From 50,000 Feet

Will Apple’s defiance of gravity continue through all of ‘08?  Some speculation and a feast of Apple-passion here; and some rumor-scouring of tech supply-chain analyst reports here.
Demand for Macs, including the skinny lil’ MacBook Air, is up, but something is telling the company to slow down production of iPods and iPhones.  TUAW.com (”the unofficial Apple […]

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Interception of private personal and financial data should be treated like a release of nuclear waste, says Cory Doctorow in the Guardian.  Referring to the loss of private tax data for 25 million British residents, Doctorow asks, “will the leaked government data ever actually vanish?”
Our capacity to store, copy and distribute information is ascending a […]

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Technology is how a lot of people kept themselves amused before presidential politics got interesting again. No doubt Steve Jobs is already working on an iPhone that can cry.
To keep things in perspective, however, more people did attend the Consumer Electronics Show than the Iowa caucuses–despite rising costs that might drive the show out of […]

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Silicon Valley’s hometown paper is the San Jose Mercury-News, and columnist/blogger Dean Takahashi is its top tech news reporter. Late last week, he published his tech predictions for 2008. His first guess is creepy.
Threats to our civil liberties will increase from two directions. The government will seek more authority to spy on […]

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Popular Mechanics has released its 10 Worst Gadgets of 2007. I don’t think everything on the list belongs there (like, why is everybody picking on Pleo, that cute lil’ robot dinosaur?), but some of them make you wonder — who is running these companies?
Take, for example, #6, the Violet Nabaztag:
Meet Nabaztag, perhaps the […]

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First of all, there’s a new home for On the Record, the blog for Maryland’s Daily Record. Click here to read it and then click on the feed for your reader. It’s a widescreen blog with a great masthead and some useful new features….
To celebrate the new look, they’ve posted some good stuff lately. […]

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A huge fiasco in England — Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs office (HMRC) mishandled and then lost two CDs containing private tax data on 25 million UK families. Alastair Revell, who blogs for IT Director, says this:
Apparently, the CDs were sent by internal mail without being registered or recorded in any way. It was […]

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Well, it happened. Rachel Paulose, the controversial young U.S. Attorney for Minneapolis, has left the frozen north and will return to Washington DC. Minnesota Lawyer Blog’s Mark Cohen has been getting a lot of eyes on his insightful farewell-to-Paulose post:
I believe that Paulose made the right choice in opting to end her often […]

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Legendary tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen explains that the Silicon Valley way of creating businesses might be what its polar opposite, the entertainment industry, might turn into as a result of the WGA strike; and of the underlying issue behind the strike, the convergence of scripted movie and TV entertainment with the Internet.
The whole, very long […]

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Here are a few interesting stories our reporters have picked up the past day or two….
Portland’s one of those towns with some tasty microbrews. In fact, its unofficial nickname is “beertopia.” Today we learn from the DJC’s Libby Tucker that three local breweries are investing–a lot–in energy conservation schemes, including recovery of the intense […]

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