An interesting article in VeloNews about failures of technology in the 2004 Tour de France. Of particular interest is the speculation that the large crash in stage 6 may have been caused by a faulty handlebar.

According to an article from the Associated Press (courtesy of Yahoo!), Verizon Wireless, Cingular and Sprint have agreed with Attorneys General of 32 states to provide additional information and flexibility to customers. Among the concessions are: more detailed coverage maps, the ability to return phones within 3 days, and a …

According to an article from CNet, Marybeth Peters, the Registrar of Copyrights, is set to endorse the INDUCE act (written about here in a previous article). In the history of bad technology legislation, this act is set to be rivaled only by the DMCA in terms of its chilling effect …

The big financial news yesterday was Microsoft's announcement that they would be spending billions on a stock buy-back and dividend program. An additional piece of information from CNet this morning indicates that Bill Gates will be donating $3B of his booty to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, his charity …

Verizon (formerly Bell Atlantic, Chesapeake & Potomac, AT&T, etc.) has announced their intention to provide "FIOS" (their name for fiber to the home) this year. According to an article on ExtremeTech, this will include a rollout that will pass 1 million homes in 7 states and will provide services up …

For those unfamiliar with the term, phishing is using web sites or spam to elicit credit card numbers (or other similarly interesting, mostly financial data) from people. It has been around for a while, but a recent article from InfoWorld does a good job of explaining why this new breed …

An article on InternetNews quotes Andi Gutmans (one of the founders of PHP) as stating that they have no intention of moving their license to the GPL in the wake of a recent dispute over the use of PHP with MySQL. The issue stems from a recent change by the …

Lindows has reportedly received $20M from Microsoft to settle the pending trademark case. Microsoft will receive the Lindows domain names in exchange for their cold hard cash and Lindows (pardon me, "Linspire") will continue to operate, but with the addition of money in the bank and no lawsuit from Microsoft …

For those who have read the Dan Brown novel, TheDaVinci Code, you are familiar with Roslyn Chapel. The chapel, just outside of Edinburgh is the home to one of the final pieces of the 'Grail puzzle in the book and is now seeing a substantial increase in tourist traffic. Although …

After all of this hubbub over the years about turning off your cell phones because they may crash the plane, CNet is reporting that American Airlines and Qualcomm completed on Thursday a test flight involving a mobile base station and a satellite uplink to provide in-flight cellular service to passengers …

Admittedly, it isn't very likely, but John Dvorak (columnist for PC Magazine) has written a column suggesting that Microsoft may shut down after pushing down the stock price, spinning off some subsidiaries, and off-shoring most of the employees.

Boston-based Tech Superpowers has created a highly-mobile digital editing station based on the merger of a Lexus IS300 and a Macintosh G5-based editing station, including an XServe RAID for 2.7TB of storage. To see how it turned out, they held a contest for best editing at the show, in …

Apple released their 3rd Quarter financial results last night and the news is quite good for them. Profits up (300%), revenues up (30%), unit sales for iPod up, unit sales for CPUs up, can't complain about that. Beyond the basic highlights, here are some other interesting tidbits from the announcement …

Initial user reports on AccellerateYourMac are good on Apple's new Airport Express with AirTunes. If you haven't heard of this, Apple's released a $129 802.11g (WiFi) gateway that allows you to play your iTunes through speakers attached to the device. Great if you don't have a wireless network already …

I'd violated my usual rule and read a number of reviews before going to see Spider-Man 2, so I was expecting a surprisingly good movie. However, I've been seeing a lot of "art" films and so an action flick was pretty appealing. Short answer: the critics are right, this movie …

I just about died laughing when I read this article from WKYT (the local CBS affiliate in Lexington, KY. For those who don't know, the state of Kentucky has an absolutely awful license plate containing a smiling sun. Well, the American License Plate Collector's Association has given the plate its …

WKMG in Florida has an article describing a robbery thwarted when a woman from Kentucky noticed robbers in the house of a friend in Florida by using a web cam that the Floridians left running. A call to the police followed, and the robbers were caught while trying to escape …

Wired is reporting that Tennessee will be launching a $2.5M pilot program to track sex offenders with GPS bracelets. Authorized by Tennessee HB3182, the bill applies to people convicted after July 1, 2004 of a "violent sexual offense". Interestingly, it also provides for the offender to pay for their …

An upbeat article from Wired today recounts the throngs of people crowding Boston's new Convention Center. According to some reports, the crowd is standing room only and some vendors are pleasantly surprised at the turnout.

OK, this is just plain spiffy. T-Mobile is providing the GPRS data service, for the Saeco/Cannondale Pro Cycling Team to send telemetry data in real time from their bikes and riders. You can check it out on 2Peak's site (providers of the gizmo to measure the data).