Thanks to Fark for the pointer to this important and timely story on news.com.au. NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence Command) has announced that Santa will receive a fighter escort when transiting controlled airspace this upcoming Christmas Eve.

According to an article from CNet, Google has entered into agreements with Harvard University, Oxford University, Stanford University, and the University of Michigan to scan portions of their libraries as part of Google Print, the search maker's effort to bring the world of print online. Although some of the participants …

And you should too! Seriously, if you are still using Internet Explorer, ask yourself "Why?" If you need it for some specific task, use it for that. Otherwise, take the advice of the Penn State IS department and use just about anything else. Popular alternatives are: Safari (MacOS X) Firefox …

I'm sure everybody saw this, but if you didn't, it's the end of an era. An article from the Washington Post (also reported in many other places) details the sale of IBM's PC unit to Lenovo Group Ltd., China's largest PC manufacturer. The company that started the PC (not personal …

An article from MediaWeek brings up some interesting statistics about FCC indecency complaints. According to their report, the number of indecency complaints has soared from 14,000 in 2002 to over 1 million this year. More interesting is the claim that of the approximately 500,000 complaints that did not …

Normally, I just consider Gizmodo to be a guilty pleasure as the site dedicated to new tech toys, etc. This morning brought a story that was just too "important" to let be. CNET has the main story about tight fitting pants being the #2 cause of broken phones among 300 …

Netcraft has an article reminding people that it is never a good idea to click on a link in an email that appears to be from your bank. The article describes a scam being perpetrated by a Korean group that uses a failing in the SunTrust web site to make …

The New York Times is reporting in an article this morning that a study recently released by the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) puts US students about the middle of the pack in the industrialized world on reading and math skills. Of course, math was worse (we ranked …

Not to beat up on the French, but they're getting the Homer Simpson "Doh!" award this week for this article from the International Herald Tribune describing a counter- terrorism check gone bad. It appears that 4+ days ago, the airport police in Paris planted explosives in an unsuspecting passenger's bag …

In an interesting development and a boon to Apple's fledgling storage product line, Oracle is quoted by CNet in this article as using 50 to 100TB of XServe RAID storage in their own environment. Also of note is an announcement by Apple that they expect Oracle's 10g software to be …

An interesting article (thanks to Tim for pointing it out) appears in the Washington Post about the constitutionality of government-mandated, privately-funded speech. It appears that "Got Milk?", "Beef-It's what's for dinner", "Pork: the other white meat", and "Cotton: the fabric of our lives" are all embroiled in a set of …

Not exactly travel, but I'm not sure where to put this. On Saturday night, Carol and I went to Celtic Christmas, a concert held at Dumbarton United Methodist Church in Georgetown. The concert was good, but the meal ahead of time was spectacular! Red Ginger of Georgetown (located at 1564 …

Finally a good article on the FDA funding problem, from the New York Times. The article (which goes into a good deal of detail and has interviews from a variety of sides), follows the path of FDA funding since the 1984 act that effectively created the generic drug market in …

I took a quick look this AM after my story yesterday about the NWS providing XML weather info and noticed that I don't seem to have made any comments here about Weather Underground. If you haven't been getting your weather here, you should be. The service is free (with a …

This is cool. As a part of their program to push more XML data out to the general public, the National Weather Service is not only providing forecast data (among others) via XML, but they are providing weather alerts via RSS. Dulles current weather is available via RSS. Virginia severe …

Check out this new card from Sonnet (long-time supporters of the Macintosh for high- quality third-party drive ATA and SATA controllers). They've put 4 internal and 4 external drive attachments on this puppy for $199. Did I mention it can take advantage of PCI-X? Can you say 546MB/sec RAID …

A new program called RendezvousVPN is now available from Phillippe Hauser that creates a Rendezvous tunnel between two networks. It's unclear to me whether it tunnels all of the traffic or just the Rendezvous traffic, but my guess is the former, as it would be more difficult to get around …

For those geeks out there who sometimes have to program things other than Macintoshes, here's an article that describes using Apple's XCode on OS X to develop code that runs on embedded systems.

An article from InfoWorld notes that the FCC has approved (PDF) Friday a software defined radio made by Vanu.. The radio is for use as a cellular base station for GSM and will be capable of handling a variety of frequencies (important for GSM, since Europe uses 900MHz and 1 …

eWeek has an article citing evidence from Larry Blunk (of Merit) that Microsoft is poised to assert intellectual property rights over internet protocols including TCP, IP v4 and IP v6, DNS and other essential protocols. The concerns were expressed in a note to the IETF's IAB (Internet Architecture Board) and …