Outside the Beltway

The institutions charged with solving our Information Age social problems are stuck in the Industrial Age.

As the internet becomes more ingrained in our lives, it’s become a tool for parenting. And a break from it.

Did you know that the iPhone is made in China for a mere $6.50? It’s false but true!

Hinckley, California — the town that Erin Brockovich made famous — has slightly less cancer than we’d expect.

Have credit cards and ATMs eliminated the value of large currency zones?

Opt out of Tynt’s clipboard hijacking.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says he isn’t running for President, but he’s sure acting like a guy who’s at least thinking about it.

Minor fluctuation in tax rates is not the most significant thing happening in the world’s largest economy.

Mike Brown, who discovered Xena, decided he could not in good conscience allow it to be made a planet. And killed off an old favorite in so doing.

Viacom says a lower court ruling in favor of Google “would radically transform the functioning of the copyright system and severely impair, if not completely destroy, the value of many copyrighted creations.”

Despite recurring predictions that the Internet and mass communications would allow people to work from anywhere, talent continues to cluster in big cities.

WikiLeaks domain name service was terminated for violating terms of use.

WikiLeaks has been dumped from Amazon’s servers.

Should blogs and other online forums ban anonymous comments?

The American copyright system is broken. Cory Doctorow offers some useful suggestions for fixing it.

In an effort to combat illegal file sharing, the US Department of Homeland Security is seizing domain names.

The Chevy Volt’s $33,000 price tag makes its modest fuel savings hard to justify.

Despite the recent media outrage over TSA search procedures, public attitudes on the subject remain largely supportive.

NATO-Russia cooperation on missile defense is a welcome step forward.

The Denver Post’s Craig Walker has captured this image of a TSA agent performing an “enhanced pat down.”

The Atlantic’s Dave Thier laments that, “The Beatles on iTunes Means Your Kids May Never Hear ‘Her Majesty’

A Florida courthouse illegally saved 35,000 images from security scanners.

Gmail alerted me that they had undergone a homepage makeover. Somehow, I hadn’t noticed. See if you can guess why.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood wants to install devices in cars to disable cell phones.

It appears that full body scanners, operated by leering yahoos under the cover of government authority, may finally be rousing the sheep who have meekly submitted to the absurd delays and indignities that have been piled on since 9/11 and sundry botched attempts.

A ten year old case out of Texas raises yet more doubts about the justice of the death penalty.

Those images on your Facebook page may come back to haunt you if you decide to run for office someday.

Perhaps the dumbest study ever published in the Lancet compares the negative effects of alcohol and illicit drugs without controlling for incidence.

Too many copyright owners are stupidly invoking their rights to keep short clips off of YouTube and other services, losing potential customers in the process.

Thanks to a combination of good intelligence and fast action, it looks like the U.S. and UK avoided a serious attack on airliners last week.

The growing number of cell-phone-only households gives Democrats hope that the polls are undercounting them.

The Pentagon is looking at a system that would flag suspicious access to data, similar to the alerts by credit cards companies designed to prevent fraudulent charges.

Charles Murray argues that the Tea Party is right to complain about out-of-touch elites.

The next generation of the Windows operating system is about two years away. Does anyone care?

New multifunction credit cards will soon change the way Americans handle simple transactions.

Apparently Juan Williams is really, really, really important.

Will Digital Video Recorders kill the campaign commercial? Unfortunately, no.

Lots of jobs that existed in recent memory — secretaries, travel agents, gas station attendants, cashiers — have been replaced by technology. The middle class may be disappearing with them.

Once the province of science fiction, a car that can drive itself is now a reality, thanks to Google and DARPA. The implications are mind boggling.

InstaPaper’s business model is stealing content created by others, stripping it of the ads that pay the creators, and running their own advertising on it.