Mark Fleischmann

If you live in Germany, blowing away virtual baddies may soon do more than stress your thumb joints. Pending legislation in Bavaria and Lower Saxony would give creators, distributors, and--yes--players of violent video games up to a year in the slammer. To be specific, it would penalize "cruel violence on humans or human-looking characters." The move in the world's third-largest gaming market follows a horrific school shooting in a town on the Dutch border, where an 18-year-old gamer wounded 37 people before killing himself. Officials blame the rampage on the teen's fondness for the game "Counter Strike," although his video suicide note cites school, anarchist politics, bullying, a desire for revenge, social isolation, and the joy of gun possession--everything but video games. Even so, insists Bavarian interior minister Günther Beckstein: "It is absolutely beyond any doubt that such killer games desensitize unstable characters and can have a stimulating effect." Digg readers retorted: "Computer games don't kill people. It's the nutters with guns that kill people." And: "I propose a ban on bad parenting." But the outlawing of virtual crimes literally crosses the line between fantasy and reality. Maybe the best solution for virtual violence is a virtual prison sentence.

How often does The New York Times print something clueless about home theater technology? About as often as you go to the bathroom. The latest outrage comes in a story debunking various tech underachievers with the headline The Hat Trick That Didn't Happen. Reporter Richard Siklos cites a Frank N. Magid Associates survey saying that the number of HDTV buyers who are looking forward to watching high-def has declined from 63 percent two years ago to 47 percent now. He goes on to say: "The reason for this lack of enthusiasm is pretty clear in my own home. For one thing, plenty of shows on the high-definition channels I receive with my digital cable package appear with big black borders--because of the aspect ratio or somesuch--and I can't figure out whether this is my doing or the cable company's or the broadcaster's." Actually, aspect ratio is the program producer's decision, and those black borders are usually a superior alternative to stretching. Note to Siklos' editor: Tell your reporter to find his remote and learn to use the aspect ratio control or somesuch. He can learn more about aspect ratio in any number of places, including the Wiki. And while he's at it, RTFM. If fewer HDTV buyers are interested than HDTV today versus two years ago, the most likely explanation is that plummeting flat-panel prices have lured less knowledgable viewers into the market. And the solution is to assign knowledgable writers to cover the subject.

"Police blame iPod explosion for 5% rise in robberies," says a headline in The Guardian. Crime actually fell by two percent from April to June, according to figures from the Home Office, but the same period saw a five percent hike in robberies. One top cop attributed the bump to "the products that are available to be stolen these days. The mobile phone explosion is continuing. The iPod explosion is continuing. All of these gadgets that people carry around with them are very attractive to robbers, so that puts the opportunities up." To New York subway riders, this is old news—about a year and a half old, to be precise. It's hard to resist whipping out your 'Pod and putting it in harm's way when you're accessing MTA info the fun way.

Sony's long-awaited BDP-S1 Blu-ray player has finally hit the shelves. It does 1080 lines at 24 frame per second for the ultimate in filmlikeness. And it's not just a product--it's a punctuation mark, adding "an exclamation point to Sony’s full HD 1080 line of products, which ranges from BRAVIA™ flat-panel LCD and Grand WEGA SXRD® rear-projection televisions to the new PlayStation® 3 game console, Blu-ray Disc enabled VAIO computers, PC drives and recordable BD media," says the press release. Speaking of Sony HDTVs, did you catch the secret sale from November 24-27? Too bad, so sad. The BDP-S1 sells for $1000, not bad by early-adopter standards, but if you can wait till 2008, the cost of a Blu-ray drive will drop 50 percent, according to DigiTimes. Of course, just because a major component drops in price, that doesn't necessarily mean that a product will do the same--but given the fact that a BD drive is the major component of a BD player, we might entertain hopes.