The Seattle Times reports that “

[h]igh-tech workers [in the U.S.] on federal permits are speaking out — many for the first time — over rules that leave them in personal and professional limbo. […] Legal immigrants who feel squeezed by limits on the number of green cards issued each year are trying to separate their complaints from the protests by illegal immigrants. […] Applications for work-related green cards — limited to 140,000 each year, about 9,800 per sending country — are backlogged so deep that many immigrants must plod along for years, uncertain about their future in the United States and unable to change jobs while they wait for permanent residence.”

The Wall Street Journal today has an interesting article by Dick Armey, chairman of Freedom Works Foundation, on Charlie Rangel’s proposed “Tax Reduction and Reform Act of 2007.” Mr. Armey states that while “[i]t’s rather refreshing to see that [Mr. Rangel] recognizes that America’s corporate-tax rate is too high and hurts our competitiveness, […] this glimmer of progress is swamped by the plan’s range of new taxes on capital investment and punitive measures towards American companies that operate globally.”

Slashdot writes about a worrying development in Russia. According to the publication, “the percentage of Russian adults having access to the Internet has risen from 8% in 2002 to 25% in 2007. This growth has attracted the attention of the Kremlin. Its allies are creating pro-Kremlin web sites and are purchasing web sites known for high-quality independent journalism. Pro-Kremlin bloggers have used their skills to bury news about anti-Kremlin demonstrations: at Russian news portals, web links to news about pro-Kremlin rallies consistently rank higher than web links to news about anti-Kremlin demonstrations. The most disturbing development is that the Kremlin intends to develop a Russian Internet which is separate from the global Internet. Russian officials are studying the techniques that the Chinese use to censor the Internet.”

In a different article, Slashdot reports that “[s]upercomputers small enough to fit into the palm of your hand are only 10 or 15 years away, according to Professor Michael Zaiser, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh School of Engineering and Electronics. Zaiser has been researching how tiny nanowires — 1000 times thinner than a human hair — behave when manipulated. Apparently such minuscule wires behave differently under pressure, so it has up until now been impossible to arrange them in tiny microprocessors in a production environment. Zaiser says he’s figured out how to make them behave uniformly. These ‘tamed’ nanowires could go inside microprocessors that could, in turn, go inside PCs, laptops, mobile phones or even supercomputers. And the smaller the wires, the smaller the chip can be. ‘"If things continue to go the way they have been in the past few decades, then it’s 10 years… The human brain is very good at working on microprocessor problems, so I think we are close — 10 years, maybe 15,’ Zaiser said.”

CNet News has a great article today on young, successful IT entrepreneurs who feel the urge to start another company even though their financial situation would allow them to spend the rest of their lives traveling the world in their private jets.