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Adidas has some smart new shoes. Not smart in the sense of look good, but smart in the sense that they have intelligence. They seem like overkill to me and are a little out of my price range ($250) but I bet we see more things like this in the future - clothing that adjusts to maintain human comfort and performance will be commonplace someday.
Google has a new open source site. The initial projects are oriented around high-performance computing and Python. Not a whole lot there yet, but an interesting start.
Maybe Congress will actually do something worthwhile besides idly chat about Social Security (without benefit cuts, they are wasting everyone's time on the whole debate).
At a minimum, companies that sell information should be liable for cleaning up the messes they create when people get their identities stolen through their negligence - actual damages X3 might be adequate to compensate victims.
Some interesting comments from Rod Johnson. He is a very smart guy who has been (rightly, IMHO) critical of some aspects of J2EE. The real danger to .NET is if people actually listen to him and lighten up on the Java standards fights. The easier J2EE is to work with, the worse for .NET. Right now, it isn't easy enough.
The recent revelations about ChoicePoint are disturbing. Here is a company selling your information to anyone with a credit card and they lying about past fraud. If information is power, the private bureaus that control credit informaiton in the US are much too powerful for the level of accoutability they have to the consumer whos information they possess.
If you are willing to lie a little bit, you can get a credit report on anyone through services like (the horribly misnamed) SafeRent.It seems to me that no data about me should be released without my express consent. Sure, that might not be easy to make fraud-proof and would add a few hoops to jump through when I want to buy a car or something, but would serve to help keep private information private.
If you are ever in need of a decent, free sound file converter, check out Switch. I didn't give it an extensive test, but it worked well for the task I had at hand - converting some WMA files to MP3. The UI was easy to figure out, the conversion was quick and the sound quality was good. What else can you ask?
SAP has been making a number of moves lately to boost their share of the enterprise systems market. The most recent aquisition of Retek looks like it will fill a gap in the current offering (and of course, they will have to rename the Retek Xi product because SAP already has a product called Exchange Infrastructure, XI for short). It will be fun and interesting to see what Oracle's response to this is.