All the top Seattle, Washington news.

While most of us are gripping beers around the barbecue this weekend, the chief executive of Nintendo subsidiary Siras will be clinging to a rope on the side of Mt. McKinley in Alaska. Peter Junger's a hardcore mountaineer well on his way to climbing the highest mountains all 50 states and McKinley's one of the last hard ones on his list. Redmond-based Siras offers technology that companies use to "fingerprint" merchandise to reduce fraudulent returns and verify warranty eligiblity. The company's Web site has a link to follow Junger's progress - he's using a GPS device from Spot Adventures…

Comcast is shuffling a bunch of channels in early August in King County, including a few moves related to its digital conversion. Mostly affected are customers who already have digital cable service. Starting around Aug. 5, Digital Starter subscribers will start getting high-definition versions of 28 channels such as MTV, Comedy Central, Travel, BET, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The full list was printed in the paper's legal notices section. Digital Preferred customers will get four additional sports channels - NBA TV, NFL Network, NFL Network HD and NHL Network - but lose ESPN Classic to the…

PCs with USB 3.0 connections could start appearing by the end of the year, boosting throughput 10 times over USB 2.0 - fast enough to transfer 5 gigabits of data per second.. That's according to a Nikkei Electronics Asia report (which I found via Microsoft product planner Alan Cheslow's Twitter feed and blog). The report said NEC - the leading USB 3.0 manufacturer so far - is going to begin large-scale production of USB 3.0 host controllers in September. NEC expects USB 3.0 to quickly become mainstream. It's anticipating 140 million PCs with USB 3.0 will ship in 2011, and 340 million in 2012.

A crazy thought: Is Dell toying with Microsoft with its stealthy mobile device project? That's what I wondered after reading the Wall Street Journal story about Dell developing Android-based devices, including a Web tablet slightly bigger than an iPod Touch and phones that could go on sale later this year. An excerpt: The development effort is one of the first experiments by a big-name PC maker in a nascent category of products known as mobile Internet devices, or MIDs, which are designed to fill a perceived gap between mobile phones and laptop computers. You could also call them ultra-mobile…

Forrester Research dramatically adjusted its forecast for IT spending in 2009, saying it now expects a 10.6 percent decline instead of the 3 percent drop it predicted at the start of the year. That's for the globe. In the U.S., Forrester expects a 5.1 percent decline, down from the 3.1 percent it predicted at the start of the year. But don't fret - it's only a "temporary pause," the Cambridge, Mass.-based research giant said. Spending on technology should pick up in the fourth quarter in the U.S. - which syncs with Wall Street starting to talk about MSFT hitting $30 again - and recover in…