The PlayStation Move is Sony's answer to the motion control trend. It uses a digital camera called the PlayStation Eye to track the movement of a new controller stuffed with gyroscopes and sensors and magic—all of it topped with a glowing plastic ball.

It's been over a week since my Move review hardware arrived, and I've played games with a variety of people just to gauge their reactions. When holding one of the Move controllers for the first time, everyone I've seen so far has one instinctive response: they give that ball on the top a good, hard squeeze, like it's a clown nose.

The ball doesn't light up until you have the PlayStation Eye turned on and a game begins. Then it glows brightly, and the changing color of the ball often provides in-game information. The glowing ball also adds an extra helping of surrealism to some titles; playing archery, it was almost distracting to have that glowing pink orb so close to my face. During dark sections, I could see the glowing ball reflected on the screen of my television.

The ball sometimes cycles slowly between different colors. At other times it pulses. You can feel the motor inside the force feedback mechanism move in time to the light, as though you're holding the heart of some mechanical, bio-luminescent beast. If you have kids, you are screwed during play time; anyone from the ages of ten on down will gravitate towards that glowing ball, and they won't want to let go. My baby wants to gum on it constantly, while my older kids wave it around like they're at a pre-pubescent rave.

The PlayStation Move is here, ladies and gentleman, and it's pretty damn great.

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Man, the broadcasting industry is on a device mandate rampage these days. For weeks, we've been covering the National Association of Broadcasters call for Congress to require all smartphones to include FM receivers. This requirement is apparently what would make passage of the Performance Rights Act acceptable to the NAB—the bill would require radio broadcasters to pay royalties to performers as well as song copyright holders.

But this dubious deal isn't enough, it seems. Now the broadcasters and their supporters are also revving up their campaign to require handhelds to carry TV tuners too. The latest call comes from TVNewsCheck.

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Every year in September, Apple reveals its new iPod lineup in time for the holiday buying season. This year's event takes place tomorrow, and the usual rumors about what Apple plans to announce have popped up. Here's a rundown of some of the things we've been hearing in the hours leading up to the reveal.

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Amazon might be getting ready to expand its video offerings, according to a report released this afternoon by The Wall Street Journal. Despite facing a wall of "no comments" from every party rumored to be involved, the report indicates that the retailing giant, which already offers sales of popular TV shows, is looking to launch a subscription video service that would operate similarly to its current services, which can be watched on the Web or a variety of video devices.

According to The Journal, Amazon has approached a number of media companies to try to get them to sign onto the plan, which has been pitched in a number of variations. One of the more intriguing ideas is to bundle it in with Amazon Prime, the company's premium shopping service. Although this might cost Amazon money in the short term—its fees to the content providers would have to come from whatever profit it makes on the average Prime customer—it would guarantee the content providers a large audience, and might provide an additional incentive for new and existing Prime customers.

So far, it's not clear if anyone has taken Amazon up on the deal. The company is said to want to have the service in place by the holidays, but may have to revise those plans or scrap them entirely if none of the content providers comes through.

The apparent reticence of the media companies makes for a sharp contrast with the music business, which seemed to be eager to have a subscription service succeed, providing them with an indefinite revenue stream. In contrast to the unified front of the record labels, however, the video producers seem to be very fragmented, experimenting with a variety of ad-supported and paid rental and purchase options. So far, it appears that Amazon hasn't offered them something they feel they can't get somewhere else.

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Many high-technology companies have run afoul of the US' Export Control System, which regulates the overseas sales of items that can be put to use for military or intelligence-gathering purposes. Given the pace of innovation, hardware and software that was once the domain of the military or spy agencies can rapidly wind up in the hands of consumers, meaning that the system for tracking what's restricted needs to be nimble and user-friendly. Unfortunately, it was anything but, and that has led to a new effort to reform the system in a way that would increase the opportunity for US companies to sell goods overseas.

The impact of export controls on the high-tech industry have caused problems for everyone from browser makers—who once ran up against restrictions on their encryption software, despite its wide availability outside the US—to hardware makers; Apple once advertised that its G4 processor fell under export control due to outdated definitions of what constituted a supercomputer. But they also affect more mundane items. In the announcement that outlines the reform efforts, the White House notes that the brake pads for the army's M1A1 tank are essentially identical to those used in fire trucks, but only the former ends up under export controls; "Under our current system, we devote the same resources to protecting the brake pad as we do to protecting the M1A1 tank itself."

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US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke went to Nashville yesterday to address a symposium on intellectual property enforcement, and he threw down the gauntlet: the Obama administration will find, board, and scuttle digital pirate ships, and the SS Copyright is going to get a new coat of armored plating.

"I think it's important to lay down a marker about how the Obama administration views this issue," he said of online copyright infringement. "As Vice President Biden has said on more than one occasion, 'Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft,' and it should be dealt with accordingly."

There's much to be said for this view of "dealing with" piracy—which is why we have long argued that the judgments handed down in P2P lawsuits against twenty-something music fans have been ludicrous. $1.92 million? $675,000? No one walking out of a Walmart with a stack of Richard Marx discs under his arm would be subject to such penalties.

Locke then lamented the fate of songwriters. "Recently, I've had a chance to read letters from award winning writers and artists whose livelihoods have been destroyed by music piracy. One letter that stuck out for me was a guy who said the songwriting royalties he had depended on to 'be a golden parachute to fund his retirement had turned out to be a lead balloon.' This just isn't right."

To make it right, Locke pledged to work for global IP norms, enforcement of those norms, and a "strengthening" of the international copyright system.

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Palm's webOS smartphone platform introduced some compelling innovations when it was first released in 2009. The next major version of the operating system, which is currently under development, brings some noteworthy feature improvements and new capabilities for developers.

The first beta release of the webOS 2.0 SDK, which was made available this morning, offers developers an early look at some of the new functionality. The new feature lineup includes substantial enhancements to webOS multitasking and support for deeper extensibility in several key components of the platform.

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We tend to think of bacteria as engaging in chemical warfare only when they attack us, wreaking havoc on our cells. But the microbiome is a vicious place, with many species hurling toxins at each other, attempting to gain a competitive advantage. A bacterium called Bacillus subtilis goes beyond the pale; it contains a set of genes for a "cannibalism system" that it uses to off its close relatives when facing starvation, enabling it to get enough nutrients to form a spore and ride out the lean times. A study that will appear in PNAS describes how a clever experimental approach let them purify one of the cannibalism factors, which turns out to be a potent antibiotic.

Many bacteria form spores when faced with starvation; the spores have tough shells, and the bacteria inside remain inert, needing neither nutrients nor water. Once conditions improve, the spore opens, allowing the bacteria to resume their normal activities. Some of these spores, which have a specialized base and a stalk that extends from it to ensure the spores spread widely, involve an orderly form of suicide. Cells die in the process of forming a stalk so that their neighbors, who are likely to be their close genetic relatives, can survive in the form of spores.

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When Apple gave its highly publicized explanation of the iPhone 4 antenna issues to the press back in July, CEO Steve Jobs said that Apple would give all iPhone 4 users a free case as an interim solution while the company researched the problem further. An executive with Mexican mobile carrier Telcel has now claimed that after September 30, Apple will release revised iPhone 4 hardware that does not exhibit the same signal attenuation flaw.

While announcing the launch of the iPhone 4 in Mexico, Telcel's Director of Value Added Services, Marco Quatorze, told CanalMX that initial units would exhibit the same antenna problems as those released so far in the US. He also said that Apple would be providing free cases to all iPhone 4 buyers who request one from its website.

However, Quatorze also said that after September 30—the date Jobs promised an update on the antenna issue and the date that the free case program expires—Apple will begin supplying revised iPhone 4 devices that "do not have the reception malfunction."

MacRumors notes that it is unusual for a carrier executive to have such advance knowledge of Apple's plans, or to be allowed to share it if he did. However, Quatorze also said that Telcel will have a number of options for early buyers to upgrade to the revised hardware without having to extend the usual two-year contract. Apple did not to respond to our request for clarification at the time of publication.

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The D-pad on the existing 360 controllers is, to put it mildly, utter garbage. If you want to play any games relying on precise movements, such as fighting games, buying a third-party controller is a requirement. Microsoft hopes it has this problem licked, however, and is releasing a controller with a new, updated D-pad on November 9. The catch? You won't be able to buy the controller alone; you'll need to grab the Play and Charge Kit to get it, and the final cost will be $64.99. 

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They just don't make dictionaries like they used to—though perhaps that's a good thing in some ways. Take the monumental and splendiferously fecund pulchritude that is the Oxford English Dictionary as an example. This astonishing linguistic achievement, first appearing in full in 1928, was a bookshelf-breaking set of volumes containing almost half a million words and two million quotations illustrating word usage over the centuries—and a decent chunk of those quotations came from a former US Civil War veteran who eventually savaged his own genitals with a pen (performing an "autopeotomy") while residing in a UK hospital for the criminally insane.

Today, the Oxford University Press, which publishes the work, employs 80 professional lexicographers, none of whom (to the best of our knowledge) have been subjected to a peotomy, "auto" or otherwise. After years of work (the second edition appeared in 1989), they are only 28 percent finished with the third edition.

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As we continue to push forward into a digital world, the role of traditional forms of media are constantly changing. E-books are challenging the printed word, while board games are being reimagined on electronic platforms like the iPad. But few creators have taken as imaginative an approach to these ideas as Les Editions Volumiques. The French publishing house has developed numerous interesting creations, ranging from a paper video game to a board game which uses your phone as the playing piece.

Ars spoke with Bertrand Duplat and Etienne Mineur, the duo behind Les Editions Volumiques, to learn a little bit more about what they're attempting to do.

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Google says that it plans to keep the site for Google Wave online "at least" through the end of 2010, and existing users will be able to export their waves before the whole thing turns into a pumpkin. The news comes as a relief to the small group of users who actually utilized Wave during its short lifespan; those who want Wave to live on will be disappointed by Google's determination to shut off the service.

Google introduced Wave in May of 2009 as a way for users to collaborate using a plethora of media capabilities. Some users were cautiously optimistic—the concept was certainly a unique one and it had some potential to change how we communicate online. Others felt that the implementation was half-baked, the UI was complex and ugly, and most users simply couldn't figure out what it was. There were lots of reasons not to use it, and Google finally pulled the plug on the project in early August.

Immediately following the announcement that Wave was no more, some passionate fans started putting together online petitions to beg Google to keep the project around. Unfortunately for those people, Google isn't giving in, but the company is throwing them a bone by letting them export their waves through the end of the year.

Google Wave team member Lars Rasmussen wrote that the team is still "working on plans," which may include extending Wave's technology into other products or open sourcing more of the code. But in the meantime, "We're grateful to all the people who have been using Wave and the partners and developers who have built on and improved the technology with us," Rasmussen wrote.

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Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is an odd duck. The $5 Xbox Live Arcade release gives you a feel for the full version of Dead Rising 2, but with its own cut scenes, voice acting, story, and setting, it's far from a demo, taking place between the events of Dead Rising and Dead Rising 2, and it does a good job of showing you what has happened to the world after the first game.

The zombies are still running wild, the military has little control, and your daughter has been bitten by one of the infected. There is hope, but she has to be given a drug called Zombrex every 12 hours... and time is running out.

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New laboratory research has attempted to figure out how hot water molecules have ended up near the icy regions of comets. Recent spectroscopic observations of the gaseous cloud surrounding comets—which are essentially big balls of flying, dirty ice—have found hot water vapor molecules within the comet's coma. No thermodynamic phase change process should lead to hot water being released by the <100K ice, so how it got there has been quite a mystery.

In cold, ionized media, an important source of water is the dissociative recombination of the hydronium ion, H3O+. When a slow-moving electron hits this, one of the possible reaction pathways leads to neutral water and atomic hydrogen, along with a release of energy. Using a new type of detection apparatus, researchers from Germany, Israel, and the US examined the relative frequency and associated energies of the various reaction pathways that occur when D3O+ interacts with an electron (where D is deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen). 

In addition to understanding the reaction energies, the team suggested a mechanism that explained how D3O+ becomes D2O and D. They hypothesized that an electron attaches to the hydronium ion, forming an unstable intermediate that decays into the final products. The team found that the pathway that leads to D2O and D released an amount of energy far below the predicted reaction energy, suggesting that the remainder remains trapped in the resulting D2O molecule, held in the form of internal excitation. 

The heavy water molecules generated in the laboratory reaction had temperatures in excess of  60,000K, a finding that explains the signature of hot water found in the cold icy environment of a comet.

Physical Review Letters, 2010. DOI: Upcoming

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AMD has announced that it is retiring the ATI brand, and expects to have fully transitioned all of its graphics products to the AMD label by the end of this year. And in an unrelated but no less important bit of news, the company has also confirmed that it is indeed looking at using Bobcat in servers.

The timing of the ATI brand announcement makes sense, given that the company is moving full speed ahead into the Fusion era with the upcoming launch of its Ontario mobile platform, which features an integrated CPU and GPU on the same die. So from a purely technical perspective, it makes little sense to talk about your processor as an "Application Processing Unit" because it combines a CPU and GPU on the same die, and then give your discrete GPU chips a different brand name than the CPU/GPU combo chips. If the CPU and GPU are going to merge in silicon by the end of the year, then the brands should merge, as well.

That said, the move has to give Intel at least a tiny bit of heartburn. Current systems integrators, Apple being the most obvious example, advertise the Intel and ATI brands alongside one another for systems that use Intel CPUs and ATI GPUs, so that will now change to Intel and AMD branding. With as much as Intel has invested over the past decade in the "Intel Inside" program, the company can't be happy at the idea of an AMD logo accompanying the ubiquitous "Intel Inside" badge on laptops, flyers, webpages, etc.

As for AMD's server news, the company's newly hired server chief told IDG today that his unit is currently investigating Bobcat's potential as a server part. This is great news, as it's something that we recommended in our recent look at Bobcat.

"We're definitely in the process of examining this as a design point... It would be foolish not to," AMD's Donald Newell told IDG in an interview.

He later indicated that the company needed to collect a lot more data before it could decide if Bobcat makes sense for a large enough subset of server workloads.

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Eagles drummer and singer Don Henley has a world of trouble on his mind, and he hopes that Congress will lighten his load... by gutting the best part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Defending his copyrights in the digital age is just too hard for Henley and his labels, because it requires constant vigilance of both mainstream user-upload sites like YouTube and dodgier destinations like BitTorrent trackers.

In comments to Rolling Stone last week, Henley admitted that the "the onus of legally pursuing infringement has always been on copyright owners," but went on to argue that the burden of this one-sided monitoring has become too great to handle. Instead, he wants to gut the "safe harbors" in the DMCA that protect sites from material uploaded by users, so long as they take it down in response to a valid DMCA copyright complaint. Those sites should have to do some copyright monitoring of their own.

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You know the feeling: opening up your e-mail to find hundreds of messages of varying importance. Some are automated reminders from your favorite sites, some are newsletters you have subscribed to, some are actually from real people trying to contact you, and so on. Separating the wheat from the chaff can be overwhelming much of the time, and even the most carefully crafted filters don't keep up with the ever-changing nature of what's important to you.

Google is hoping to address that problem with a new feature in Gmail called Priority Inbox. Aimed at providing users a way to get through their inboxes as efficiently as possible, Priority Inbox tries to learn your e-mail habits in order to decide which messages are important to you, and move them up to the top where you can see them first.

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In the wake of a few high-profile errors found in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report, the organization asked the InterAcademy Council, a coalition of national science organizations, to examine its structure and procedures in order to identify potential weaknesses. The IAC's report came in today, and it more or less indicates that the IPCC has been a victim of its own success. Because so many people, from policy makers to critics, pay attention to the IPCC's reports, the IAC suggests that fundamental reforms are needed to improve the transparency and rigor of the organization.

The IPCC's troubles began with a disclosure that one of the sections in its massive Fourth Assessment Report, the Summary for Policymakers, contained some inaccurate information regarding the likely fate of Himalayan glaciers, suggesting they were melting at an unrealistic rate. That seems to have opened the floodgates, and a variety of claimed inaccuracies (some spurious) were published, as was an attack on the group's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri. These issues helped prompt the IPCC to request an evaluation of its organization and process. For that, it turned to the IAC, which has a membership that includes the national science academies of many nations, including the US' National Academy of Sciences and UK's Royal Society.

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Roku announced today that it is dropping the prices of its line-up of set-top boxes. The pricing changes come just days before Apple is rumored to be unveiling a major revision to its Apple TV set-top box based on streaming content.

Roku currently sells three models of its digital video player: the basic Roku SD, the mid-range Roku HD, and the top-end Roku XR. The Roku SD is now priced $20 less at $59.99, and the Roku HD and Roku XR are priced $30 less at $69.99 and $99.99 respectively.

The Roku SD only streams in standard definition and is limited to analog output. The Roku HD is the original device, and includes both analog as well as HDMI and digital audio output for streaming up to 720p content. The Roku XR adds 802.11n WiFi and a USB port, and will be able to output 1080p with a firmware update scheduled for later this year. The company noted that most content providers will still be streaming at 720p, but the increased resolution should come in handy for a new USB streaming "channel" currently in testing.

Apple is holding its annual music-related media event this Wednesday (don't miss our live coverage of the announcements), and persistent rumors have suggested that Apple will announce—along with new iPods—a major update to the Apple TV. The device is said to be built around Apple's A4 processor and will run a variation of iOS. The new device also expected to ditch the included hard drive in favor of sufficient flash storage to stream video directly from iTunes. Apple may change the name to "iTV" (the original name before the product launched in 2007), and rumors have pegged the price of the new device at $99.

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