Web/Tech

Need historical photos for your blog or Web site? The Library of Congress has a Flickr page where it will make available thousands of photos from its collection. The photo here is a mountain farm along Skyline Drive, Va., from 1914.

The concept of privacy continues to "evolve," i.e. the trend of everybody wanting to know where everybody else is all the time continues to strengthen. Fort Wayne Police Chief Rusty York wants to put GPS chips in all patrol cars:

It will allow officers, dispatchers and managers to see where the vehicles are located across the city. The chief said this will help in officer safety because it will better locate officers calling for help.

The concept of privacy continues to "evolve," i.e. the trend of everybody wanting to know where everybody else is all the time continues to strengthen. Fort Wayne Police Chief Rusty York wants to put GPS chips in all patrol cars:

It will allow officers, dispatchers and managers to see where the vehicles are located across the city. The chief said this will help in officer safety because it will better locate officers calling for help.

Did you get your Parade magazine in the Sunday paper yesterday? If not, you missed out on some big news:

In the "gadgets keep getting cooler" department, note this trend to watch:

Around the time reform-supporters in Russia fired up their faxes and e-mails and surrounded and protected Boris Yeltsin, the conventional wisdom started growing that the new information technology would liberate "the people" rather than empower their would-be oppressors. "1984" had gotten it wrong. But as we can now see from the monstrous actions by the thugs in Burma, that view may have been a tad premature: 

Everytime something new came along -- the telephone, the radio, TV -- there were people left behind for awhile. Now, those of us who produce newspapers are facing it with computers and the Internet:

Just one small story from the northwest corner of the state: An e-mail is circulated saying that the owner of a Dunkin' Donuts is turning away customers in uniform because "you are killing my countrymen and I will not serve you." Outrage builds until somebody decides to check it out:

"Hard to believe that something like this might be going on in our community,” said John Pitt of the Indiana Army National Guard.

How cool to be able to go to work without having to, you know, go to work:

Imagine a work world with no commute, no corporate headquarters and perhaps not even an office in the physical world at all.

For Bob Flavin, a computer scientist at IBM; Janet Hoffman, an executive at a management consulting firm; and Joseph Jaffe, a marketing entrepreneur, the future is already here.

Remember the digital divide? How the world was going to be split between those with access to all the new media and the poor, left-behind dunces who would not have access? It turns out that we have a divide involving a much older medium. One in four adult Americans say they did not read a book last year:

One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.