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Produced and hosted by Jon Gordon, Future Tense brings you the latest technology topics in daily five-minute capsules. From electronic privacy and digital democracy to spam and computer worms, Future Tense keeps you up to date on the rapidly changing world of technology.
Future Tense is heard in the United States during broadcasts of the CBC's As It Happens.
Follow Jon Gordon's daily technology blog.
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Cinnamon Girl, Mr. Soul, Cowgirl in the Sand and other Neil Young song characters will soon take up residence on Blu-ray. Young announced this week he'll release his entire music archive on Blu-ray discs, a sign that the discs' capabilities could be building appeal among musicians as well as movie studios.
Guest: Aram Sinnreich, NYU Steinhardt
Clearwire and Sprint Nextel are resurrecting their plan to build a new super-high-speed mobile Internet network. A similar deal fell apart last year, but this time it's backed by big-time investors including Google, Comcast, Time Warner.
Sprint Nextel and Clearwire will combine their wireless broadband units to create a $14.5 billion communications company that will develop a mobile network based on a technology called WiMax. It's like Wi-Fi but the signals travel much farther and can blanket entire cities.
Guest: CNET News.com writer Maggie Reardon
iRobot makes the well-loved robotic vacuum cleaner called Roomba - and it also builds robots for the military for doing dangerous jobs like handling bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. iRobot recently won a Pentagon contract worth up to $300 million to build new robots, but the company had to go to court to get the deal done. That's because the military initially gave the contract to a former iRobot who was employee accused by iRobot of stealing its designs, according to a story in the most recent issue of Wired.
Guest: Noah Shachtman, Wired
NewsTrust is a nonprofit service attempting to help people find good journalism online by subjecting stories to the scrutiny of volunteer citizen reviewers. NewsTrust members rate stories from news sites and blogs based on journalistic principles like fairness, sourcing and context.
Computer science: Not jut for geeks.
That's a message the Association for Computing Machinery is hoping to spread as part of a project to polish the image of technology careers.
John White, CEO and executive director of the computing trade group, says fewer students are studying computer science in college , and too many tech jobs are going unfilled, because young people don't have an accurate picture of the computer scientist.
The ACM, along with the WGBH Educational Foundation, will soon begin a public relations project called "New Image for Computing," which is designed to highlight the appeal of computer science education and careers to young people.
The commercial sponsor of Ubuntu has released a new version of the open source software package. Is it sufficiently user-friendly to attract mainstream users?
Link:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says Microsoft has betrayed customers of its defunct MSN Music service, and should give music buyers their money back.
Microsoft last week Microsoft announced it would no longer issue digital rights management keys for songs purchased from MSN Music after August 31st. Because the songs are DRMed, or copy protected, consumers will be prevented from transferring their songs to new devices, and could lose their music when they get new computers or when their old machines fail.
As the technology of brain imaging advances, some philosophers and civil libertarians are beginning to worry about a possible threat to privacy.
What if brain scans could eventually detect specific thoughts? If scans could detect criminal proclivities, how would that affect our judicial system - which is based on actions, not thoughts. Do we have a right to mental privacy?
Guest: Paul Roote Wolpe, bioethicist at the University of Pennslvania School of Medicine, and board member of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics.
Lower Manhattan -- with its stock exchanges, Federal Reserve, big banks, and bridges and tunnels -- remains a tempting terror target.
New York City is implementing a technology-focused plan to protect the area. At the center of the plan, according to Wired Magazine contributing editor Noah Shachtman, is an array of 3,000 security cameras designed to detect early terror warning signs.
