NEWS
Links to stories over the past few days concerning Montana's IT sector

State's wages remain rock bottom
12/31/2002: Great Falls Tribune: The average wage in Montana was the lowest in the nation in 2001, the third consecutive year at the bottom of a 22-year slide triggered by major changes in the state's natural resource industries during the 1980s.

Few tech jobs in Wyoming
12/28/2002: Billings Gazette: Wyoming gained only 34 high-technology jobs from 2000 to 2001, according to a study.

A High-Tech Fix for One Corner of India
12/28/2002: NY Times: Soon after N. Chandrababu Naidu became chief minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh in August 1995, he ordered that a partly built and abandoned government building here on the edge of the city be finished and turned into a college for computer software engineers.

Video Lottery moving 45 jobs to N.J.
12/27/2002: Billings Gazette: Video Lottery Consultants is moving another of its departments out of state within the next 18 months, affecting 45 jobs, company officials announced Tuesday.

Lewis & Clark Revisited: Satellite Archeology Digs Out The Past
12/24/2002: Sapce.com: The U.S. Congress made an Apollo-like decision nearly 200 years ago to dispatch an expedition of explorers into uncharted territory. Back then the financial bar to probe the unknown was a bit lower than the $25 billion needed to hurl human adventurers to the Moon.

Activist network shut down by Verio, Dow Chemical
12/24/2002: Press release: Bowing to pressure from the Dow Chemical Corporation, the internet company Verio has booted the activist-oriented Thing.net from the Web.

School debt drives grad out of state
12/23/2002: Missoulian: rian Ehlert, a University of Montana junior, studies for a final exam last week on the UM campus. The Havre native would like to teach in Montana when he graduates with degrees in chemistry and teaching, but says that the state's low teacher wages will probably mean he has to work elsewhere to repay his $20,000 student debt.

Officials say state's poor foster care performance really a computer data problem
12/23/2002: Great Falls Tribune: Montana's foster care system fails to meet national standards in two key areas, but state officials blame computer problems rather than poor care.

Legacy of Power Cost Manipulation
12/22/2002: Two years ago this month, a record was set at the height of the West Coast energy crunch: an hour of electric power was sold for $3,250 ó more than a hundred times what the same small block had cost a year earlier.

Committee: Scrap computer system
12/19/2002: A key legislative committee told the Martz administration Wednesday it should pull the plug on remnants of a problem-plagued and undependable computer system that has cost the state $37 million and still doesn't work properly.