I'm always interested in the ideas of technologies that are inspired by nature - and not just one feature or item, but by technologies that take on ecological principles to better interact with their environment and look to sustainability. With that in mind, I was reading about some new technologies around the corner... (all from Economist issue June 12th-18th 2010)

Good post and discussion on Basalla's 1998 book 'The Evolution of Technology':

The BBC's new series, The History of the World in 100 Objects, is very cool.  It's especially good for somebody like me who has been studying the evolution of technology.  Well worth a listen - I will be very interested in the later programs to see if they will take on the issue of virtual object - such as software - still things that we have made - but now digital rather than physical...

Getting back to the question of if there is a technical solution that would ever be able to stop copyright violations on p2p, a couple of interesting blog posts that might back my eariler hypothesis that it is simply not possible to stop.  First off is the results from a study into anonymizing service use in Sweden.

Woo woo!!... the schedule for eCommEurope now has me on it...

There is another story in the media about the ongoing debate about what (if anything) the government should be doing in response to online piracy;

A rift has opened between music's creators and its record labels, with a broad alliance of musicians, songwriters and producers fiercely criticising the business secretary Lord Mandelson's plans to cut off the broadband connections of internet users who illegally download music.

This is a great little video from TED Talks by Kevin Kelly;

Tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly asks "What does technology want?" and discovers that its movement toward ubiquity and complexity is much like the evolution of life.

Video link here...

Recently NASA used evolutionary algorithms to create a better antenna.  This is not true evolution in the sense that the fitness landscape (the peak towards which the evolutionary process moves) has been pre-conceived - that of a better antenna, which a set of parameters that would describe that this should be.  However is does demonstrate the power of an evolutionary process to generate a result that it hard to envision at the star

There is an interesting article in the current issue of New Scientist, an essay by W.Brian Arthur on his theory of technological evolution;