President Obama announced plans to contribute $5 billion in medical research grants that the White House says will cumulatively provide "cutting-edge medical research in every state across America." The funds will be provided via Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus plan, and will largely be used to aid research into cancer, heart disease and autism. The president made the announcement while visiting the National institutes for Health on September 30.

Back in September, I posted a note about attacks on the two-factor authentication systems used by some online banking sites. One of my recommendations has always been to use a dedicated, carefully configured PC for this function; a PC that is not used for general Web browsing, iTunes, Facebook, and everything else under the sun. I've also suggested that using an OS other than Windows " specifically, Linux " is a useful additional precaution.

The thing that scares Murdoch and the like into wanting to move web content behind a paywall is not the ABC, nor bloggers, nor aggregators. What scares those moghuls most is firefox, or more accurately, the various browser add-ons that let you control what chews up your bandwidth, most notably AdBlock Plus.

Now that teenage unemployment has reached 25 percent among those still actively seeking work (source), it seems like a good time to look at regulations that might discourage companies from hiring teenagers. Economists have traditionally said that the minimum wage law is the primary weapon wielded by older workers against the young.

In his "Security Fix" blog at the Washington Post, Brian Krebs has an article about a new service being tested by Comcast, which warns customers that the ISP thinks their PC may be infected with malware, by opening a notification windows while the customer is browsing the Web.

That is an old saying about the people from Afghanistan, who have sort of made a habit of switching sides during long conflicts within their country. And with this in mind, and remembering the most successful part of the surge in Iraq, it seems President Obama might just be willing to rent some Afghans who are currently sided with the Taliban. All we have to do is pay more than the Taliban, and presto, we have a much quieter but only slightly less dangerous conflict.

In the fifties, Ed McBain wrote a rather nondescript book, a crime thriller which had all the cliches and ingredients of a potboiler " wooden, flat characters mouthing banalities, the stereotype business tycoon, the tough cop etc. etc. There was, however, a distinct complexity to the plot, which though the author could barely leverage, but which the legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa recognized and transformed into a far more potent and profound film. King's Ransom, the book, became High and Low, the film.

The financiers and uber-capitalists have long used for self-serving agenda the arguments of Schumpeter, while "Teh Left" has considered them heartless and obnoxious. But is it time greens, even radical greens, took up Schumpeter's most famous catchcry, "creative destruction", so often a philosophical pretext for business attacks on working conditions, to argue against the obscene coddling of Big Carbon by capitalist governments in the name of economic stability?

While many of us take fast Internet connections for granted, there are many locations in the world where cables have yet to be run. Residents in these areas often find themselves stuck with dial-up connections. (Remember those days when you clicked on a page and had time to make sandwich before it loaded?) Whether you have a cabin on a mountainside or a rural farmhouse, satellite Internet service can have you surfing web sites at blink-of-an-eye speeds, up to 50 times faster than a dial-up connection.

Canada's broadband Internet access ranking slipped from second place to ninth place amongst 30 developed nations in the last 10 years, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD compares policies of its member countries with respect to environment, economics and social issues. The findings of the organization's surveys are widely accepted by its members to be benchmark data. The Internet access ranking was measured considering broadband availability, pricing, speed, and data caps.

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