Came across Microsoft's announcement of a "A planetary computer for a sustainable future through the power of AI", complete with a glossy video featuring Lucas Joppa @lucasjoppa (see also @Microsoft_Green and #AIforEarth). On the one hand it's great to see super smart people with lots of resources tackling important questions, but it's hard not to escape the feeling that this is the classic technology company approach of framing difficult

Wired 16.01 has an article entitled The Data Wars by Josh McHugh. A quote from the printed version: It's a sobering read for those of us who advocate harvesting data from as many sources as possible, more so in light of Microsoft's bid to buy Yahoo. Yahoo provides free access to many of its tools via an API (such as the image search I use in iSpecies, and in this sense is much more open than Google. Might this change under Microsoft...?

I would prefer to avoid Microsoft-bashing, but today I've spent time trying to get my tree viewer to work under Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and it's hell. Here are the problems I've had to deal with: Empty DIV bug On IE 6 the top of the scrollbar overlapped the transparent area when the page first loads.