All Blog Posts from Tech Talk

Watch three remarkable people reveal their wishes to change the world live from the TED Conference in Long Beach, California, via webcast at 5 PM Pacific Standard Time (PST) Thursday.

Tune in and get inspired as TED Prize winners — deep-ocean explorer Sylvia Earle, astronomer Jill Tarter and Venezuelan maestro José Antonio Abreu — unveil their ideas worth spreading. Special introductions by Al Gore, Quincy Jones and Sir Richard Branson.

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To call TED "elitist" makes it sound like snobbery. Not so. Instead, imagine a gathering peppered with dozens of futurists, artists, CEOs, and scientists -- plus a few more folks who defy categorization. They get all together for several days (Feb. 3-7) to listen to mind-blowing talks about everything from population trends to sea creatures. It is an intellectual Mardi Gras. The presentations are filmed, and they’re so compelling that they almost instantly go viral online.

This is the annual TED or the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference (those in-the-know just call it "TED"). Think World Economic Forum combined with a touch of the Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital and maybe a hint of a G8 meeting for good measure. And it’s all riveting, mind-blowing stuff. In previous years the event was held in Monterrey, Calif., but this year it moves south to Long Beach.

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It’s ironic. On the 25th anniversary of my start as a newspaper columnist, the very newspaper that gave me that start laid off 250 people, including 150 editorial positions. The layoffs didn’t affect me, I stopped writing for the LA Times in 2002 but it’s still sad to see colleagues lose their jobs and to see likely further erosion of quality in one of the world’s best media outlets.

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Hard to believe it’s been exactly a year since I traveled to the Arctic with our CBS crew – myself, producer Chloe Arensberg and cameraman Mark LaGanga. For those who remember our blog postings, you might also recall another passenger onboard that journey: my father, Doug. To mark the one-year anniversary, I’m posting a “video postcard” that encompasses both our time onboard the ship and some of my father’s history in the Arctic.

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I'm in Istanbul Turkey this week where I got a chance to test out the Lingo Navigator, a $70 pocket-sized gadget that translates and speaks out-loud in Turkish and 11 other languages. You can hear the Lingo itself and my comments on my podcast .

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Daniel Sieberg and producer Alec Sirken sample the products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.Among the gadgets: motorcyclists can now rock out safely when they put on a helmet. And science-minded kids have a new exploratory tool.

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I love technology as much as anyone and a tech reviewer, I get to play with more than my share of new gadgets but, as cool as these tech toys are, there is a downside. At some point, they must be discarded and when they finally do end their useful life, many of these items wind up in landfills either here or in the developing world.

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CBSNews.com's David Hancock tries out one of Verizon's new cellphone MP3 players and finds himself pining for the easy interface of the Apple iPods.

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In my column that went up today, I examine Comcast’s alleged practice of blocking uploads from BitTorrent and other applications. The practice was reported last week by the Associated Press and numerous bloggers. The company doesn’t admit to the practice but does say that it takes steps to protect its network from people who abuse their service by sending out excessive amounts of information.

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AT&T says it is suspending its new program that let parents choose how and when their children can use their cell phones, citing a problem with the way it was working with 911 systems.

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