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 …

Thanks to Amanda for passing along the URL to this site that keeps a very thorough FAQ about the Columbia disaster.

An article1 in this week's Washington Post describes a situation in Wisconsin where a woman's ex-boyfriend stalked her using a GPS tracking device to watch her every move. Original link (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33715-2003Feb6.html) no longer available as of 2025-11-22. No reliable archive snapshot found …

An article on CNET is detailing some more "fun" with patents out there. This time, it is Acacia Media Technologies shaking down companies for the "process of transmitting compressed audio or video online". Once again, the thing that I find most disturbing about this is that the patent claims are …

In a disturbing post on Slashdot, the poster recounts a recent exchange with his new employers who seemed to think it was appropriate to ask for a full background check (including credit check) of all existing and new employees. Seems to me that this is another fine case of privacy …

An article on the BBC site describes experiments in New York and Britain to create messages that "linger in the air." Basically, the idea is that the system sends you an alert via SMS when you approach a location that has messages connected with it.

This one takes the cake... or is that pie. Never mind, you have to read this posting on Slashdot: Aaron Steele writes "Okay, I work at an Apple Authorized Retailer and we just had a lady come in to see if we could fix her PowerBook G4. She walks in …

Tom's Hardware now has a review of the new Intel Centino or Pentium-M technology. The new CPU & chipset architecture is actually a platform for building laptops and incorporates most of the functionality into its base feature set. It may not be the fastest, but Tom's says that Intel is off …

I don't know if it is true, but MacNN is reporting that Microsoft is trying to get together their own "switcher" advertising campaign. The article includes a snippet of an email message supposedly sent to users who have recently registered Microsoft products. The campaign is to be called "Sensible Solutions …

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 …

Despite the Challenger disaster this past weekend, NASA is continuing to move forward on some more nuclear propulsion research. According to an article on Wired, NASA is earmarking $3 Billion over the next few years to do research into creating a nuclear-powered electric engine to lift a package into orbit …

Microsoft appears to be having yet more fun with patches to their software. According to an article today on CNET, the software giant is release a new critical patch for Internet Explorer, right on he heels of pulling a patch for Windows NT, and the major patch fiasco that was …

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 …

If the IBM PowerPC 970 weren't enough reason, the fact that IBM is even thinking about, much less building a next generation chip should be enough to get Apple's attention. According to this article in InfoWorld, IBM is releasing preliminary information about the road map for the upcoming Power5 architecture …

Researchers at AT&T Research Labs have published a paper (PDF) about counting hosts behind NAT devices. The short version is that they take advantage of the poor use of monotonically increasing packet ID numbers in IP packets sent by different hosts to track the number of hosts that are …

In an interesting cross between "research" and marketing, you just have to wonder whether the folks at PC World really thought about their sources before quoting a report from Symantec as being "research" proving that despite the decrease in "cyber-attacks", the net is still a "dangerous" place because of the …

In the Constitution of the United States of America, we find the following statement that calls upon the Congress of the United States to be granted the power: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to …

When I was at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign", I took a large number of economics courses, spanning everything from macro and micro to 300-level ag. ec. courses. Perhaps our current President needs to pay some attention to my professors' claims that "free trade benefits everyone." Unfortunately, he …

According to the BBC, some recent political debate over Sexual Offences laws in the UK have been censored because of new anti- spam software that has been installed in systems at the Parliament there. The article raises concern over whether the new system is diverting otherwise-appropriate email because it may …

PC Magazine has an article comparing the two common high-speed desktop buses, USB 2.0 and FirewWire. Not surprising, they found that USB 2.0 seldom lives up to the 480Mbps that it advertises and that FirewWire is better for use with consumer electronics devices.