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If you're burning to spend this Valentine's Day, Pizza Hut has a $10,000 engagement party package that includes a personal fireworks display, a one-topping pizza, and bread sticks with icing to prep your stomach for a lifetime of loneliness. … Read more

There was a time when streaming audio meant sacrificing fidelity. Many early Internet radio stations delivered an AM-quality 64Kbps stream, while the "good ones" topped out at 128Kbps.

Even Spotify for iOS, the app version of the popular music service (which CNET called "the best free music option since stealing"), could muster only 160Kbps--a bit better than FM radio, but a far cry from CD-quality.

My, how times have changed: Spotify for iOS can now stream music at 320Kbps.

That's a big deal for folks who typically listen through headphones, which is where you can … Read more

I like to think I'm pretty young at heart, but even I forget sometimes how fun it was to be a kid, when being entertained took something as simple as a cardboard box and a lot of imagination. Thankfully, littleBits reminded me.

littleBits is a set of circuit boards that can be snapped together to form whatever you want. Created by engineer and interactive artist Ayah Bdeir, littleBits was designed in part to help kids (and adults) understand how electronics work and get them interested in building their own devices, instead of just consuming them.

Each littleBits module has a specific function, such as power, motor, light, or switch, and they attach to one another via magnets, so there's no need to solder or program anything. To create a working circuit board, all you need is a power source and some kind of output, and each part is color-coded (blue, green, pink, or orange) depending on its function (power, output, input, or wire). … Read more

What if you took the decentralized, distributed theory that powers torrent technology and applied it to live streaming?

That question, or one similar to it, is what BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen must've asked himself a few years ago. The answer is BitTorrent Live, and it's currently working its way through a series of weekly real-world tests at the BitTorrent headquarters in San Francisco.

BitTorrent Live is a live-streaming technology that leverages the bandwidth of everybody watching the stream to lighten the stream's network load. It could be applied to everything from family weddings to corporate conference calls … Read more

If the names Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, Heisenberg, and "The Blue" mean anything to you, you're going to love this.

There are many stories that seem like obvious candidates for getting the 8-bit role-playing game treatment, but "Breaking Bad" wouldn't have been at the top of my list. But the good folks at College Humor have taken that hit AMC show and boiled its four seasons down into a fantastic video, old-school RPG style.

It's hard to summarize. Let's just say that in the first scene, we see our troubled main character, … Read more

Old-school gamers will remember an age when there were no continues, no checkpoints, and no respawns. If you died during a level, that was it--you went back to the beginning of the level to do it all again. The craziest thing about it? You liked it even though it drove you crazy.

These days, a gaming purist might say games have gotten too easy and gamers have gotten too soft. When dying in a game doesn't mean anything, how can you truly enjoy the game? I'm not sure it matters, but I can see both sides. Maybe after checking out this collection--if you don't throw your iPhone through your computer screen from frustration--you can tell me what you think in the comments.… Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif.--With a discovery that could some day fundamentally alter the scale of mass data storage, nanotechnology researchers at IBM say they have found a way to store a bit of information in as little as 12 magnetic atoms.

That's a radical improvement over today's storage devices which, IBM argues, require about a million atoms to hold a bit of information. For those keeping score at home, IBM's discovery could mean storage could one day be possible at 1/83,000th the scale of today's disk drives.

And while the IBM researchers behind the … Read more

LAS VEGAS--A phalanx of deals involving the commanding general of torrent protocols, BitTorrent, and next-generation hardware marched into CES 2012 today, the unofficial Day Zero of the show. BitTorrent also announced that more than 150 million people used sibling programs BitTorrent and uTorrent last month, making them by far the most popular torrent clients around.

Following up on the announcement from CES 2011 that it would partner with hardware manufacturers to ship their devices with torrent support built in, BitTorrent revealed four companies based in Europe, Russia, and Asia that have prepared new hardware that automatically works with the current BitTorrent program. BitTorrent-certified devices from these companies will carry the BitTorrent logo. … Read more

The TorrentFreak blog has outed the RIAA and U.S. Department of Homeland Security as harboring downloaders of pirated songs by hip hop artists and crime-based TV shows, but the RIAA denies it.

TorrentFreak said it used the YouHaveDownloaded.com site to find instances of IP addresses within the RIAA and the DHS linked to downloads of copyrighted content from BitTorrent.

Six RIAA IP addresses were linked to downloads of music by Jay-Z ("American Gangster") and Kanye West ("My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy"), as well as the first five seasons of "Dexter," a "… Read more