Interesting article, however I would say that five lines of C++ code per neuron is pretty optimistic considering the amount of work going into modeling a neuron in the blue brain project; http://seedmagazine.com/designseries/henry-markram.html
Also I remember reading in Code Complete that the space-shuttle software had zero defects per 500,000 lines of code by combining formal development methods, peer reviews, and statistical testing. Not really sured how they 'proved' there were zero defects, but I'm sure you could get the number far lower than 1 per 100 lines.
What makes it harder to startup in the UK versus the US? Not much, maybe the higher cost of living/higher legal fees etc. However, I agree that making a successful startup in the UK is a far harder, and it's probably due in part to that lack of an identifiable community.
There just doesn't seem to be the same depth of startup culture that exists in the US; the UK has no Silicon Valley and the online situation just reflects this. I think that's because we don't have a long history of really successful Internet startups.
The European VC scene does seem to be a little bit of a cargo cult version of the US model. The UK YCombinator doesn't exist, because there was no UK Yahoo! to sell the UK Viaweb to. As a consequence of this today's UK startup community is shepherded by individuals and companies with little Internet startup experience of their own.
It's kind of like having parents who were never themselves children.
As others have suggested on here, we could certainly build the software to create a place for UK startups to hangout. To go further and create something that makes starting up as easy in the UK as in Silicon Valley would take far more resources. Although probably not as much as you would think, as Paul Graham himself pointed out; http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html
It would also be cool if AT&T had some kind of VoIP/mesh software for the iPhone. That would allow them to benefit from the mass assembly of their customers, and maybe even reduce their infrastructure requirements for the event (rather than increase them).
Also I remember reading in Code Complete that the space-shuttle software had zero defects per 500,000 lines of code by combining formal development methods, peer reviews, and statistical testing. Not really sured how they 'proved' there were zero defects, but I'm sure you could get the number far lower than 1 per 100 lines.