I’ve had a couple days now with Windows 7 and it is certainly an improvement over both Vista and XP, requiring slightly less resources than either (significantly less than Vista), booting faster, and offering superior usability. Yeah, but why does it cost so much? I know why.

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Hey, we can’t all have careers at Google (GOOG). Sometimes when you work in IT, you have to hold your nose and hope for the best.

Last year we named “The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT,” but we barely scratched the topic’s grime-caked surface. In the world of technology, there’s plenty of dirt to go around.

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The digital Disneyland of the future–where we freely work and play online–may be at risk. Why? Because, some argue, broadband carriers can’t support it. The Internet’s “free ride” culture has led to more people downloading gigabytes of data at practically no cost. Even if broadband infrastructure’s capacity doubled or tripled, there’s no avoiding the equivalent of an abrupt work stoppage.

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The increased monitoring and profiling of Internet users by companies such as Google and its DoubleClick online advertising subsidiary is widely seen as one of the biggest threats to online privacy. But in reality, said university professor Paul Ohm, the potential for the same kind of activities by ISPs poses a much greater privacy risk.

Ohm, an associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder, published a research paper titled “The Rise and Fall of Invasive ISP Surveillance” late last month. The 77-page document chronicles the different market pressures and technology advances that are shaping the behavior of ISPs and warns of “a coming storm of unprecedented and invasive” surveillance of users by such companies.

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I bet you thought people banked in the Cayman Islands because they serve fruity cocktails with tiny parasols in them while you’re waiting for your checks to clear. Well, you’re only partly right. The other reason people keep accounts in the Caymans is to avoid paying taxes and/or to launder their ill-gotten gains. For many of us this is not news–or at least it wouldn’t be, if not for the brain-dead actions of one such bank and the magistrate they duped into being their monkey. Swiss Bank Julius Baer used its legal muscle to convince a U.S. judge to close down the WikiLeaks.org domain, because the site contains documents that allegedly show Baer is exchanging its clients’ dirty old dineros for fresh clean ones with just a hint of mint.

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