A computer on every desk and in every home in Brazil, Russia, India, and China

[i]t’s taken 27 years to reach 1 billion PCs in use, and market researchers say it will take only five to reach the next billion.” According to Forrester Research, “many of those next billion will be used by first-time PC users in emerging nations like Brazil, Russia, India and China. At least 775 million new PCs will be in use in those countries by 2015.”

In a different article, CNetNews.com points out that “Google and its YouTube subsidiary are trying Hollywood’s patience. The search engine has made significant progress in recent weeks signing content partnership deals for YouTube. But a growing number of studio executives, irritated by no-shows at meetings and canceled test programs, say they are frustrated with Google’s inability to scrub the site of copyright-infringing material.” Adding to the execs’ irritation is the fact that smaller video sites such as Guba, Dailymotion.com and Eyespot, as well as Microsoft’s Soapbox, have already implemented copyright-filtering technology.

The Financial Times warns that, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), “India is within reach of ambitious targets of signing up 500m phone subscribers by 2010, or almost half its population, but delays in adding more spectrum could stifle near-term growth.”

The Register has an interesting article on cyber warfare today. The article points out that “[t]he problem is … that normal business activity suffers the collateral damage” when governments engage in cyber warfare, and that “[t]he world is in urgent need of technology that can properly block denial of service attacks.”

The BBC reports that, according to the Federation of Small Businesses’ annual Index of Wealth, Scotland is the worst performing small country when compared to nine other small European countries in the areas of economic performance, employment rates, health and education.