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Last week, I spoke about how CES was back, and I gave some of the highlights. However, there always are discussions and trends going on behind the scenes, almost-invisible products, and impressions that take a while to form that can be even more interesting. There was one keynote that came close to ...
The real world has finally caught up with the concept of a sex robot, something that's been immortalized in films ranging from "Westworld" to "A.I." and the fembots of "Austin Powers." And where else but the 2010 Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas would that vision be realized in the five-foot-se...
I was at CES last week, and the magic was clearly back in this show. In the past couple of years, CES has been dominated by one device -- making it more like a one-product waste of time. Two years ago, everyone was talking about the iPhone, making many of us wonder if we were at the wrong event. Las...
Three-dimensional television has been hot this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba, JVC Kenwood and Samsung were among the consumer electronics companies announcing new products in this line. Behind the scenes, however, a battle is brewing, as there are...
A new study from the University of Utah provides more fuel for the conviction that sending and receiving text messages while driving affects concentration and reaction times. However, more potential digital distractions lie down the road -- as shown by another Monday announcement: Ford Motor said it...
"Avatar" could indeed light the way to fresh, uncharted territory for filmmaking and entertainment thanks to its groundbreaking special effects and 3-D technologies -- but that's not necessarily a good thing. The best way to explain that is to go see writer-director James Cameron's new blockbuster i...
3-D is definitely not just for cheesy drive-in movies anymore. It's done great box office with animated films, and that big 3-D sci-fi action movie "Avatar" coming out this weekend has won over a lot of early reviewers, at least on a technical level. But one of these days you won't have to go out to...
The Blu-ray Disc Association released the specifications for 3-D Blu-ray on Thursday, just over a year after Panasonic first publicly demonstrated its application of 3-D Blu-ray technology. The specifications are backward-compatible with standard 2-D Blu-ray players, and disks and will run on Sony P...
IBM's revelation at SC09 created quite a stir and immediately brought forth visions of Cylons and Hal 9000. The cognitive computing team at IBM Research has moved significantly forward in creating a large-scale cortical simulation and a new algorithm that synthesizes neurological data -- two major m...
Microsoft and Windows go back to the very beginning of the PC -- when people couldn't afford them, when networks were defined by terminal emulators and floppy disks, and when many of the Google pioneers were in diapers. Looking back at what Windows initially did and considering what Windows 7 is cap...
The woman who can feel roughness or smoothness in her artificial hands for the first time in years; the child whose artificial leg lengthens as he grows; the previously armless man who can reach into a cabinet above his head to prepare dinner; machines that will some day register sensations in much ...
U.S. automakers have spent a lot of time lately wondering whether someone can think up a solution for their economic woes. Meanwhile, one of their Japanese counterparts is using brainpower in a different way: to control the movement and direction of a wheelchair. Researchers at Toyota headquarters i...
For the last 30 years, many people have invested a lot of money and effort chasing an unrealized promise of hoped-for explosive growth in home automation. With not a lot of commercial progress, it might be seen as foolish to pursue opportunities in this space. However, the promise of addressing lat...
Having developed Deep Blue, the supercomputer that famously beat out world chess champion Gary Kasparov back in 1997, IBM is now working on a computer built to compete in the TV quiz show "Jeopardy." This will use a system based on Question Answering, a computer science approach that tries to build ...
The gaming market has been broken for a long time, and the Conficker worm is a reminder that the PC concept is also becoming unmanageable. Developers want one platform to develop to; they don't want three consoles, two portable gaming systems, lots of phones and a PC. Users want something vastly les...