Apple has long boasted of its culture of innovation, and how this led to such products as the original Mac and the iPod. However, it turns out that, at least in the case of the iPod, Apple had a hidden ally: the US government. During a speech at Tuskegee University, President (and iPod user) George W. Bush told his audience, "the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod."

The buzz at the the recent Philadelphia Auto Show focused on a car that can go from zero to 60 in four seconds and get more than 50 miles to the gallon, running on soybean biodiesel fuel.

The innovative design didn't come from any car company--it came from five students at West Philadelphia High School, who built it as an after-school project.

According to a report on CBSNews.com, the project not only produced a car, it helped turn struggling kids earning C's and D's into straight-A students.

Let's look at the shattering success of every DRM solution to date. Every single one has failed. The score card is hundreds if not thousands against, zero for. Name me one song, movie or software title that is DRM infected that has not found it's way to the net within a week of release, usually long before release. There are none. To protect content, DRM is an abject and total failure, and will continue to be.

It also hurts the user - there is no DRM infection that in any way benefits the consumer. It costs more to develop, costs to license, makes hardware more expensive and complex, and screws the user under legitimate uses. It has a negative value to the consumer.

Here is the problem, every DRM infection is unique, patented, copyrighted, copywronged, and DMCAd ad nauseum, They protect their code in every way possible, and make it so you have to get their approval to use it. This is all done under the guise of protecting content, but that is a lie.

have ATRAC, FairPlay (har har), Real, WMA, and a host of other DRM infections, and none can play any of the others. If you have a player that can do one, chances are that it can't do any of the others, almost like the license terms preclude it, but it would take someone much more cynical than I to say that.

The big companies are at war, and we are the casualties. So, they have to send their flying monkeys to sue single moms, 12 year olds and octogenarians to make it appear that they are doing what they say. Bull, they are lying. The sad part is that the public, and worse yet, the governments are listening to them.

Draft legislation making the rounds in the U.S. Senate gives us a preview of the MPAA and RIAA's next target: your television and radio.

You say you want the power to time-shift and space-shift TV and radio? You say you want tomorrow's innovators to invent new TV and radio gizmos you haven't thought of yet, the same way the pioneers behind the VCR, TiVo, and the iPod did?

Well, that's not what the entertainment industry has in mind. According to them, here's all tomorrow's innovators should be allowed to offer you:

"customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers to the extent such use is consistent with applicable law."

Had that been the law in 1970, there would never have been a VCR. Had it been the law in 1990, no TiVo. In 2000, no iPod.

Now the RIAA and MPAA want to betray that legacy by passing laws that will regulate new technologies in advance and freeze fair use forever. If it wasn't a "customary historic use," federal regulators will be empowered to ban the feature, prohibiting innovators from offering it. If the feature is banned, courts will never have an opportunity to pass on whether the activity is a fair use.

Voila, fair use is frozen in time. We'll continue to have devices that ape the VCRs and cassette decks of the past, but new gizmos will have to be submitted to the FCC for approval, where MPAA and RIAA lobbyists can kill it in the crib.

The entry of satellite and digital radio into the technological mainstream is increasing tension with the record industry, which wants new rules governing how consumers can make digital copies of songs from the airwaves.

At issue are new devices that can record and save high-quality digital copies of tunes as they're being broadcast by these new networks. Recording executives are worried that consumers might increasingly opt to make such copies instead of purchasing the music on a commercial CD or from a download store like Apple Computer's iTunes.

Congress has historically come down on the side of the broadcasters in this debate, saying that radio stations can play whatever music they want while paying only a relatively small amount of money to songwriters and publishers for the right to "perform" the song on-air--and not paying record companies at all.

"Our concern remains that this is an effort to stifle technology before it has a chance to grow," said Consumer Electronics Association spokesman Jeff Joseph. "It has never been illegal to record a song off the radio in the context of fair use."

University of Michigan scientists have created the first quantum microchip, which could be a giant stride in the race to produce a new generation of brawny, super-fast computers.

So, on a semiconductor chip roughly the size of a postage stamp, the Michigan scientists designed and built a device known as an ion trap, which allowed them to isolate individual charged atoms and manipulate their quantum states.

Known as quantum superposition, the ability of the qubit to occupy two quantum states at once means that it can execute computations at an exponentially faster rate. Each time a qubit is added to a quantum system, its computing power doubles.

Will your notebook or desktop PC someday sport quantum innards? It's unlikely, at least in the immediate future. Researchers believe quantum systems will be much more efficient at rock-solid cryptography and mass database searches than running the latest version of Doom.

It certainly happened to you to be so frustrated by the 'reactions' of your computer that you wanted to break it. And the computer industry has noticed, trying to build hardware and software as user-friendly as possible. Still, it would be a good idea for your computer to guess when you're about to become mad at it. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany are working on computers that estimate our emotions. Their solution involves cameras and image analysis, but also special gloves equipped with sensors to record your heartbeat and breathing rate, your blood pressure or your skin temperature. And even if it's difficult to train a computer to interpret emotions, they have enough confidence in their system to demonstrate it at the next CeBIT in March 2006.

A service offering Mission Impossible-style text messages that "self-destruct" after they have been read has been launched.

Staellium UK said that its StealthText service will allow business executive dealing in sensitive information to send texts which will delete themselves from the recipient's mobile phone as soon as the person has read them.

Once opened, the message will disappear after about 40 seconds. Staellium said it has already had interest from financial services companies, the Ministry of Defence and celebrity agents.

"In spring 2006 we will be launching new services such as self-destruct email, voice and picture messages, so ultimately no one will ever have to worry about their messages or pictures ending up in the wrong hands ever again," she added.

What living person holds the most U.S. patents? In this era of information and lightning searches - when patents are both more valuable than ever and a source of raging controversy - you'd think such a simple question would be easy to answer.

America cannot identify its most prolific living inventors. We can't single out these people who should be considered national treasures.

As it turns out, the USPTO has but one guy who does statistical studies of the agency's 7 million-patent database. He last sorted for individual inventors in 1997, and has since been too busy with other projects to update that list.

Anyone can go to the USPTO's website, type in an individual's name, and get a list of all the patents granted that person. But you have to start with a name. You can't set up an open-ended search that finds the names that appear most often. There's no easy way to let the database generate a list of top inventors.

America's greatest inventor is apparently an obscure guy in Japan who makes stuff most people can't comprehend. And the nation's greatest native inventor seems to be a man who has come up with 100 different ways to make a flower pot.

Albert Swank Jr., a 55-year-old civil engineer in Anchorage, Alaska, is a man with a mission. He wants to install a nuclear particle accelerator in his home.

But when neighbors learned of plans to place the 20-ton device inside the house where Swank operates his engineering firm, their response was swift: Not in my backyard.

Local lawmakers rushed to introduce emergency legislation banning the use of cyclotrons in home businesses. State health officials took similar steps, and have suspended Swank's permit to operate cyclotrons on his property.

For Swank, the backyard cyclotron is a personal quest: He lost his father to cancer years ago, and he says his community needs the medical resource. He also wants to use it to inspire young people to learn about science.

But the Anchorage Assembly plan to hold an emergency public hearing on Dec. 20 to determine whether he will be permitted to install the device at his lifelong residence.