Score one for the federal government, I guess. The Texas Senate was forced to abandon their plans to pass a bill referred to as the “Groping Bill” after the Transportation Security Administration played the federal trump card. According to Forbes, …

Austin, Texas – which already plays home to tech companies Freescale Semiconductor and Dell – will soon boast a Facebook office, too.  A $1.4 million incentive package we reported on in late February has been approved, and Facebook’s decided to establish a team in Austin as a result.

Although it isn’t quite a done deal, Texas Governor Rick Perry seems to have more or less ensured that Facebook will open a sales and operations office in Austin.  Perry’s offered the company $1.4 million as an incentive to establish the branch and create some jobs.

Social networks such as Facebook are being used to express and communicate genuine personality, instead of an exaggerated identity, according to new research from psychologist Sam Gosling at The University of Texas at Austin.

"I was surprised by the findings because the widely held assumption is that people are using their profiles to promote an enhanced impression of themselves," said Gosling of the more than 700 million people worldwide who have online profiles.

Unless you are a college football fan (hang in there social media geeks, we’ll get to your stuff soon enough ) you probably wouldn’t even have a clue what this post is about. Honestly, unless you are a Texas Tech student or fan or resident of Lubbock, TX you may not know what a Red Raider is.

Amazon.com may soon have to pay the state of Texas back taxes with penalties and interest after the state learned the online retailer had a distribution center in Irving.

The Texas Comptroller’s Office is investigating if Amazon owes Texas possibly millions of dollars in uncollected sales taxes on purchases made by its customers in the state.

Unsurprisingly, it’s in Austin, where the local political climate hews much closer to the West Coast liberal leanings than other areas of the state.

Quite a few bloggers out there have clued-in to how using Eurekster’s Swickis on their blogs can be a cool feature enhancement, providing custom thematic search engines for their users.

A few days ago blog ad network Chitika released a study [PDF] co-sponsored by University of Texas, Dallas that projects revenue for the top 50,000 weblogs at $500 million.

The WorldWide Web Consortium (W3C), in May 0f 1999, issued Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which outlined methods of making web content easily accessible to the visually and physically impaired. In those guidelines the W3C stated plainly,

Hurricane Katrina devastated several states along the Gulf Coast region in what turned out to be one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history. Eighteen months last, the affected areas still find themselves struggling to rebuild their respective communities and revitalize their local economies.

In an attempt to give these areas a helping hand, Microsoft announced today its intention to donate $1.7 million in cash, software and specialized curriculum to nonprofit partners in Louisiana and Texas.

Marketing company Think Partnership Inc. has let its letter of intent to acquire struggling blog search engine Ice Rocket expire and, says MarketingPilgrim’s Andy Beal, the company will not be moving forward with the acquisition.

Web vigilantes will soon have their chance to be virtual citizens on patrol once Texas implements its plan to place webcams along its 1000 mile Mexico border. Gov. Rick Perry called the setup a “virtual wall.”

Electricity takes the world into the future. The statement sounds a little dated but with the recent FCC ruling that utility companies could run high-speed Internet access through existing electrical outlets. Broadband over Power Lines or BPL may just be the wave of the future.

After one positive test result for mad cow disease, the National Veterinary Service Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, tested 67 cows from the same Texas herd and found all subjects to be BSE free.

The United States Supreme Court, adding to a series of baffling rulings this week, ruled that displaying the Ten Commandments outside government buildings was more acceptable than displaying them inside government buildings-except for the display in the Supreme Court itself.

Right now, the technology will be limited to users in South Korea, using a special broadcast format.

The last time I looked at the sign-up wiki for the London geek dinner next month, there were some 80 names. I looked again just now – and it’s 127.

Oki Electric Industry has signed a contract to acquire the driver chip business for large TFT-LCDs from Texas Instruments Japan.

Internet sevice provider EarthLink has claimed a victory over two men accused of using EarthLink’s service to send large amounts of spam.

Joined by Microsoft, the state of Texas has filed a lawsuit against what they term as “the world’s fourth largest spammer.”