About 10 days ago, Steve Ballmer indicated that he didn't share Google's views with regards to China; Ballmer said that Microsoft would continue operating in China regardless of recent hacks and a policy of censorship. Today, Bill Gates more or less echoed those sentiments. Some free speech advocates might have hoped Gates would feel otherwise; after all, now that he's let Ballmer take the reigns at Microsoft,

Google has a post up on the Google News blog today talking a little bit about how it recrawls news content in order to provide the most up to date content and eliminate dead links. "How do you balance looking for new content against the need to update older content? How can you make sure the content is fresh, doesn't link to dead pages or display headlines that have been changed by the publisher?" asks Google.

Data breach incidents cost U.S. companies $204 per compromised customer record in 2009, compared to $202 in 2008, according to a new study from the Ponemon Institute and security firm PGP. Even with an overall drop in the number of reported breaches (498 in 2009 vs. 657 in 2008), the average total per-incident costs in 2009 were $6.75 million compared to an average of $6.65 million in 2008.

A couple of important questions regarding Chirp - AKA the first Official Twitter Developer Conference - have finally been answered. Would-be attendees now know which dates to be in San Francisco (April 14th and 15th) and how much money they'll have to spend ($469). These facts were posted on the official Chirp homepage today, and the first 100 tickets (out of a total of 800) were released, too. Interest seems to be high so far. Of course, a lot of details remain unannounced.

If you are not familiar with GeoEye, it's the company behind the GeoEye-1 satellite. This is a satellite with a very high-resolution camera on it that takes pictures of the world, and Google uses imagery from that in Google Earth and Google Maps. Back in September, GeoEye announced the one-year anniversary of the launch of the GeoEye-1. Since then, it had imaged every continent in the world,

by Mike Krumboltz The Lost Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X... and now the Sandwich Generation? Both President Obama and Vice President Biden are invoking the tasty term while addressing the need for government to help the middle class with tax credits. So, who are the sandwichers? They may sound like a group of people who grew up on hoagies, but this sandwich is more metaphorical than meaty.

There were plenty of cool things on display at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this month. The Waveface stuff from ASUS was proof of that. Another example would be the cell phone watch from Kempler & Strauss - the W Phonewatch. According to the company, it's the world's smallest full-function GSM unlocked cellphone watch. It's bluetooth-enabled, and works seamlessly with existing in-car and in-ear Bluetooth devices,

by Claudine Zap Our top picks from the day's hottest searches. Sasha Cohen (Searches increased by 1,272%). While the former Olympic medalist showed grace and poise at the figure skating championships, it probably wasn't enough to get her  to Vancouver . New Orleans Saints (+524%). The team is headed to its first Super Bowl . Johhny Depp (+351%). The Internet says Depp is dead, but rumors of his demise are greatly exaggerated . Brad and Angelina split (+421%).

The Google-ization of AOL continued today as Jeff Reynar, who used to work for the search giant as an engineering manager, joined the company. AOL's appointed Reynar Head of Technology for Engineering and Products in New York. We should note that Reynar didn't head to AOL straight from Google; he spent the last 18 or so months as the CTO of DBT Labs. So it's not like AOL lured the man directly away from the Googleplex (where he spent four and a half years) and all its perks.

Google is updating its search results to provide fact-based answers directly in the results. The feature is called Answer Highlighting and it bolds facts in the text description area of a result. For example, if you're curious as to how tall the Empire State building is and query "empire state building height," you used to get a direct link to that info in Wikipedia's text description. Now, the fact is directly included in the Wikipedia listing.