Executive director of university relations for Hewlett-Packard Wayne Johnson insists that industry must lead the charge to bring more women into IT by encouraging them to stick with science and engineering courses and share their technology ideas with their peers. To this end, HP has given the Institute for Women in Technology (IWT) a new home at HP Labs as well as equipment. IWT was established to increase the number of female technology graduates as well as give non-technical women a voice in technology development, and executive director Sara Hart comments that the dominance of men and male viewpoints in the IT sector is dictating product development. Leaving out the opinions of everyday women leads to technology that is useless to many consumers, and getting engineers to understand this trend is one of the goals of IWT.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is promoting a plan to merge information technology, nanotechnology, and biotechnology, each of which has the potential to dramatically modify humanity at the biological level, according to advocates. Drafted by NSF adviser Mihail Roco, the initiative calls for more spending in the three sectors, and the establishment of a "Human Cognome Project" that aims to map out the workings of the human brain. ... The plan goes so far as to say that the convergence "could achieve a golden age...[in which] the twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment...[and] humanity would become like a single, distributed and interconnected 'brain.'" However, critics contend that such a scheme gives the commercial marketplace too much authority to reshape human beings to the point that it crosses ethical and political boundaries. Roco believes that enhancements to humans can be handled in a responsible manner, and insists that "The core objective [of the project] is to improve the human condition." The government, he adds, will help strike a balance between individual rights and the need for advancement.

• Fujifilm FinePix F402
• Nikon Coolpix 3500
• Pentax Optio 330 GS
• Canon PowerShot S45
• Canon Digital IXUS v" / S230
• Olympus C-730 Ultra Zoom
• Canon PowerShot G3

Of course, Finland already has a female president, Tarja Halonen. USA seems to be some years behind Finland in this matter, as in many others.

I have been using LaTeX for making books for about ten years now, and to some degree the Radio system is similar to LaTeX. I have written some document classes and a large number of style files for LaTeX, and Radio allows me to do similar things in web publishing. This is nice, although I would like the system to have a faster and more intuitive user interface.

Funny, isn't it, that the New York Times would run a piece about how weblogs can lead to friction between bloggers and their mainstream media outlets, without mentioning yours truly."

"I can't imagine a nicer way to make a living," said Mr. Alterman, who is paid by MSNBC to write about politics, the media and culture in his Web log. "It's therapeutic, and you get things off your chest. I can write whatever I want."

Not to be outdone, a number of corporate and mass media outlets are starting to support in-house blogs by their own journalists or as part of intranets, called k-logs or knowledge-logs. Macromedia started several software support blogs."

Because further down the street, beyond the reach of my system, another neighbor has put in Wi-Fi. And another, and another. Think of a pond with one water lily, then two, then four, then many overlapping, with their stems reaching into the Internet."

A larger problem in a business environment is the amount of time people will spend on the blogs they feel compelled to monitor, and worse, create. How long will it be before people are E-mailing us hyperlinks to their blogs? As it is, we spend a large part of our day wading through stuff to find the achingly infrequent important messages. It's gotten so bad that I sometimes think the two worst inventions of the past hundred years are E-mail and the Xerox machine. To badly paraphrase Winston Churchill, never in the field of human endeavor have so many wasted so much to obtain so little.

The FBI said Poet, a bookkeeper for a small Berkley law firm, embezzled $2.1 million from the firm's accounts between February and August, after scam organizers persuaded her to wire huge amounts of money to bank accounts in South Africa and Taiwan to expedite the transfer of money to the United States.

Given the track history of Microsoft in making untrusthworthy products, I wonder what will come out of these visions? Systems which automatically deny you the access to your files - and you need the centralized Microsoft services to restore the access?