President Bush's war against nature

In 2003, the Bush administration's assault on the environment became so pervasive and virulent as to be almost comic. Programs to weaken regulations, increase pollution, and permit more logging went by the Orwellian names "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests."

On the 30th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, the feds announced plans to weaken rules on the importation of endangered species to the United States by circuses and hunters. And it was revealed that administration officials covered up the toxic fallout in New York City from 9/11. As for that pesky problem global warming, the feds prescribed a stiff dose of further study, thanks.

The Bush administration took industry's side at every turn, even backing carmakers in their battle against the state of California. It has been up to the states to rebel when the relaxing of green regulations truly goes too far.

On one occasion, when federal officials were invited to explain their "green" policies, they were missing in action, prompting California's attorney general Bill Lockyer to quip: "They're getting a little thin-skinned about trying to defend their environmental record, because it's essentially indefensible."

SCO attacks Linux

In the world of open-source software, Microsoft has always been public enemy No. 1 -- but this year the SCO Group, a small firm in Utah, seems to have dethroned Bill Gates. SCO believes that Linux is illegal. The company, which owns all rights to the original Unix source code, says that the celebrated open-source operating system is nothing but "an unauthorized derivative of Unix." In March, the company sued IBM -- a longtime partner of SCO -- for billions, alleging that the firm had stolen SCO's property and stuffed it into Linux.

The case quickly achieved trial-of-the-century status among Linux devotees. Because the company has been slow to reveal the specific code that it says IBM introduced into Linux, SCO's claims have been widely dismissed by most experts. But fans of open-source software also appreciate the high stakes involved in the case -- SCO plans to argue that the General Public License, or GPL, the revered free software license that makes Linux possible, is invalid, an argument that, if accepted by the courts, could upturn the entire open-source movement.

But even if SCO doesn't manage to invalidate the GPL, its attacks could very well contribute to a climate of fear surrounding Linux -- a possibility that will surely be savored by the folks in Redmond.

Hydrogen to the rescue?

In 2003 the Bush administration bet that hydrogen will become what a new generation of cleaner fuel-cell-powered cars will run on, announcing a $1.2 billion Freedom Fuel initiative in January.

Excitement over the coming "hydrogen economy" triggered a wave of technological innovation and investment, with start-ups competing to create the next-generation fuel-cell engines and a fuel infrastructure to power cars, trucks, buses and even boats. The goal: use technology to make the United States less dependent on foreign oil, and ease greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

But with war protesters against the invasion of Iraq adopting the mantra "no blood for oil," and climatologists growing ever more urgent in their concerns about climate change, some environmental groups saw the focus on a coming hydrogen economy -- which always seems to remain 10 or 20 years away -- as an industry-giveaway ploy to avoid regulating automakers and polluting industries right now. Even China, in its first such attempt at regulation, adopted stricter fuel-economy standards than the United States.

Some boosters of a hydrogen future also wonder where all that hydrogen is going to come from. But those too impatient to wait for technology to solve the problem in a few decades made their own biodiesel, or bought a hybrid-electric car.

Anita Borg

The technology industry lost its most prominent, respected and effective advocate for women in 2003: technologist Anita Borg.

Borg, who died of brain cancer at age 54 on April 6, founded the Institute for Women and Technology as well as the Systers mailing list, where a generation of women in computer science met and learned from each other online.

Remembered by her peers as "not just another nerdy white guy," Borg set her sights beyond merely increasing diversity among engineers. She strove to teach geeks, like her, how to take seriously the innovative ideas of the "nontechnical."

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