Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker has the details on the latest development in the effort to reform portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (pdf) to allow the distribution and use of circumvention technologies for non-infringing purposes. Tech giants Sun Microsystems and Intel, along with a number of other powerful tech firms, will announce […]
The President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) met for the third time since being reconstituted by President Bush in the Spring of 2003, approving a report (pdf) on Health Information Technology, getting an update on the progress of the subcommittee reviewing (pdf) federal cybersecurity R&D, and taking testimony for the subcommittee charged (pdf) with reviewing […]
The House Committee on Science today approved by voice vote two bills authorizing and codifying policy for High Performance Computing research and development at agencies under the committee’s jurisdiction. HR 4218, the High Performance Revitalization Act of 2004, attempts to address concerns within the computing community about interagency coordination in the government-wide Networking and Information […]
The profile of federally funded R&D at universities and colleges that emerges from this analysis raises issues of proportionality. Specifically, in the current funding profile, approximately two-thirds of the federal funds going to universities and colleges for the conduct of R&D is focused on only one field of science life science and federal […]
The House Government Reform Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census planned to hold a hearing this Wednesday on “Defining Federal Information Technology Research and Development: Who? Where? What? Why? and How Much?” However, the events surrounding former President Ronald Reagan’s memorial here in DC have resulted in the hearing’s postponement. No […]
As a Gmail account holder (peter.harsha), I’ve got mixed feelings about news that the California State Senate has approved Sen. Liz Figueroa’s (D) bill placing restrictions on Google’s web-based e-mail service in order to prevent, Figueroa says, Google from “secretly oogling private e-mails.” While I’m happy on the one hand that government appears to be […]
Tom Kalil has a nice column that explains the importance of federal support for fundamental research in the creation of Google (and makes the case that current US policy is hurting the environment that allows companies like Google to spawn and grow). The Google story is just one of the more recent examples of long-term, […]
Coinciding with yesterday’s House Science Committee hearing on HPC (see entry below), the White House released the latest report of the High-End Computing Revitalization Task Force (HECRTF), spelling out the Administration’s “forward looking plan” for high-end computing with three components: an interagency R&D roadmap for high-end computing core technologies; a federal high-end computing capacity and […]
In what could fairly be described as a “love in,” Thursday’s House Science Committee hearing on HR 4218, the High Performance Computing Revitalization Act of 2004 (HPCRA), featured witnesses from the Administration, industry, university and federal labs all singing the praises of the committee’s bill to amend the 1991 High Performance Computing and Communications Act. […]
Declan McCullagh has an interesting piece at CNET News.com that describes the some of the difficulties Congress has trying to regulate technologies it doesn’t really understand. In their efforts to regulate things like peer-to-peer clients, spyware, and chat clients, members of Congress often cast their net way too broadly, drafting bills that would affect far […]
