According to an article on SFGate.com, California is selling off items confiscated at airports on eBay. You can look for their auctions by querying the handle CaliforniaGold2000 on eBay. According to the article, they've made over $16k selling a collection of mostly pen-knives.

According to a report today on The Wall Street Journal, Red Herring, the monthly mag that had become the standard bearer for the "New Economy", has been shuttered by it's parent company. The article (membership required), indicates that the March issue (on newsstands now, run out and get yours) will …

According to an article from Wired, California Governor Gray Davis is rethinking his position on Internet taxes. With the preponderance of tech-heavy industries in California that would be required to comply with new rules, the state is considered a bellwether for this contentious issue.

Regardless of how you stand on the prospect of war, the anti-war ranks have taken their opinion to the Capital's telecommunications infrastructure. According to a story in Wired, hundreds of thousands of calls and thousands of faxes jammed lines at the House and Senate yesterday.

Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood died last night. He was diagnosed in January with stomach cancer and is survived by two sons and his wife. Stories are available on most of the news outlets. Personally, I remember many happy hours watching Mr. Rogers and am heartened by …

According to an article on the BBC News site, recent changes in the rules for Formula 1 (the world's most popular motor sport) have participants upset about possible safety concerns related to rule changes for the 2003 season.

I was digging through the Herman Miller site looking for a new chair (try eBay), and ran across a link to a QuickTime movie entitled "The Official Chair of Office Hockey". You'll have to go to the Aeron page to check it out (in the right-hand column).

Professor David K. Levine of UCLA has posted drafts of chapters one and two of his new book The Case Against Intellectual Property, co-authored with Michele Boldrin. The first two chapters (in Acrobat format) are a good read about the problems and potential solutions to current-day intellectual property issues. Generally …

An article in The Daily Yomiuri (a Japanese newspaper) reports that a 21 year old man was arrested for attempting to sell a virtual house in the game Ultima Online that belonged to another player.

According to an article in BusinessWeek, the Canadian Copyright Board is looking into compensating labels for the theoretical loss of revenues that they propose are attributable to piracy. According to the article, it is looking at raising the current $.21 CD levy to $.59 (that's nearly 200%) and adding a …

Contrary to the belief of our fine Ukrainian friend, Coca-Cola is actually NOT as well thought of as Apple. Apple took the number 2 spot behind Google in a poll of international brands. Coca-cola came in third, 2 percentage points behind Apple. If you want to read on, the article …

The BBC is reporting in the following article that a 10m hole opened up yesterday swallowing 3 lawns (gardens by English standards). The apparent cause is the boring of a connecting tunnel to London from the Chunnel that was taking place 20m below the surface.

You may or may not have seen these "Harley Earl" Buick ads recently. If you haven't, basically the advertisements show the relatively nondescript, 1950's-dressed Harley Earl introducing himself and talking about how decadent his new car designs are. Being a young pup as I am, I just assumed Mr. Earl …

CNN is reporting in this story that a 20-year-old man who carjacked the van of a California Judo team has now been sentenced for his crime. This is clearly a case of choosing the wrong victim, because not only did he get a chance to spend 11 years in jail …

An article in InfoWorld states that the RIAA has once again been attacked by people who apparently don't agree with the organization.

After a few years of people talking about too much porn, surfing, and bad internet jokes in the workplace, an article in Business 2.0 draws attention to the possibility that monitoring and cracking down on personal internet access at work could be counterproductive. The piece also theorizes that an …

Wired magazine is reporting in an article about the findings of a group of researchers in New Zealand. It appears that they have actually found a case of what they call "eThrombosis", similar to the problem that is reported to occur on long airplane trips in which a blood clot …

Generally speaking, I'm not in the habit of getting in between the administration and Iraq. However, I was asked a question today that I needed to research in order to get to the bottom of, so I figured I'd put the results here. The short of it is that the …

According to an article from CNET, a number of online retailers (including Target, Marshal Fields, and others) will begin charging sales tax on orders filled after Feb 2, 2003. All of this action is part of an agreement created last year between 38 states and the District of Columbia to …

In what appears to be a trend this quarter, VMWare is announcing their first profit. According to an article on CNET's site, the company has announced that they grew their revenues by 100% and are now profitable. For those unfamiliar with the company, they manufacture software that allows running …