Wired has a story about an effort to force car makers to release codes to their on-board computers.

Also includes references to several sites that help you figure out the codes.

Hey check this out! The beverage industry has a web site with consolidated product reviews from hundreds of beverages.

Here's an interesting site that documents long-forgotten predictions of the future.

Barron's has some notes from the future [subscription required] with these highlights:
1. Explosion of consumer-created content, from cell phones and blogging.
2. HD drives with 2-5 TB of storage by 2009 (Laptops with 1TB).
3. End of the apps industry, with everything going to services.

The participants weren't impressed with
1. grid computing
2. Wi-Fi
3. Longhorn (won't be out till 2009), says Martin Tobias of Ignition.

CableNewser.com is a blog by an 18-year-old who analyzes the cable industry. I wonder what kind of software he uses?

More speculation on the future of hard drives.

Here's an article that speculates on computer power in 2034.

Here's another application for some speech technologies: automated indexing of audio. Of course, current recognition technologies can't handle this very well, but you might be able to get some of the bang with a few simplifications. For example, maybe the recognizer could crawl through adn look for some specific words of interest to you.
Search engines try to find their sound | CNET News.com

The VOIP industry is going to be huge: FCC Commissioner Michael Powell calls it "the most important shift in the entire history of modern communications since the invention of the telephone."

Some VOIP services to check out:

• Free World Dial


• IPCAll.com gives you a Washington State phone number


• fwd.calluk.com gives a London phone number

It is frankly rather difficult for me to believe that Linus Torvalds really developed Linux completely on his own, especially since I remember the whole GNU project in the 80's.
Is Torvalds really the father of Linux? | CNET News.com

I didn't realize there was a US maker of TV sets left. Five Rivers Electronic Innovations LLC employs 3200 people. WSJ.com - Tariffs on China's TV Sets Give An Edge to Small U.S. Producer

Voice analysis software is being used by a Halifax General Insurance in the UK as a way to detect fraud over the phone. They claim a 12% hit rate in a three-month trial.

The company that did the outsourcing study that got all kinds of press a while back hasrevised its numbers: now they're expecting a few more (830K intead of 600K) to go overseas by 2005. But the gist remains the same. It's tiny part of the overall market (under 0.2% in any year) and the vast majority of the lost jobs happen a decade from now.

When this Wired article says Tech Execs are contributing to Republicans, I take it with a grain of salt, because I can understand how any CEO might tend to contribute more to incumbents.

Note that the $1000 that Irwin Jacobs gave to Howard Dean may in fact have been a pro-republican gesture, on the grounds that Dean would be easier to defeat.

Here's a brilliant way to decipher words that have been blacked out of secret documents. Count the number of blacked out pixels, figure out the font for the text, and use process of elimination to figure out which words are possible in that space. The crossed-out words in the infamous 9/11 PDB said "Egyptian".

The New York Times > International > Europe > Massarosa Journal: The Olive Oil Seems Fine. Whether It's Italian Is the Issue. Did you know that most "Italian" olive oil is really from Spain?