In a speech to the House of Representatives Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, George David, chairman of United Technologies Corp. said, "we need to say to our world that we are going to have a cost of carbon, whether it's cap-and-trade or a carbon tax.??? He added that the cost of energy will be high for a long time.

If John McCain becomes president, he proposes having 45 new nuclear reactors built in the United States by 2030. He doesn't really see renewable energy happening without nuclear power.

Is health a private matter? Since the release of the new iPhone, Apple shareholders have been asking about Steve Job???s health. He looked gaunt at the announcement, which brought up initial?? concern. Do the shareholders have a right to know the status of his health?

Why study interruption?

I became interested in it from my own personal experience. I moved here from Europe back in 2000. I was stunned by the amount of multitasking that I was doing here in the U.S. and I was wondering if other people were experiencing it as well. Anecdotally, people were reporting they were crushed by all of these different projects. People's lives as information workers involve different kinds of technologies, and they create even more of a force for interruption and different places where we can focus our attention.

In the recent issue of Fast Company, Linda Tischler writes in, "The Eco-Home of Tomorrow," "Forward-thinking architects and real-estate developers are already envisioning the post-bust cycle of home building. And smaller is better."

Apart from becoming more and more unpleasant, recently business travel is also becoming far less necessary. With videoconferencing technologies improving and fuel prices rising, more businessmen and women seem to be choosing the option to stay put and use new technology to cut down on travel.

Last month, the SimCity box set went on sale. It included five different versions of the popular city-building simulation game, which was first published for PCs in 1989. The Sims games were not only one of the best-selling franchises of the past two decades -- they pioneered an entire category of simulation games that require quicker problem-solving skills than trigger fingers.

President Bush has continually expressed his opposition to a housing bill that proposes to include $4 billion in grants for local governments to buy and refurbish foreclosed properties.

Nobel laureate and former US vice-president Al Gore recently made a speech advocating that Americans abandon fossil fuels completely over the next ten years. His solution is ???that the price of carbon-based energy include the costs of the environmental damage it causes. I have long supported a sharp reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made up in CO2 taxes. We should tax what we burn, not what we earn. This is the single most important policy change we can make.

Although Toyota's Prius has piqued interest, SUVs are still selling. "Surprisingly, there is still a good majority of people buying full-sized pickups and SUVs," Mark Bruschi, general manager at Shore Toyota, told The Press of Atlantic City. "We are off about 15 percent for those vehicles from where we were."

Apart from the incentives offered, Bruschi reports that SUVs are doing well because people have kids, they're going skiing, or to the beach, or towing their trailers.