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Anyone who uses email regularly probably already knew this, but it’s official: spam is now two-thirds of all email, and in the US, it’s 83% of all email. Ouch! At my company, we already use blocklists to reject something like half of all email that hits our servers, and our customers are still pummeled with spam in their inboxes. Email used the be one of the relatively ‘easy’ Internet services to offer, and now it’s quickly becoming one of the hardest. If you happen to be a customer and are wondering what we are doing about it, rest assured that we are working very hard on some stuff to help ease the pain.

According to some new research, it appears that most of the dinosaurs that went extinct may have died within minutes to hours of the asteroid collision with Earth. The collision may have generated as much energy as 100 million megatons of TNT warming up the atmosphere enough to incinerate or roast unprotected life.

An ongoing technology project to create the US Military of 2010 is doomed to failure, or at least doomed to not meeting its time and financial goals and creating a lot of substandard technology. This seems to be part of a theme I’ve been noticing lately. Technology is supposed to be all about taking steps forward while minimizing any steps backward, but in our excitement to achieve what we think of as ‘the future’ we are pushing things ahead in a way that may be resulting in the steps back being greater than the steps forward. When you’re talking about a cellphone, that just means disgruntled and annoyed customers. When you’re talking about the military, that means disgruntled and dead soldiers. This gradual unraveling of our technological advantage may just become the undoing of the United States itself, but I wouldn’t be so bold as to make a claim that grand, haha.

Anyway, it’s interesting that all of this is happening in the first decade post ‘The Year Two-Thousand’. I think that means my old rantings and ravings about the importance of the turn of the millennium may have had something going on.

Author Shelley Jackson has written a short story and is publishing it through a series of 2095 tattoos, each one a single word and on a single person. People from all over the world are helping to publish the story and no one yet knows what the story is about or even more than a few words of it. The author plans to share the finished story only with the participants. It sounds like a publicity stunt to me, but I still think its awesome.

The RIAA has asked the FCC to consider imposing a set of broadcast flags on digital radio. Digital television already has similar broadcast flags. The flags are intended to prevent end-user from recording and distributing the digital signals over the Internet. Any device sold in the US would have to conform to the rules and would be required to behave in a way dictated by someone other than the owner of the device. This could potentially prevent digital radio from being recorded at all. If you had high hopes of being able to record digital radio programming to take with you on the road, your bubble may have just burst. I love how the future keeps entering our daily lives and is never as good as it seemed like it was going to be. We’ll have more access to more movies, music, radio, news, porn, etc than ever before… but we won’t be able to do what we want in the way we want with any of it. Fantastic.

Sometimes I feel like I’m fighting with my life. I feel like the events happening around me are constantly pushing me away from where I had planned to be going. I feel like there’s never enough time to do all the things I want to do as well as all the things I need to do. Unfortunately, the needs always have to come before the wants. It just stresses me out to think about all the things I could be doing and ends up just slowing me down even more, but it’s hard not to feel like life is cruising along at top speed. Every moment counts and you have to have yourself focused on the things you’re trying to achieve. I guess the trick is making sure you don’t forget to notice all the things you already have achieved.

Verizon is building a nationwide fiberoptic network to offer video and television services as well as high speed Internet connections at speeds of 30 Mpbs. They have to do it to compete with the cable companies that are now starting to offer VoIP phone service over their cable lines. If Verizon pulls it off, along with the other phone companies, this could mean great things for us home users.

Apparently hybrid cars don’t actually get the great gas mileage the EPA ratings indicate. Angry car-owners are holding their fists up in the air to the car companies, but the car companies claim it’s a side-effect of out of date testing methods employed by the EPA. Still, you don’t hear the car companies mentioning that when you go into purchase a hybrid.

On top of this, something like half of all the energy consumed and emissions generated by a car are during its manufacturing process. Buying an old Volvo is probably better for the environment than buying a brand-new hybrid. Still, every little technology step in the right direction is worth supporting in my opinion.

The Make-A-Wish Foundation has helped a 9 year old boy with Leukemia create a computer game featuring a hero that battles cancer cells. Eric Johnston of LucasArts volunteered to help make Ben’s wish come true and the result is now available for Mac and Windows. Sounds like an all-around great thing to me.

I had a brain flash last night and I think I’ve figured out what the next Apple digital lifestyle product is going to be. I won’t bore you with my thought process, so without further ado:

The next Apple digital lifestyle device will be essentially a hardware version of iTunes with ethernet (wireless optional). It will connect to your television and stereo and will come with a combination DVD and CD-R (combo drive in Apple lingo) as well as an internal hard drive. It will allow you to import music into MP3 and AAC from CDs as well as burn playlists onto CD-Rs. It will also allow you to browse through the iTunes Music Store and buy music with a remote control from the comfort of your couch. Purchased music will be downloaded directly to the device. You would authorize it as one of your 5 computers (is this why the limit was raised from 3 to 5 computers?) and you would be able to play any music shared from other iTunes on your home network. It would share its own music so you could play it on your home computers as well. It would sync directly with iPods.

I suspect the device would also include DVR functionality (perhaps licensed from Tivo, but Apple is more likely to create their own) and it would of course act as a DVD player. The slam dunk would be the ability to easily copy music, photo, and video (and other?) files back and forth over the network so it could act as your local file server.

Unfortunately, I predict the device will be priced at around $600 which is a little too high for me to buy one right away. That’s the way Apple seems to like to do things.

Only time will tell if I’m right!