The 2006 Winter Olympics is winding down, offering an opportunity for the world community to look back on the event and reflect. Drug testing, for instance, was an ongoing element of the games, bringing about intrigue that included Italian drug testers who surprised athletes by posing as fans. This demonstrates why it’s time for the [...]

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At a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a group of biologists discussed how, in the near future, people could expect to live 100 years. A longer, healthier life is good news to most, but predictably some speakers took a negative, almost pro-death, stance.
Stanford University biologist Dr. Shripad Tuljapurkar [...]

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For those who think their cable bills are soaring to all-time highs, it might be reassuring to know that a bipartisan group of U.S. senators agree. At a recent Senate Commerce Committee hearing, members pondered the reasons for the rate hikes.
“There is only head-to-head competition in less than two percent of America,” said Senator Gordon [...]

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AOL and Yahoo will soon roll out a new program to charge advertisers for guaranteed access to users’ e-mail boxes. It’s not the perfect spam-fighting program that some would have hoped for, but those critiquing the plan on free speech and other grounds are out to lunch.
The reason most people’s inboxes are overflowing with nasty [...]

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Recently, there’s been a lot of chatter about the openness of the Internet being under attack. While the Net is indeed facing a threat, it’s not the one that some pundits make it out to be.
Read more about the problem in my Cnet column here.

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Frequent readers of my blog will know that I’m a huge fan of robots and this past year seems to have been epic for their evolution. Check out this new one showcased at the recent Demo conference: the Pleo. The company says that although every Pleo begins life with certain tendencies, each bot [...]

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John Robson, a historian and columnist for the Ottawa Citizen newspaper in Canada, has these questions for Muslims. I hope he gets some good (and peaceful) answers.

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After a year of heading in the right direction, the California Public Utilities Commission veered off course last week when Commissioner Dian Grueneich initiated a dangerous move towards old command-and-control regulation. Grueneich claimed to be staking out a middle ground in her alternate plan to Commissioner Michael Peevey’s outline for a California Telecommunications Bill [...]

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Is up and running. I went to a launch party for it last week at Chris Nolan’s home. Nick Denton, the guy driving the thing, is exactly what you’d expect.

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