Outside the Beltway

A federal appeals court has ruled that there’s no link between autism and childhood vaccines.

Firefox 4 Beta doesn’t work well with Gmail, or at least Gmail as I have it configured with various Google Labs add-ons like “Send & Archive.”

Technology guru Leo Laporte had been using Google Buzz to aggregate his social media presence for a few weeks and discovered that his feed had stopped going out and discovered that nobody gave a damn.

Manned flight is more than a century old. Why are the airlines still so clueless?

What do the critics mean when they say that the United States should be more like Germany?

Renowned author Ray Bradbury hates big government but wants it to fund the colonization of Mars. That a man of his intelligence and insight can hold such diametrically opposed thoughts is an amusing reminder of the limits of human rationality.

The secret to getting big traffic on the Internet is to target bored office workers and crazy people.

Mutated bacteria spreading in India could mark the end of effective antibiotic drugs. The medical repercussions would be enormous.

The Voodoo That You Do Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

Despite 9.5% unemployment, American firms are struggling to find qualified applicants for job openings.

For-profit universities are defrauding their students. Indeed, it’s their business model.

Google has an inordinate amount of information about you and your circle of friends.

Congress has been wrestling with the net neutrality issue for years. Two major players may force a decision soon.

Google now lets you sign in to multiple accounts in a single browser.

General Motors, and Barack Obama, are betting the future on a car that may be nothing more than an electric lemon.

U.S. passports still aren’t perfect.

The Obama administration is refusing to enforce border security, right?

Should we just accept that people are going to be on their iPhones and BlackBerries and redefine rudeness?

The Internet has given us many good things, but it’s also led to a decline in political discourse that we’d do well to reverse before it’s too late.

If it’s online, it’s forever.

The inside story about a crappy wireless network’s loveless marriage with a beauty queen phone.

By filling out Captcha’s two word phrases, you’re helping digitize old books. It’s still really annoying.

Steve Jobs took the heat off his crappy iPhone 4 by pointing out that other phones suck in different ways.

Electronic books outsold paper books on Amazon over the past three months, but the death of the hardcover is greatly exaggerated.

BP is hiring Gulf State scientists with the condition that they stop being scientists.

Is Google manipulating its search results to keep competitors down? And does its market dominance mean the government should step in?

American businesses are sitting on a big pile of cash, and giving no indication that they have any intention of spending it any time soon.

What can you learn about a blogger’s personality from his word choice?

Pakistan is the world-wide leader in internet porn searches. And they have some strange tastes over there.

Remember all those suddenly accelerating Toyotas ? Now, we’re learning the rest of the story.

Much like his pledge to close Guantanamo within a year, President Obama’s promised deadline to implement a “scientific integrity” program has come and gone.

Having a computer in the home does not have a significant impact on academic achievement, according to several new studies.

The evidence that humans are irrational continues to mount. What does this mean for self-governance?

Not only is Hezbollah taking up with the cartels, they appear to have a massive new geography-bending technology. As such, we are all doomed.

Despite new breakthroughs, an HIV vaccine is still some ways off. But, my, we’ve come a long way.

A Princeton economist has devised a formula for a classic sitcom paradox.

NASA engineers are already “close to testing” a solid rocket booster powered by combustible animal dung, and operated according to principles discovered by Ibn Al-Haytham, Islam’s best-known scientist, who died in 1039 AD.

Teaching college is a lot more work than outsiders think — although probably not as much work as professors think.

What exactly is it about air conditioning that has some people so upset ?

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in an interview that he considered raising Muslim self-esteem about their contributions to science one of the goals of his agency.

Thomas Jefferson took great pains to hide the word he originally used for “citizens” in the Declaration of Independence.

NATO should resist preemptively declaring cyber attacks “an attack on all” members under Article 5.