Hitachi has reached a milestone in tech's continuing arms race, announcing today that it will sell the first 1-terabyte hard drive.

It finally happened.

TECH CHRONICLES / A daily dose of postings from the Chronicle's technology blog (sfgate.com/blogs/tech)

IT�S odd, the feeling of comfort you get staring up at a 103-foot-tall intercontinental ballistic missile from the bottom of a hardened silo buried in the Arizona desert.

It�s not that there is any joy in knowing that an ICBM like this, the centerpiece of the Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita, Ariz., about 20 miles south of Tucson, could have been launched in just 58 seconds, hurling a city-destroying nuclear warhead at the Soviet Union. Armageddon is not a pleasant prospect.

No, the sense of comfort in seeing a Titan II comes from knowing that it was never launched.

Strange Love - New York Times

LG Electronics plans to shortly put on sale a high-definition video disc player compatible with both the HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc standards, it said Thursday.

Finally!

LG to show dual HD DVD/Blu-ray player - Yahoo! News

The companies behind an encryption system for high-definition DVDs are looking into a hacker's claim that he has cracked the code protecting the new discs from piracy, a spokesman for one of the companies said on Thursday.

A few pinheads at the top of these companies truly believe that with strong enough drm, they will actually be able to obtain blood from a turnip. More's the pity for them. And their companies. And their shareholders.

Media, tech cos probe possible high-def DVD hack - washingtonpost.com

Samsung is taking fuel cell technology for notebooks to the next level by showcasing a new DMFC (Direct Methanol Fuel Cell) dock that can power a Q35 ultraportable notebook for 8 hours a day for a full month. According to Samsung press release, the fuel cell has an energy density of 650Wh/L and total energy storage of 1,200Wh.

DailyTech - New Samsung Fuel Cell Dock Powers Laptop for a Full Month

Vanguard has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to offer a new international equity index fund: Vanguard® FTSE All-World ex USA Index Fund.

Vanguard − Vanguard to broaden international offerings

The Sunday NYT features a story on the Christopher Soghoian case [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

For theater on a grand scale, you can’t do better than the audience-participation dramas performed at airports, under the direction of the Transportation Security Administration.

Of course, we never see the actual heart of the security system: the government’s computerized no-fly list, to which our names are compared when we check in for departure. The T.S.A. is much more talented, however, in the theater arts than in the design of secure systems. This becomes all too clear when we see that the agency’s security procedures are unable to withstand the playful testing of a bored computer-science student.

I guess Matt Blaze hasn't had much occasion to be impressed with his charges since he left industry for academia:

"If a grad student can figure it out," he said, "we can assume agents of Al Qaeda can do the same."

Blaze does offer a nod to the FBI, who gave the green light to his paper, Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems.

Theater of the Absurd at the TSA

The purpose of this web site, operated by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum in cooperation with the Packard Humanities Institute, is to make Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's musical compositions widely and conveniently accessible to the public, for personal study, scholarly and educational use. This web site contains the musical text of the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (www.nma.at), issued by the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg in colaboration with the Mozart cities of Augsburg, Salzburg, and Vienna since 1954.

Outstanding!

Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg

John Strassburger, the president of Ursinus College, a small liberal arts institution here in the eastern Pennsylvania countryside, vividly remembers the day that the chairman of the board of trustees told him the college was losing applicants because of its tuition.

It was too low.

In Tuition Game, Popularity Rises With Price - New York Times

By the 2008 presidential election, voters around the country are likely to see sweeping changes in how they cast their ballots and how those ballots are counted, including an end to the use of most electronic voting machines without a paper trail, federal voting officials and legislators say.

What a mess...

Changes Are Expected in Voting by 2008 Election - New York Times