Maryland looks up as it starts to run out of space  Maryland, state of salty cookies and The Wire, isn't very big. It aso provides much of outlying areas of two huge cities - Baltimore and Washington, whose workers' desire for suburban homes has fuelled an urban sprawl into the countryside. In short, space is running out.  It's for this reason that its Governor Martin O'Malley has unveiled Plan Maryland. This will encourage high-density (and higher-rise) residential and commercial building based around existing infrastructure (ie, train stations). The aim is to combat the suburban sprawl that has filled up farmland and to reduce commutes.  By 2035 it aims to have introduced one million citizens into more walkable, less car-reliant places, thus attracting them back into city areas. It sounds exactly like the kind of policy that planning experts, environmentalists and thinkers like Edward Glaeser (we recommend his book Triumph of the City) have been extolling for years. O'Mally sold the plan to The atlantic thus: "Maryland commute times average 32 minutes, which is now longer than New York and New Jersey. The 700-plus million hours we wasted commuting during 2009 [has an estimated] $9 billion value."  Rural officials, worried about their planning power, have already reacted angrily to the plan and, weirdly, British climate change denier Lord Monckton, also spoke against it at a forum on the plans on Monday. If Monckton is dead against it, then O'Malley must be thinking along the right lines.  Read more: ind.pn/planmar  It's the Microsoft future - and it looks like Minority Report  We're not quite sure what the ethics are on creating a promotional film for products that don't actually, er, exist yet. But - annoyingly - that doesn't make this new seven-minute concept film for Microsoft's office suite of the future any less cool.  [at this point, we'd like to make clear that Bill Gates has not made a direct investment into the Ideas Factory's pockets (yet).]  Set an optimistic five to 10 years in the future, it follows an executive and mother as she connects with her business and husband and daughter at home via ultra-smart phones (thin bendy screens with augmented reality interfaces - drag a recipe on to the wall, why don't you?) There are also glasses that translate languages and fridges that give you a graphical summary of what's left inside. PowerPoint it isn't but, to be fair to the PC giants, it does look exciting - like Minority Report, as one friend put it on Twitter.  One assumes Steve Ballmer and colleagues won't be adding PreCrime Reports to Excel's spreadsheet functionality just yet.  Watch the film: ind.pn/minrepoffice  Strike out - can an eBay baseball trade prove the power of racism?  a market cannot work properly if factors such as race influence pricing. It's basic economics. But research from a trio of US academics on the biggest second-hand market of them all - eBay - suggests that, consciously