All Blog Posts from Tech Talk

Call it the ultimate absentee ballot. The two U.S. astronauts onboard the international space station cast their votes today from 220 miles above Earth, and in the words of ISS commander Michael Fincke: "If we can vote from up here, so can you."

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At first glance, the platypus looks more like a bad taxidermy project than a vibrant example of evolution gone right. In fact, when it was discovered in 1799, some people actually thought its Donald Duck-like bill had been surgically attached by a prankster. Well, the often lampooned platypus got its comeuppence this week when researchers at the University of Washington St. Louis announced they'd mapped the genome of the cartoonish creature. Their findings about the mammalian/reptile-esque platypus were rather surprising, and you can listen to one of the lead scientists, Wes Warren, in this interview for my weekly CBS radio feed, SciEye. (I love how Warren describes the platypus.)

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It's hard to imagine what's going on behind the scenes at peer-to-peer download site Qtrax, but it can't be good. Last week the media was quick to echo Qtrax's claim of a massive catalogue of free downloadable music. But by Monday night several record labels including Sony BMG, Warner, EMI Music, and Universal Music were reportedly hitting the pause button. Evidently these deals had either not been finalized, had expired, or had not been signed. The key stumbling block was the new ad-based (free) model that Qtrax is proposing. Where does the initiative go from here?

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Is it high-tech parenting or old-fashioned prying? For any parent concerned about what their kids are doing in the digital domain, dozens of software programs can log every keystroke, keep track of every Web page, read every e-mail, instant message, etc. Users can even set keyword "alerts," so if a child types or reads something they deem inappropriate an e-mail is sent to the person who installed the software. Sound scary? Orwellian? Handy? If you're under 18 years old then your parents may be reading this blog right now (although I doubt many of you are).

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It's only now that I can take a breath, reflect on what's happened lately, and jot down a few thoughts in the Tech Talk blog. From wired to wacky to out-of-this-world, it's been quite a hectic but productive time.

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