Say what you want about its products, but as an investment, there's been few better than Microsoft Corp. And since it went public in 1986, it has seen its revenue grow every year -- until now. Meanwhile, Apple Computer this week reported that, for the nine months which ended on June 27, its revenue was $27-billion, up 8.5 per cent over the same period last year..

... the beltway media are missing this point: "The condescending reaction to the Dean insurgency by television's political correspondents can be reminiscent of that hilarious party scene in the movie "Singin' in the Rain," where Hollywood's silent-era elite greets the advent of talkies with dismissive bafflement. "The Internet has yet to mature as a political tool," intoned Carl Cameron of Fox News last summer as he reported that the runner-up group to Dean supporters on the meetup.com site was witches . ."

.. a University of Waterloo research team has combined the principle behind SneakerNet with USB memory sticks -- which, for ten or twenty dollars can store several gigabytes of encrypted data -- for project called VLink, which researchers say will help extend the functionality of the Internet to less-developed, rural areas of the world.

For a while now, I've been 'tweeting' whenever the government issues a press release announcing that it is spending some money. I'm making a couple of changes to the way I've been going about this ...

The NRU, though, does more than just produce isotopes. It's a research reactor and is used by scientists in Canada and around the world to do all sorts of work. AECL -- or whoever ends up managing the facility once a federal government review of the Crown corporation is done -- is putting those engineers not involved in the NRU repairs to work on a variety of other tasks for the future of Chalk River Laboratories. Just got this notice from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, Canada's nuclear safety regulator, that AECL is seeking the CNSC's stamp of approval for some of those long-term plans ...