From the We Should Have Known This Dept comes news that CD-ROMs degrade in months, even at room temperature without sunlight. Dutch magazine PC Active tested data disks from 30 manufacturers that were recorded 20 months ago. Several data CDs developed serious errors, or became virtually unreadable, The Register reports.It’s perhaps too early to tell, but the word seems to be: different dye systems used for CD-R disks are the root of the evil and that you’re better off storing your stuff on the more expensive disks. My tuppennies’: Keep backups of your most important data on different media — hard drive, online drive, CD-ROMs, DVD — in several copies.
Japan is now seeling a car that parks itself. 
For those of you getting into the RSS feed thing (and for those of you who haven’t, a question: why not?) here’s another newsreader: 
From the So The Conspiracy Theorists Were Right Dept it turns out the W32.Blaster worm may have contributed to the cascading effect of the Aug. 14 blackout in NYC and environs. 
From the Suspect This May Be Wishful Thinking Dept Japan, South Korea and China are set to agree to jointly develop a new computer operating system as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software,