It looks like we may have a winner in the high-definition format battle, and Sony’s won one for a change. Warner Brothers has announced it’s dropping support for HD-DVD and will be
distributing only in Blu-Ray. As Business Week points out, though, this comes at a time when downloadable movies are preparing to become much [...]

Posted in Technology 2 Comments »

What would happen if we could replace sleep with drugs? DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)-funded researchers think they’ve
found a hormone that resets the brain, making sleep-deprived laboratory monkeys perform as though well-rested.
Deane at Gadgetopia seems pretty excited by the idea:
I hate having to sleep so much that I asked my coworkers once [...]

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From the New York Times:

The new energy bill signed this week makes it official. When 2012 hits, stores can no longer sell the cheap but inefficient incandescent light bulbs that are fixtures in most homes. [
No Joke, Bulb Change Is Challenge for U.S. ]

Good news for the environment, I suppose, but really bad news [...]

Posted in Technology 9 Comments »

The Sony Rootkit debacle of 2005 (discussed
here and
here) now has a full-length analysis which you can read in draft form. In a paper about to be published in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Deirdre K. Mulligan and Aaron K. Perzanowski examine what happened, what the rootkit did, and why Sony BMG apparently went [...]

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At Population Statistic, CT talks about the revived idea of forcing cable companies to sell access to individual cable channels rather than a large package of cable channels, a plan often called a la carte. We’ve only been asking for this for decades, but cable companies — secure in their local monopolies — haven’t seen [...]

Posted in Infrastructure, Politics, Technology 3 Comments »