Blog: The world's largest video game publisher announces it will soon release a game based on The Simpsons.

For many years, plenty of folks have been trying to explain that it's not "piracy" that's a threat to the movie industry, but the fact that the movie-going experience sucks. The movie industry has always really provided a service, that of "entertaining people," and that has nothing to do with copyrights. If people want to enjoy a night out, they are more than willing to pay for the experience. Of course, rather than make the experience better, many in the movie industry have instead latched onto the "piracy" excuse to actually make the movie-going experience that much worse. They don't do a good job of policing troublemakers and they treat their customers like criminals to ward off this bogus "piracy" threat. In the end, that just makes it worse. If you know that you're going to be forced to hand over your cell phone because it has a camera in it before you go to the movies, you're less likely to bother. Luckily some theaters, mostly independent ones, have started figuring this out and worked to improve the movie going experience and actually provide positive incentives to get people to go out to theaters.

Alex Billington writes in to point out his own analysis of Mark Cuban's attempt to make going to the movies an enjoyable experience again. Cuban's turning the latest theaters in the Landmark theater chain he owns into places adults want to go. No noisy arcades filled with kids, but nice upscale bars and lounges. He's also offering the ability to include food and snacks (higher end snacks) in the price of the ticket itself to avoid viewers feeling gouged when they see that they're paying $6 for $0.10 worth of popcorn. Finally, he's making the viewing experience even better -- putting in more comfortable and unique seating, including couches and even bean bags. The idea is to make it more like the home theater that so many people now claim is a better experience -- but doing so in a way that most people are unable to do with a home theater (bigger screen, better sound system, etc.). With so many examples of entrepreneurs making the movie experience better, why is it that the big studios and big movie chains still insist this is impossible?

"Channel bonding" technology that offers speeds up to 150 Mbps -- 25 times faster than today's standard -- could be available within a few years.

Harvard and four partner institutions have launched an ambitious effort to create an Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), an unprecedented project to document online every one of Earth's 1.8 million known species. For the first time in history, the EOL would grant scientists, students, and others multimedia access to all known living species, even those just discovered.

Job Fare

Microsoft has bought a minority stake in CareerBuilder, the US online job site, but it isn't saying how much it has got and how much it cost.

Blog: YouTube video aiming to debunk Geller's supposedly paranormal spoon bending has drawn two lawsuits this week, with the well-known "psychic" claiming copyright violations.

Public interest groups say bill is needed to improve the integrity of the voting process. But will it become law this year?

Video: Intel touts faster mobile chips with benchmarking demo. At an Intel press conference in San Francisco, Intel's vice president and general manager of the mobile platforms group, Mooly Eden, demos the company's next generation of mobile microprocessors. Eden shows how the new mobile chips deliver better performance on notebooks in the areas of 3D gaming, financial spreadsheets and the Windows Vista OS.