Even as prices fall, neither Sony’s Blu-ray nor Toshiba’s HD DVD, has gained an advantage.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

We've already seen call center software that can determine the age and gender of callers, but a Japanese company called Digital Technologies says its developing software that will take actions based on the emotions of the person on the line. The data is used to rank people on a 1-10 scale of happy to displeased, but it's not clear if the system springs into action after you connect to a real person or if it starts while you try to navigate voice menus -- because if our experiences with Amtrak's "Julie" automated voice agent are any guide, you might as well just rank everyone as "angry" and be done with it.

[Image by Armend Krasniqi]

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The corpse, covered in ice and mummified shortly after death, is in pretty good shape for a guy his age.

The entertainment industry has been on a bit of a crusade this year trying to convince ISPs that either they should feel responsible for the fact that people use their broadband connections to share unauthorized content. It started with NBC Universal arguing that ISPs somehow bore the responsibility for policing their networks for others' content. It's an odd argument, because most ISPs will admit (in a quiet moment) that unauthorized file sharing had been one of the biggest drivers in convincing people to switch from dialup to broadband. Furthermore, considering that there are some enlightened companies who realize that having your best fans promote and distribute your content can be good for business, it's impossible for ISPs to know whether or not the content being passed around is being done so with or without the approval of the content holder. In fact, that can lead to situations where content that producers are happy having shared gets taken down against their will.

No matter, though, as the entertainment industry has already convinced the government that its outdated business model needs to be protected, now it's trying to convince other industries that they, too, spend their own resources to protect another industry's dying business model. The MPAA's Dan Glickman, who has had trouble understanding basic economics before, is now trying to convince various ISPs that it's their job to protect the entertainment industry's business model. Why? About the only argument he can come up with is that all that unauthorized content is a bandwidth glut: "more and more they're finding their networks crowded with infringed material, bandwidth space being crowded out." That sounds nice, other than the fact that it's not true. So far, not a single prediction that the entertainment industry has made about unauthorized file sharing has come true -- and each step they take seems to make things worse. Why would another, totally separate industry, buy into the argument that it, too, needs to drag itself down to protect someone else's dying business model?

While the SF Chronicle may have gone through the stages of Google grief, it appears the LA Times is still very much in the denial stage. In fact, it's such extreme denial, that it's reaching near-satire levels. Robert Niles at OJR points us to an editorial in the LA Times saying that "many publishers" believe that Google and the internet are "a greater threat... than Osama bin Laden." Niles does a good job walking through how ridiculous that statement is, including pointing out that the LA Times refuses to name a single publisher who actually believes that. However, as has been pointed out many, many times, Google is not a threat to newspapers. It's only helping them. It's funny that, on the rest of the internet, tremendous money is spent on "search engine marketing" and "search engine optimization" to get better ranked in Google. Yet, when Google ranks newspapers well, suddenly, it's worse than terrorists. You would think that a newspaper with professional reporters would actually bother to get the facts and understand this -- but apparently that's too much to ask. The editorial goes on to complain about Google's new news commenting feature, because how dare Google actually provide people involved in a story a chance to tell their side? Apparently, all information needs to be guarded by some gatekeepers who don't even seem to understand how Google works. Of course, since the LA Times wants to keep those in the story quiet, you can't comment on the article. However, if I were Google, I'd add a response to this... on Google News, to demonstrate why that comment feature makes so much sense.

There is a revolution in solar hydrogen on the horizon. The prospect for the wide spread use of hydrogen as a portable energy carrier is dependent on finding a clean, renewable method of production. A research group headed by a professor of electrical engineering is "only a couple of problems away" from developing an inexpensive and easily scalable technique for water photoelectrolysis - the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen using light energy -- that could help power the proposed hydrogen economy.

New research suggests that pronouns may play a far greater role than simply replacing a proper name in a sentence. A new study suggests that pronouns help keep the brain's complex circuitry and limited memory system from being overloaded. Using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), psychologists studied the brain activity of 21 adults, ages 19 - 34, who were asked to read sequences of sentences to compare the brain's response to pronouns versus proper names.