server is fitted with two 80 gigabyte hard drives. Now a petabyte is 10 to the power of 15 bytes, so if Google had only 10,000 servers, that would come to 400 Gb per server. So again the numbers don't add up. I could go on, but you will get the point. But what it all comes down to is this: Google has far more computing power at its disposal than it is letting on. In fact, there have been rumours in the business for months that the Google cluster actually has 100,000 servers - which if true means that the company's technical competence beggars belief.

Now the interesting question raised by all this is: why the reticence? Most companies lose no opportunity to brag about their technology. (Think of all those Oracle ads.) Is this an example of Google behaving ultra-responsibly - being careful not to hype its prospects prior to an IPO? Or is it a sign of a deeper commercial strategy? The latter is what Garfinkel suspects. 'After all,' 'he says, 'if Google publicised how many pages it has indexed and how many computers it has in its data centres around the world, search competitors such as Yahoo!, Teoma, and Mooter would know how much capital they had to raise in order to have a hope of displacing the king at the top of the hill.' If truth is the first casualty of war, openness is the first casualty of going public.

The Shmoo first appeared in the strip in August 1948. According to Shmoo legend, the lovable creature laid eggs, gave milk and died of sheer esctasy when looked at with hunger. The Shmoo loved to be eaten and tasted like any food desired. Anything that delighted people delighted a Shmoo. Fry a Shmoo and it came out chicken. Broil it and it came out steak. Shmoo eyes made terrific suspender buttons. The hide of the Shmoo if cut thin made fine leather and if cut thick made the best lumber. Shmoo whiskers made splendid toothpicks. The Shmoo satisfied all the world's wants. You could never run out of Shmoon (plural of Shmoo) because they multiplied at such an incredible rate. The Shmoo believed that the only way to happiness was to bring happiness to others. Li'l Abner discovered Shmoos when he ventured into the forbidden Valley of the Shmoon, against the frantic protestations of Ol' Man Mose. "Shmoos," he warned, "is the greatest menace to hoomanity th' world has evah known." "Thass becuz they is so bad, huh?" asked Li'l Abner. "No, stupid," answered Mose, hurling one of life's profoundest paradoxes at Li'l Abner. "It's because they're so good!"

Ironically, the lovable and selfless Shmoos ultimately brought misery to humankind because people with a limitless supply of self-sacrificing Shmoos stopped working and society broke down. Seen at first as a boon to humankind, they were ultimately hunted down and exterminated to preserve the status quo.

New software can figure out where you are positioned based on analyzing a photo in near real time. Simply send it a photo from your camera-phone and the software will match the image to a database of locations -- such as buildings in a city -- and give you back your coordinates. The software is potentially more accurate than GPS.

Stan Wagon, a mathematician at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., has a bicycle with square wheels. It's a weird contraption, but he can ride it perfectly smoothly. His secret is the shape of the road over which the wheels roll.

A square wheel can roll smoothly, keeping the axle moving in a straight line and at a constant velocity, if it travels over evenly spaced bumps of just the right shape. This special shape is called an inverted catenary.

A catenary is the curve describing a rope or chain hanging loosely between two supports. At first glance, it looks like a parabola. In fact, it corresponds to the graph of a function called the hyperbolic cosine. Turning the curve upside down gives you an inverted catenary -- just like each bump of Wagon's road.

"You're in Flemming's entrance hall. Flemming is traveling in Transylvania right now. There's a blog here, and a mailbox, an SMS terminal, and a phone booth. There's a picture on the wall. There's a WIKI path going off to the right. There are three other visitors standing around looking bewildered. What do you want to do?"

"There are five phone messages for you, 52 new mail messages, 157 new postings in your aggregator. Your family went to the movies. It is 25 degrees. There are four computers there. On the wall you see a calendar and an address book."

"There are two ways that spreadsheets, as we know them, distort our thinking and lead to bad decisions. The first distortion is the use of point values and simple arithmetic instead of probability distributions and statistical measures. So far as I know, there's no off-the-shelf spreadsheet product—certainly none in common use—that provides for input of numbers as uncertain quantities, even though almost all of our decisions rest on forecasts or on speculations.

There are add-on products that incorporate uncertainty into spreadsheets, and many of them are quite good. Products of this kind that I've favorably reviewed over the years include DecisionTools Pro from Palisade and Crystal Ball Professional and CB Predictor from Decisioneering. It's not too hard to appreciate the difference between products that incorporate uncertainty and those that don't: On the one hand, you've got, "We predict a $1 million profit in the first year"; on the other, "The expected Year 1 profit is $1 million, but there's a 30 percent chance of losses for the first two years." These different statements will lead to quite different discussions."

"The subjects whose tools invited them to imagine alternative scenarios believed they were doing a better job—even though statistical measures of their results showed no improvement in the actual quality of the forecasts. Those subjects did, however, take longer to perform the task. Isn't that the worst nightmare of those who must justify IT's return on investment—spending extra money on a more time-consuming product that yields absolutely no measurable improvement?"