Warner Music Group announced on Thursday that it would join the ranks of EMI Group and Universal Music Group as the third of the four large music labels to offer their digital music titles for sale without any type of copy protection software. Warner will offer its catalog through Amazon in the common MP3 formats that are free to copy to any player or computer, any number of times.

This move comes after Warner Chairman and CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. defended DRMs at the 3GSM World Conference in Barcelona in February, stressing the importance of interoperability over DRM restrictions likely due to Apple’s DRM through iTunes which restricts music files to be played only on Apple devices.

The team behind the Optimus Maximus OLED Keyboard, has another cool concept for another keyboard. It doesn’t have actual keys, which means no restrictions on their shape and size.

Any part of the keyboard is fully programmable and capable of displaying an image. It would also feature a typing mode and a video mode. Very awesome indeed. It really opens up the interface to all kinds of possibilities, literally putting everything at your fingertips.

Due to a new bill recently signed into law by Acting Gov. Richard Codey some New Jersey sex offenders are finding themselves completely banned from computers and cut off from the internet. Bill S1979 prohibits convicted sex offenders who used a computer to commit their crime from using computers or accessing the internet during at least part of their parole. It also gives the state the ability to restrict internet use to convicted sex offenders even if they did not use the internet to commit a sex offense.

The new law requires convicted individuals on parole to inform authorities of any devices they have access to which can access the internet, and authorities can make unannounced visits to homes of parolees to inspect computers and install monitoring devices.

Shinhan Card, a South Korean company, unveiled a new kind of credit card yesterday. A USB credit card. It functions as a contactless credit card in stores. To use it online, you just insert it into your USB port. It enters your credit card information for you.

It should be noted that the USB device itself cannot be used as a portable storage device. In other words, money out/No data in. The company is hoping that it catches on among the franchise stores. I can easily see this taking off, especially if they make it so that the device can actually be used for storage.

According to the Financial Times, Apple is finally getting ready to announce a deal with Twentieth Century Fox to offer Fox movies available for download through iTunes. The service would allow users to download Fox movies as a temporary digital “rental”. According to the source Fox is also working out a feature on their physical DVD movies that would let DVD owners temporarily transfer the movie content from the DVD to a digital player like an iPod or a computer using Apple’s DRM.

This is something that Apple has been trying to get going for a while but has met some resistance with most studios, likely for fear of losing sales due to a higher piracy rate of movies and lower costs of ownership. Another issue is the threat that this poses to video on demand services from places such as Comcast and DirectTV. Apple currently sells some movie titles on iTunes from Disney and Viacom but has not had as much luck getting the ball rolling with video as it has with online music purchases, which more that likely has led to a rental offering.

Wii sports has become quite a popular past time with the elderly. Especially bowling. Wii sports has gotten so big at the Riderwood complex in Montgomery County, Maryland that tournaments are held fairly often. The complex houses 3000-residents and one can only guess that at least half of them are now addicted to the Wii. Just recently a 79-year-old real world bowler was defeated by an 84-year-old who’d only recently got to know the Wii game.

Apparently, they get pretty riled up about these matches and have been known to actually remain awake long enough to compete. I would imagine that having a Wii handy probably keeps some of them more physically and mentally alert then they might otherwise be, which is a good thing. And you just know that they have a whole betting system in place too.

Just like last year NORAD is pulling out all the stops to keep watch on Santa’s current locale this year as he travels the world delivering gifts. According to the new and improved NORAD Tracks Santa web site they are once again employing not only infrared-detecting satellites (from Rudolph’s nose) but they are also using 47 radar systems, special Santa Cams and actual jet fighters to get a visual on Santa’s whereabouts.

The new site has an interactive map that shows the current location of Santa and also has links to learn a little bit more about the red-suited man’s current location. You can even check out what’s currently being seen through the strategically placed Santa Cam’s or use Google Earth to see it in 3D. Kids can also find games in the Kids Countdown area.

Anyone that’s been interested in buying a Nintendo Wii this holiday season is aware of just how difficult it has been to get one and people are capitalizing on that fact, and so are many retailers. I purchased a Wii months ago that I had to stand in line one early morning to get, and even then I had to buy the $250 console bundled with two games for a total of $350. The Wii has seen a shortage for a year now and Nintendo says the lack of consoles available to meet demand is tough on planning for the company including creating any planning or promotions for new games. However, I can think of worse problems than having a consistently higher demand than supply.

According to Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, Nintendo is also discouraging the practice of bundling the console itself with other items since the Wii loses its price advantage over competitor consoles like the Xbox 360 or the Sony PS3, but it is ultimately up to the retailers how they decide to sell the console. He also added that the power Nintendo held over what retailer they would ship consoles helped retailers adhere to the companies suggestions.

Some California residents might be receiving electricity from a more novel, environmentally friendly and source in the coming years. PG&E has announced that it is going to team up with Finavera Renewables to build a “wave farm” off the coast of California in order to generate electricity.

The wave farm consists of “wave energy converters”, or basically large buoys like Finavera’s Aquabuoy pictured here. As the buoy moves up and down on top of the waves that pass by it drives a piston which is anchored on the ocean floor. The piston creates pressure which drives a turbine and in turn creates electricity. A single full-scale Aquabuoy can generate 250 killowatts which can power approximately 80 homes. The initial plan is to create a farm of these buoys that will generate 2 megawatts of electricity by 2012, and if things go well they will ramp up the farm to produce 100 megawatts.

We heard about USB planning to increase its speed by 10 fold back in September with USB 3.0 specs complete by mid-2008, but FireWire apparently had no intention of sitting back and being outdone. The 1394 Trade Association announced last week a new specification for FireWire that uses the same connections and cables but promises 4 times the speed of the current FireWire bringing potential speeds of up to 3.2 Gbps.

The new spec called S3200 will used 100% of its bit rate as payload and none as overhead bringing the payload speed up to 400 megabytes per second compared to 90 megabytes per second in the current FireWire 800. The new S3200 spec will also be backwards compatible with existing FireWire devices and will offer cable configurations to bring data and power over 300 feet. It also will maintain its peer-to-peer architecture to connect devices with or without a computer.

We get multiple requests here at the ‘Brick with people asking if we know where they can find a Wii console without taking it in the shorts on price, so we’re pretty excited to see some hope in the availability of the console from Nintendo before the year is out.

Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime announced the availability of rain checks for the Wii’s through Gamestop, and although getting one in January might be better than nothing at all there still might be a chance to get your hands on one yet this year. The Nintendo exec announced that seven national retailers should be putting Nintendo Wii consoles on shelves this weekend. The list of retailers include Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, Sears, Kmart, Toys R Us and Circuit City.

Maybe it isn’t a marketing scheme and Nintendo really is having trouble keeping up with production for the Nintendo Wii game console. Nintendo is offering hope for some of those still looking for Wii this holiday season, although opening a present with a piece of paper promising a Wii in a month just might not be the same as the real thing.

In a telephone press conference today Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said they the company is working with GameStop to give out “rain checks” to those looking for an Wii this year with a deliver time frame in January of next year.

The marketing research firm NPD has turned in their analysis of what the top video game titles and consoles were last month and the news is very good for the industry as a whole. Leading the top in sales of new software was Activision’s “Call of Duty 4″ for the Microsoft Xbox 360 which sold an impressive 1.57 million copies. Nintendo’s “Super Mario Galaxy” came in second place and if you combine the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 sales for “Assassin’s Creed” it would actually take the silver medal. Not coincidentally Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s Creed” has emerged as the best-selling new IP for games in recent years.

Nintendo’s handheld DS gaming device sold an amazing 1.53 million units in November which was enough to give it the top of the chart for hardware sales. In second place was Nintendo’s Wii gaming console with 981,000 Wiis sold followed by Microsoft’s Xbox 360 in third spot with 770,000 units finding homes. Sony moved 577,000 PlayStation Portable to give it fourth place and the price drop in the PS3 convinced 466,000 consumers to go out and buy one of the consoles last month.

Earlier this year Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of the world’s most popular MMO game “World of Warcraft”, sent their fans into overdrive by announcing that a new game project would be revealed at a Korean “Starcraft” gaming convention. This lead to much speculation that the game would be a new MMO, possibly even a “Starcraft” themed massive multiplayer game. Job postings by Blizzard looking for programmers for a next gen MMO only helped to fuel the fire but when the day arrived the mystery game in question turned out to simply be “Starcraft II”.

Now that several months have slipped by and the hype has dissipated it appears that a Blizzard representative has confirmed that there is a secret MMO game in development at the company. In a discussion thread on the Blizzard forums about the merger between Activision and Vivendi (which owns Blizzard) a Blizzard rep let loose the first official comment about the rumored MMO by saying “It is an unannounced next-gen MMO and that doesn’t mean an expansion for World of Warcraft either.”

This next story should give you pause to think about what may be ahead in the near future for the emerging biotechnology sector. A science team at South Korea’s Gyeongsang National University announced that they have successfully cloned kittens that have a modified gene that alters their skin color. When placed underneath an ultraviolet light a unmodified cat will look green. These new genetically modified cats have a fluorescent protein inserted into their DNA which makes their skin appear red under the same kind of UV light.

Three cloned Turkish Angola kitties were born in early 2007 but one died shortly after. The two surviving cats now weigh 3.5 kilograms and appear to be perfectly healthy representatives of the feline race. Aside from being able to make funky colored critters the new procedure is hoped to be used for bringing back the populations of animals on the endangered species list as well as identifying and eliminating genetic diseases in people and pets.