The US Congress, over the past few years, could only agree on the names for post offices.I hope they don’t get any ideas from this:

A draft motion seen by the Financial Times says that “unbundling [of] search engines from other commercial services” should be considered as a potential solution to Google’s dominance.

Whatever you think of the business practices of Google, they don’t deserve this nonsense from people who have no idea what they are doing. What idiots, here is the long form via: Google break-up plan emerges from Brussels – FT.com.

O’Reilly Media is a (the?) leading publisher of tech media.  They have been huge advocates of DRM free books that can be freely shared, but surprisingly they do not feel it hurts their bottom line. Now this.

If you know anyone, or the sons or daughters of anyone, who wants free access to some of the best content on technology, let them know about this. You can’t beat free.

Safari Brings America’s K-12 Free Books, Videos from O’Reilly.

Rather than exacerbating the Ebola panic, which in the US seems to have subsided a bit, this author digs deeper into the problem associated with these sorts of epidemic.

Without containment in the areas most ravaged by this disease, it doesn’t matter what we do here.  The disease will spread,it will get here in greater numbers, and then we will have a real problem, not a 24/7 panic du jour, soon to be replaced by another blonde abducted in the Caribbean.

Ebola: The Real Reason Everyone Should Panic — The Message — Medium.

This year marks the  35th anniversary of the introduction of the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc. Whether you love them or hate them, use them daily or only have a pedestrian interest in them, they have changed the way business is done and allowed people to have a better grasp on how their business is doing, or how it can do better.

Steven Levy wrote an article on spreadsheets in 1984, and he reprised it this year. It is a fascinating look into the world of personal computers in 1984, and you can see how they have changed our lives since then.

Enjoy a bit of history.

 A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge — Backchannel — Medium.