LATEST ADDITIONS

How many decimal places can you take it? The Pi trainer can get you further.

Google Middle Earth.

Stretchable silicon gonna be the next big craze.

Tastes like "physics."

Now that we know what audio product you liked in 2005, what did you <I>not</I> like? What was the worst audio product released in 2005?

This time last year the music industry was ready to celebrate. Compact disc sales were up for the first time in years, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks were reeling from lawsuits, ringtone sales were proving unexpectedly profitable, and legitimate (paid-for, that is) downloads were rising. But this year, Jim Urie, president of Universal Music Group, told <I>The Wall Street Journal</I> that Christmas 2005 was "a bleak holiday season at the end of a bleak year."

On December 16, Congressmen James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and John Conyers (D-MI) introduced <A HREF="http://static.publicknowledge.org/pdf/HR-4569-DTCSA-Analog-Hole.pdf">HR 4569</A>, a bill "to require certain analog conversion devices to preserve digital content security measures"&mdash;in other words, to mandate that electronic devices and software manufactured after a yet-to-be-specified date respond to a copy protection system or watermark embedded in a video signal and pass that along when converting the signal to analog or vice versa. It also mandates copy protection for analog signals. This is referred to as "plugging the analog hole," since analog signals, even those converted from protected high-definition digital sources, are currently "in the clear" or open for copying. (Standard-definition signals can be protected by systems like Macrovision, but no such protection exists for high-definition signals.)