PCMag.com today has an article pointing out that “a Macintosh is a PC.”  The article’s author, Lance Ulanoff, writes: “Pardon my frustration, but this common misconception

[that a Mac is something else than a PC] has had a long and lasting impact on the venerable brand you’re patronizing right now.  […]  I’m not saying that Macs are not wonderful products. We almost always love them when we test them here at PC Magazine Labs.  […]  But Steve Jobs is not God, and his products are not grown on trees and picked by loving workers who let them ripen on cotton sheets by the window sill. If you need further evidence that Macs are not vastly different from Windows-based PCs, remember that all Macs now use Intel CPUs─the same CPUs you find in Windows PCs. With Boot Camp, Macs can even run Windows. I wonder if the folks who do this refer to their Macs as PCs.  […]  Put simply, we all use computers that run different operating systems.  […] [T]he differences Apple is trying to tout aren’t quite as huge as Apple would like you to believe.”

The Register reports that “[t]he EU has agreed to reserve 30MHz of spectrum (around 5.9GHz) for cars that want to talk to each other, in the belief that doing so will save lives rather than add more driver-distracting gadgets.  The idea is that cars driving along a road will be able to spot hazards, such as a slippery surface, and will decide – presumably for the common good – to inform those following to take care. Quite how the cars following will alert their fleshy drivers to the problem remains to be seen, but that’s not the EU’s problem.”

Slashdot reveals that “[o]n Tuesday, IBM was granted US Patent No. 7,407,089 for storing a preference for paper or plastic grocery bags on customer cards and displaying a picture of said preference after a card is scanned. The invention, Big Blue explains, eliminates the ‘unnecessary inconvenience for both the customer and the cashier’ that results when ‘Paper or Plastic?’ must be asked. The patent claims also cover affixing a cute sticker of a paper or plastic bag to a customer card to indicate packaging preferences. So does this pass the ‘significant technical content’ test, IBM’ers?”

According to CNetNews.com, “[n]ow that the economic downturn has somewhat cooled early stage investing, some venture capitalists say there’s no better time to take a longer-term view.  […]  Investors are eyeing myriad opportunities, including new ways to make money from all of those social media sites and building the next generation of the Web. To some that’s the creation of the ‘implicit’ Web and to others it’s the ‘semantic’ Web. Some of the companies they’re investing in are already well-known to hardcore techies. But all of them will likely help change how people experience the Internet.” 

Internetnews.com today has an article pointing to the “pitfalls of open source litigation.”  The publication writes:  “Optimists say the best things in life are free; realists say yes, but anything that’s free costs way too much. Nowhere is that more applicable than in open source software.  The problem is that open source software developers call in code from other open source applications.  ‘If you’re using only a few open software packages, you’re actually using a whole lot more applications because open software builds on things other people have done,’ Stormy Peters, executive director of the Gnome Foundation, a nonprofit organization that coordinates the efforts of the Gnome Project, told a presentation today on avoiding open source lawsuits. The Gnome Project is a worldwide project to create a free computing platform for public use.  For example, a project using Ant, MySQL and MSQL Server Connector, AspectJ and the Spring Framework would ‘really use over 90 different open software packages, each of which has its own license,’ Peters said.  ‘The problem is that it’s difficult to find out what other software open software depends on.’”