Hooray! IT anthems and rockin' tech CEOs are back.
8:27:52 PM  #   your two cents []

Microchips weigh heavily on environment. The production of a microchip requires a hefty amount of materials, energy and water, according to a study. [CNET News.com]
8:15:31 PM  #   your two cents []

 Tree-huggers, unite! I've just learned on the news that my good friend and Green TD Eamon Ryan was one of three Greens that chained themselves to the 100+ year old plane trees down Dublin's main thoroughfare, O'Connell Street. In its infinite wisdom, Dublin Corporation has decided to chop down ALL the trees and replace them with smaller lime trees. Apparently the big old planes won't fit in with some trendoid landscape artiste's 'vision' of what the grand old street should look like. Dubliners are furious about this, going by the anger expressed on radio programmes in the past few days. May better heads prevail -- Dublin has few enough trees as it is, and old trees are even rarer, much less trees that had a front row seat to the 1916 Uprising and Pearse's reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the front of the General Post Office on O'Connell Street. So many of the old buildings of that time are gone -- let's at least keep the trees. By the way Eamon is very sound on tech and broadband issues...
5:40:45 PM  #   your two cents []

FTC: Where Spam Goes to Die. "The FTC now gets around 70,000 forwarded spams a day. Last year, they received about 40,000 pieces a day. Three years ago, that mailbox received about 4,000 missives daily, and in 1998 the entire year's take was fewer than 100 spams."  [Wired News] The FTC wants you to forward your spam to uce@ftc.gov -- complete with headers etc, so don't simply cut and paste.
11:53:33 AM  #   your two cents []

Ahhhh,  California. There's always something like this to reconfirm the wacky image of my much loved home state...
10:47:28 AM  #   your two cents []

Voting into the void. New touch-screen voting machines may look spiffy, but some experts say they can't be trusted. [Salon.com]
9:36:34 AM  #   your two cents []

From Dan Gillmor's column  in the San Jose Mercury News. This column needs to be sent to our decision makers in Ireland (and as a matter of fact, I think I'll fire up a few emails right... about... now...):

What would we lose by calling the telecom giants' bluff? Maybe a couple of years of rapid broadband deployment, though what they're deploying now -- DSL and cable modem connections -- runs at such a slow speed that it can only be called broadband if you stretch the definition. In South Korea and other places where deployment is going strong, speeds are much faster and prices much lower.

There's another party at this table, by the way. Local governments can and should be building their own fiber networks, as some already have done. Unsurprisingly, the phone companies have been lobbying state legislatures to forbid this practice. We need a federal law that explicitly allows municipalities to bypass the monopolists.

In Ireland, the Dept of Communications is trying to build out a fibre network connecting around 120 cities over the next few years. What do our duopoly telecom companies tell me? "There are plenty of networks already; the govt shouldn't waste its money on an independent network but should be helping us offer DSL and other services," they croon. Uh-huh. However the entire project remains under threat by a Finance Minister who frittered away five years of boomtime budget with little to show for it but tax cuts... and thinks the networks should be funded through public private partnerships, an approach to finance that has been resoundingly unsuccessful across Europe and in the US.

9:02:58 AM  #   your two cents []

I saw the tablet as a prototype out at Microsoft's Redmond  HQ last year. I thought it had great potential. But who knows what people will really want? Silicon Valley's Dream Tablet, From Microsoft. Microsoft hopes it has nailed down one of Silicon Valley's most cherished, if elusive, ideas: a notepad-size computer controlled by a pen. [New York Times: Technology] Meanwhile, HP offers a tablet with a detachable keyboard.
8:52:57 AM  #   your two cents []

Ralph Hodgson. "Some things have to be believed to be seen." [Quotes of the Day]
8:45:15 AM  #   your two cents []

Lily Tomlin. "Reality is nothing but a collective hunch." [Quotes of the Day]
8:44:56 AM  #   your two cents []

From Werblog: "John Markoff of the New York Times writes about Vivato, a smart antenna startup that claims it can extend WiFi to distances of 2,000 feat indoors and four miles outdoors. The exciting aspects of the technology are that it works with the established WiFi standard, and with a point-to-multipoint configuration serving several hundred users. If Vivato's antennas work as promised (always a big qualifier), they could greatly expand the utility of WiFi as a broadband access technology."

He also has this cool map of WiFi'd Manhattan (I don't know why, but I love these geeky network maps).

8:41:01 AM  #   your two cents []

Trying to Shift Shape of PC Screens. Researchers are trying to develop technologies that could put computers and large-format screens onto wafer-thin glass, or even plastic that can be rolled up. [New York Times: Technology]
8:37:57 AM  #   your two cents []

More NASA news from Cory Doctorow:

NASA seeks to debunk debunkers with new "yes-we-really-did-land-on-the-moon" minibook. Amid fresh media buzz over conspiracy theorist claims that Apollo moon landings were faked, NASA recently agreed to pay aeronautics engineer James Oberg $15,000 to write a monograph countering debunkers' claims point-by-point [...] NASA also recently published this web site with point-by-point counterclaims to Apollo hoax allegations. Link [Boing Boing Blog]

8:30:16 AM  #   your two cents []

Scientific American: "According to a report published today in the journal Science, between 22 and 47 percent of the world's plants are endangered," triple the number previously believed to be under threat.

8:25:55 AM  #   your two cents []

Cassini returns first image of Saturn. NASA's Cassini spacecraft, launched five years ago, has returned its first image of Saturn... [spacetoday.net]
8:23:40 AM  #   your two cents []