Entries for May 2006

I like instant gratification and might be willing to pay $2 or $2.50 to get a full-track tune anytime I wanted. But the price doesn't stop there. New music stores from Verizon and Sprint Nextel haven't managed to turn cellphones into polished music players, adding nuisance to the dollar price of getting songs on and off a phone. It's still too awkward to supplant most MP3 players, much less the simple-to-use iPod.

Convenience, or impulse indulgence, has its price. But how high? Sprint Nextel tested the limits when it put a $2.50 price tag on songs downloaded from its wireless music store, which opened late last year. That's more than double the going price for downloaded songs, and pundits predicted the service was doomed.

Our black-and-beige PCs are going green. Environmental green, that is. And it's a change coming to the United States with little effort from Americans. Hazardous materials will begin disappearing from electronics on U.S. store shelves this spring as manufacturers race to meet new government directives – from Europe. European Union regulations go into effect this July that force makers to essentially remove lead, cadmium, mercury, and other substances from electronic devices.

It's those poisons that make electronics, notably computers and monitors, expensive to recycle and dangerous to dump.

When it comes to cheap, renewable energy, nothing seems more reliable than sucking heat from Mother Earth. Geothermal heating and cooling has been around for 20 years or more, but it remains unknown to most people—we didn't know about it until a friend installed it, and neighbors hadn't heard of it until a huge drilling rig began the noisy, two-day process of boring holes in our small back yard.