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.

In the ever-growing world of open source projects that are just wrong... comes iPod Linux, a microLinux port to the iPod. Apparently, they now have it booting and playing sound...

An article at Silicon Valley.com includes a good-sized list of evidence for prior art against the frame and link patents that SBC has filed.

The long-rumored demise of dial-up internet may well be underway. According to an article in the New York Times, the big three ISPs (AOL, EarthLink, and MSN) are all reporting slowing subscriber growth or loss of subscribers in the most recent reporting periods. Meanwhile, broadband operators are seeing increases in …

CNet is reporting that the Pentagon and WiFi technology companies have reached an agreement intended to protect military radar frequencies while expanding the availability of WiFi. This agreement will dovetail into the proposed additions to the 5GHz spectrum. Those familiar with the spectrum will note that the 5GHz spectrum (used …

After the tragedy involving the Space Shuttle Columbia on Saturday, NASA has begun an investigation into the incident. As a sign of the times, they are taking advantage of the internet and digital photography, audio and video to quickly accept evidence from the public. On their Shuttle Columbia page there …

In this morning's L.A. Times there is an editorial by Janis Ian about the RIAA and their counter-productive attempts to "help" musicians by thwarting MP3 downloads. The 40-year veteran of the recording industry indicates that merchandise sales rose over 300% after recordings were made available in MP3 format online …

Quoting from the action alert at the EFF, "Representatives Rick Boucher and John Doolittle recently re-introduced the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act (DMCRA, H.R. 107), which would enact labeling requirements for usage-impaired "copy- protected" compact discs, as well as several amendments to 1998's infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA …

I didn't quite know whether to put this in Technology or Privacy, since it's a bit of both.USA Today has an interesting article on the upcoming use of RFIDs in consumer goods for inventory tracking, price tagging, and other uses. It correctly raises the privacy concerns as well. Of …

CNet has an article on Microsoft's announced DRM platform toolkit for media companies and producers. The Data Session Toolkit (so-named because the intention is to store the DRM'd content in a second "session" of the CD with Data only flags) contains licenses for Microsoft's Media Player format and allows labels …

An excellent, in-depth article appears at the Real World Tech web site. If you want to see a comparison of the different technologies at play in the world of 64-bit computing, this is a great resource. There's information here about MIPS, Alpha, Sparc, Itanium, PowerPC, and PA- RISC.

Not surprisingly, after last week's worm, security experts are faulting Microsoft for not providing enough active security measures and quality in their software. Over the past few years, Microsoft has increased their public statements about security, but most of them have focused on how users can cope with security problems …

I'd encourage everyone to read this article on Salon.com. The piece is from a long-time record executive (John Snyder is president of Artist House Records), who has done a superb job of putting together a coherent piece on copyright, file sharing, and the music industry's fight to keep themselves …

Surprisingly, despite some lackluster reviews, The Recruit is a good movie for the post- cold-war spy action drama genre. Mike, Dmitry and I went to the movie on Saturday so as to avoid paying full price for a movie with such inadequate reviews. Since I hadn't been to the theater …

At this point, doubtless everyone has heard about contact with the Space Shuttle being lost this morning about 8am CST. The presumption is that the Shuttle broke up on reentry and that all hands were lost. Personally, I have very vivid memories of the Challenger accident back in 1986. I …

I found an article this morning indicating this is possible. I haven't tried it, but I do have one of the aforementioned cards, so once I have a second 802.11g card, I may give it a shot.

Sometimes you just never know who's going to come to your rescue. In the case of privacy on the Internet, Verizon is starting the year off as benefactor to the world by fighting the RIAA in court over the identity of an internet user. Of course, it's not all quite …

According to this article from the Australian paper the Sydney Morning Herald, there is already evidence of DVDs starting degrade within a mere 2 years of their original manufacture date. Although the evidence is so far a bit sparse, indicators are that between 1 and 10% of all DVDs may …