Archive for February, 2009
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
adeelarshad82 writes to point out that details have been provided for President Obama's proposed $18.7 billion in funding for NASA in 2010 (up from $17.2 billion in 2008). Quoting: "The budget calls on NASA to complete International Space Station construction, as well as continue its Earth science missions and aviation ...
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Saturday, February 28th, 2009
commodore64_love writes with news that a number of cable companies, such as Time-Warner, Comcast, and Cox, are trying to establish themselves as content providers on the web in addition to television. They are currently negotiating with HBO, TNT, CNN, and a number of other channels to bring their programming online ...
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Saturday, February 28th, 2009
It has been reported for a while that the RIAA was suffering some cutbacks and dwindling support, but techdirt is reporting that the cuts may be even deeper than most originally suspected. Who knew suing potential customers would ruin your business? "I'm sure some will somehow 'blame piracy' for this ...
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Saturday, February 28th, 2009
MissMachine writes "I'm a computer science major who has been recently getting involved in local grassroots politics in my county and state. I've been discussing the idea with some of my state legislatures of submitting a couple of resolutions, opening up to the idea of switching to open source software ...
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Saturday, February 28th, 2009
CWmike writes to tell us that Sun's Scott McNealy is pushing for the Obama administration to adopt a much more open-source friendly policy similar to what has been done in Denmark, the UK, and other countries. "Although open-source platforms are widely used today in the federal government -- particularly Linux ...
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Saturday, February 28th, 2009
Synthetic Biology, a relatively new field, is seeking to find out what happened to a bunch of chemicals to make them capable of supporting a metabolism, replicating, and evolution. A Florida lab is showing some of the most promising advancements in this direction with their AEGIS (Artificially Expanded Genetic Information ...
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Saturday, February 28th, 2009
Bruce Schneier recently wrote another essay on privacy for the BBC concentrating on how data seems to be the "pollution of the information age" and where this seems to be leading. "We're not going to stop the march of technology, just as we cannot un-invent the automobile or the coal ...
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Saturday, February 28th, 2009
GlobalEcho writes "Credit default swaps (CDS) are infamous for bringing down AIG and requiring a bailout of hundreds of billions of dollars. Because the market for these was so murky, the US government has insisted that Wall Street create a clearinghouse for these contracts. In a fresh twist, part of ...
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Saturday, February 28th, 2009
Techdirt points out an interesting query in Slate asking why book publishers appear to be making the same mistake that record labels did with the iTunes service with DRM, and single-vendor lock-in. "Back in 2005, we noted that Apple's dominance over the online music space, which upset the record labels ...
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
The OpenDocument Format (ODF) has moved an important step closer to widespread adoption by the UK government with the publication of an internal Cabinet Office report recommending its use.
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