Voting for a Republican has to do with the cold hard realities of this planet and how the world sees the USA. If we elect someone as starry eyed and naive as Obama, we will inevitably become the target of countries who want to test us.

Well, in 2000 we elected (and I use that term loosely) Republican George Bush, son of the guy who bombed the crap outta Saddam Hussein a decade or so before. Dubya brought with him an administration full of saber rattling Republican chickenhawks like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld. Curiously, having all of those experienced, hardcore testosterone-oozing militarists in his administration didn't do squat to deter us from becoming a target of those forces which "wanted to test us". Instead, North Korea set off a nuke, Iran and Venezuela told us to go screw ourselves, and Osama crashed airplanes into Manhattan and Washington D.C., killing almost 3,000 Americans.

Next time, I'd recommend voting for the smart guy, not the tough guy. Being tough isn't terribly useful if your opponents outwit you at every turn.

Obama won the Latino vote? In a primary?

Suddenly that Texas win is looking like an increasingly remote possibility for Ms. Clinton. And her defenders can't spin this one as not counting because it's a caucus, or because Virginia is too white, or because it's too black, or because it's too rich or too poor.

Look for them to start complaining that Hillary was outspent.

Another wheel off the Clinton bus.

First, it was "Obama can't win Latinos". Now that he's won the Latino vote, they're suddenly the "wrong kind" of Latinos, and the rest of us just don't understand what "Latino" really means.

Whatever.

Div-X is now an encoding type, but the original intent of the media wasn't a new format, it was just a way to make an exiting format more limited.

The DivX codec has absolutely nothing to do with the failed DIVX (Digital Video Express) scheme.

DIVX discs were essentially standard DVD's with additional encryption, which could only be viewed for 48 hours after the initial screening before being discarded. Introduced in late 1998, DIVX flopped within a year, having encountered massive consumer resistance.

The DivX codec is an implementation of MPEG-4, and beginning in 1998 was one of the first codecs widely available to computer users which offered DVD-like picture quality at substantially reduced bitrates. Its name was a sarcastic reference to the hated DIVX discs, and was originally written with a winking emoticon, i.e. DivX ;-)

I mentioned Mini-Disc, I just didn't know the name. That wasn't a format so much as a resizing of an existing format.

That's not really true. MiniDisc was radically different from CD in a number of ways, not just because of its much smaller form factor. MiniDiscs came inside their own protective case, like a 3.5" floppy. They allowed for recording years before CD recorders became widely available and affordable, using a magneto-optic process that's entirely unlike today's recordable CDs (a laser heated the magnetic material inside a recordable disc until it became warm enough to have its orientation flipped by a magnetic field). They also used lossy compression to cram roughly 74 minutes of audio onto a roughly 140MB disc (compared to CDs, with a capacity of 640MB). Sony's ATRAC format never caught on outside of the MiniDisc, but it was a precursor in the consumer marketplace to other lossy formats like .mp3, and it's impressive that Sony rolled such technology out over 15 years ago.

You can add the 12-inch laser disc from the early 90s (predated VCDs and DVDs) to your list.

Laserdisc was never a runaway success, but it was hardly a failure. It lasted from 1978 thru the introduction of the DVD, roughly some 20 years, during which time it consistently provided the highest-quality image and sound consumers could buy. It was also a great rental format, if you happened to live in a city with shops that rented Laserdiscs.

It never really caught on in Europe - which is ironic, since Philips essentially invented the format - but it did well in Japan and it helped pave the way for the CD, which Sony and Philips jointly developed based on Laserdisc technology.

The big problem for Blu-ray is that all it offers over conventional DVD is better quality. That's fine for the 25% or so of the population that gives a crap about quality and has a tee vee big enough to see the difference on, but what about the other 75%?

Seems to me that video on demand, either via the cable providers or just over the internet, offers both potentially higher quality as well as greater convenience than physical media like DVD or Blu-ray discs.

I think the same forces which have marginalized the CD over the past few years in favor of .mp3's and iPods are about to come into play for both DVD and Blu-ray, in a big way. Hard to see how a fledgling format like Blu-ray's gonna survive that kind of pressure. I don't know if it'll go the way of the SuperAudio CD and DVD-Audio, which met the iPod head on and lost, but it still might end up a lot like Laserdisc as a niche product for geeks.