Not one to let politicians bogart the limelight, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is coming to UT Austin next Wednesday, February 20, for a special student- and faculty-only lecture....

A lawsuit against the City of Kyle for violation of the federal Fair Housing Act started yesterday. The suit was filed by the national and Austin branches of the NAACP, the Home Builders Association of Greater Austin and the National Association of Home Builders. It alleges that Kyle has increased the cost of local housing by instituting revised zoning ordinances. According to the NAACP, the resulting increase in prices disproportionately affects minorities and the Fair Housing Act prohibits cities from zoning in a way that excludes housing for certain classes of people, even if officials did not intentionally discriminate....

New study out of NYU "discovers" that blogosphere "chatter" about an album is directly correlated to that album's sales. Yahoo will reject Microsoft's buy-out bid of $44.6 billion, claiming that the figure "massively undervalues" the company. Analysts, on the other hand, believe that Yahoo's acceptance of the buy-out offer is only a matter of time. Today, Austin's City Hall will discuss a recent study showing the economic impact of a proposed medical school for the Austin area....

Hillary and Obama play nice. Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo. Drug resistant flu virus on the rise. U.S. Economy loses 17,000 jobs in January....

According to Microsoft, Santa likes to talk about oral sex. The space shuttle heads to the International Space Station this Saturday. The CIA destroyed vidoetaped evidence of their interrogations of two top terror suspects in 2002. Rest assured, this is probably an isolated incident. A positive sign for our economy. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney is a mormon and nobody cares. The U.S. House sends kickass energy bill to Senate. City ordered to put......

A bat found at Leander High School tested positive for rabies Leadership Austin's next project: finding a new chief UT nabbed a $1 million federal grant to fund grad school programs for low-income, first-generation and other minority students Happy National Coming Out Day! Some company named "Digital Reg of Texas" is suing Apple, Hustler.com, Microsoft, Playboy, Audible, Sony, Macrovision, and Blockbuster, claiming the companies violated a 1998 patents on digital rights management technology Environment......

Violent crime goes up in the US; so do arrests for pot. Apparently, nobody in Iran is gay. Even gay people. It's been fifty years since Little Rock, and now we have Jena. Progress... If Microsoft buys Facebook, will it become lame? Or don't the corporate kids care? India gets meta with the outsourcing. Kiefer Sutherland arrested for DUI. Maybe he's drinking to drown the guilt over his torture-show? Newest sex tape scandal features...Meg......

Two weeks ago, Katherine Gregor's Chronicle column discussed a recent study by professors Louise Harpman and Jason Sowell from UT Architecture, sponsored by the Downtown Austin Alliance. The study concluded that Wooldridge Square Park (between Guadalupe/San Antonio and 9th/10th Street) needs more community support, event programming, and landscaping improvements. Wooldridge Square, along with Republic Square and Brush Square, was one of four public squares included in the original grid for the city of Austin......

Cedar Park, Pflugerville and Round Rock placed among Forbes magazine's fifty fastest growing suburbs in the United States from 2000-2006. Among the many Texas cities on the list, Round Rock was 12th, Pflugerville was 7th and Cedar Park was 3rd. Forbes discussed some of the tradeoffs of unregulated suburban sprawl: low housing costs, but high transportation costs - providing the example that in Houston, transportation costs are the No. 1 household expense, according to......

The Historic Landmark Commission will consider at its meeting tonight whether to designate Harthan Street as a Local Historic District. Harthan Street is a short, dead-end street north of Sixth and west of Lamar. It would be the first Local Historic District in Austin. The "Local Historic District" designation is more restrictive than the "National Register Historic District" designation already in place in many Austin neighborhoods. With a "Local Historic District" designation, all building......

Foreclosures in Travis and Williamson counties are at their lowest level since December 2002, but 78664 in Round Rock had the 182nd most foreclosures (by zip code) in the country, and the sixth most in Texas, according to a list published by Money Magazine. Most of the remaining Texas zips on the list are in suburbs outside Dallas, although 78660 in Pflugerville represents at number 450. Image from Microsoft Live (view of 78664).......

Last year, Microsoft came to central Texas looking for a spot to build a new $550 million data center. Austin lost out to San Antonio mostly because the City of San Antonio offered the company a better break on electricity rates for the new project. Since then, Mayor Will Wynn and the Austin City Council have been pursuing a new proposal to cut electric rates for certain types of large high-tech companies in order to......

Microsoft rolled into town yesterday on its Family Gaming bus, stopping at the state capitol as part of a national marketing campaign showing off "appropriate gaming and entertainment choices for their family." The "Safety is no game. Is your family set?" campaign sees the software giant partnering with Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Best Buy to teach parents how to limit their kids' exposure to raunchy video games and movie content. "With success......

On Tuesday, the American -ists will be celebrating democracy and hitting the polls, letting politicians know what they really think. It just made us wonder: if it were up to the -ist-a-verse, what would we be voting for? Londonist votes for better skincare, alternative spaces for art, cute little birds and the men who keep them, and concrete. Lots of concrete. Shanghaiist votes for one of the Bee Gees and Air Supply (it's a double-ticket),......

Local chipmaker AMD is dropping $4.2 billion in cold hard cash and 57 million in shares to acquire high-end graphics chip maker ATI. The move is expected to strategically prepare AMD for the mythical release of Vista, Microsoft’s new version of Windows, which has been repeatedly pushed back. According to a press release from AMD’s site, the acquisition will result in $7.1 billion in combined sales and 14,900 total employees. The company will maintain......

The big boys at Microsoft are looking for a home for a new $600 million data center that would bring with it 100 or so jobs. The frontrunner appears to be San Antonio, but another Texas city (read: Austin) is also in the running. Microsoft and some of their real estate partners have visited the Alamo City a few times and seem serious about building there, and while the new data center would not......

Austin is getting a new public Art Installation. Today at 11am, Mayor Will Wynn and Gibson Guitars will be part of a ceremony kicking-off the project in front of City Hall. Austin GuitarTown is going to feature guitars scattered around the city, placed in front of landmarks and significant businesses, that are painted by local musicians and artisans. NASA is planning to bomb the moon in order to study dust particles that come from......

Now we know they were just slowly trying to make us dumber on the way to class as if we needed more help. Diesel exhaust proves to be an issue on the big yellow bus. Former Iraqui leader Saddam Hussein and his cohorts are faced with new charges; they are accused of and wlll be tried for genocide for the over 5000 killings in Halabja. Ex-Lieutenant Colonel Yousef al-Suwaileh won the Kuwaiti election on......

DCist helps us make more sense of the world this week. Posts like this concert review are the reason for Scott Stapp. DCist also enumerates the reasons for playing ultimate frisbee, Condi's tight buns, their love of a local convenience store, and their jealousy of a person in Seattle calling the city. LAist documented graf artist Banksy's most recent visit to LA in one two three posts. They also found the best possible use......

Lately, the music industry has been making more moves than a blog editor at a GLO show. Here's a run down on everything you need to fuel your hatred of corporate music and Nashville. If you don’t hate Music City, move there, it took us exactly six hours to develop a serious loathing we allowed to fester for six years. James Blunt, unsurprisingly called Blunt the C*nt by his sassy British friends, became the......

There seem to be a lot of double standards in place when it comes to regulating Free Speech around the world. Joseph "Jack" Thomas, an Austrailian-Muslim convert, had a hard time with his conversion because he loves his beer. On Sunday, a 22-year old in Detroit shoots his girlfriend's mother while she's attending Sunday Services. While the 'Horns men's basketball team looks ahead to the Big 12 and NCAA tournaments, take a peek at......

-Police in the UK are trying to figure out the true identity of the fake Earl of Buckingham, who "married under the false name, passed it to his children, laid claim to the Buckingham crest and promised his teenage son that the peerage would one day be his." Sounds almost too awesome to be true. -The crazy woman in Houston who drowned her five children back in 2001 has had her murder convictions thrown......

The University of Texas at Austin's own robot soccer team, Austin Villa, has returned home from Atlanta where they placed third in the RoboCup US Open 2005. RoboCup is a relatively new project aimed at promoting research in AI, robotics, computational perception and related fields. The first US Open was held at Carnegie Mellon in 2003. During the competition, the Austin Villas (not to be confused with the Aston Villas from whence UT derived......

Having only begun distributing the superior Firefox browser since November of last year, the fact that in a few months it has been downloaded by such a wide audience is simply uncanny. It's success can be largly attributed to two factors: 1) The almost fanatical devotion to the unique browser by everyone who has had the chance to use it, thus adding great credibility to the oldest of advertising strategies, word-of-mouth. 2) It doesn't......

Austinite Charlie Gough went from a UT undergrad pursuing a computer science degree to Time’s 100 Most Influential People list, all without a diploma. Bungie game studio (which later was bought out by Microsoft) scooped up the one of three creators of Halo back in 1988. The video game was pretty much responsible for making the Xbox a necessity for gamers. Halo 2 isn’t doing bad either, with Microsoft reporting selling $125 worth of games......