National MP falls victim to water hoax
NZPA | Thursday, 13 September 2007

WATER WOES: National's Jacqui Dean is the latest MP to fall for a hoax, calling for a ban on "dihydrogen monoxide" - or water.

Ms Dean, the MP for Otago, a leading proponent of a ban on party pills, appears to have been duped by a letter from a constituent asking her to raise the issue of dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO).

A letter, signed by Ms Dean and sent to Associate Health Minister Jim Anderton, the minister in charge of drug policy, last month, asked if the Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs had a view on banning the "drug".

Mr Anderton yesterday took the opportunity to rub Ms Dean's nose in the embarrassing blunder.

He said dihydrogen monoxide "may have been described to her as colourless, odourless, tasteless and causing the death of uncounted thousands of people every year, and withdrawal from which, for those who become dependent on it, means certain death.

"I had to respond that the experts had no intention of doing so."

It is not the first time MPs have had a brush with the hoax substance.

In 2001 a staffer in Green MP Sue Kedgley's office responded to a request for support for a campaign to ban dihydrogen monoxide by saying she would be "absolutely supportive of the campaign to ban this toxic substance" if she had enough time, which she did not.

National used the letter to try and embarrass the Greens - who were at the time waging a campaign against genetic engineering - as scientifically illiterate.

Wikipedia says the hoax has been running since 1989 with the aim of illustrating how a lack of scientific knowledge and an exaggerated analysis can lead to misplaced fears.

It was initiated by three University of California Santa Cruz students and gained widespread public attention in 1997 when a 14-year-old student, Nathan Zohner, gathered petitions to ban DHMO as the basis of a science project, titled "How Gullible Are We?".

Hasta La Vista, HD DVD

We're not going to have the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format war to kick around anymore. This morning, Toshiba announced that it would stop making HD DVD players and recorders, a surrender that yields the market to the rival Blu-Ray format.

A statement on Toshiba's Web site attributed the decision to "recent major changes in the market," which is a grotesquely understated way of stating that movie studios, video rental stores and electronics retailers had spent the last month and a half pounding nails in HD DVD's coffin.

First, Warner Home Video announced in early January that it would stop releasing new titles in both HD DVD and Blu-ray. A month later, NetFlix also said it would drop HD DVD, news which was followed quickly by Best Buy's decision to promote Blu-ray over HD DVD And just last week, Wal-Mart said it would boot HD DVD players and titles from its stores.

It's hard to imagine that HD DVD could once have been the favored contender. It did, after all, reach stores months before Blu-ray--and did so with dramatically cheaper players. Microsoft had even anointed it as the high-def disc format of the future. But after that head start, most of HD DVD's best features were either unexploited or unadvertised:

* HD DVD backers repeatedly touted the lower manufacturing costs of its discs, but customers never saw that alleged advantage show up in store prices.

* HD DVD allowed movie studios to release "hybrid" discs--a regular DVD on one side, an HD DVD on the other--that would work in current and future players, but studios either neglected that or reserved it only for some titles.

* HD DVD discs were supposed to provide a "managed copy" of a movie to a computer, but squabbles between the format's developers and movie studios prevented that feature from being activated.

* HD DVD did away with the "region codes" that stop you from playing a DVD bought overseas in most players purchased in the U.S., but this unequivocally customer-friendly feature was only ever mentioned in passing by HD DVD backers. Ditto HD DVD's slightly more lenient copying restrictions.

* You could buy a Toshiba laptop with an HD DVD recorder drive at a non-exorbitant price, but standalone HD DVD video recorders for use with a TV never made their way into U.S. stores.

So now we have the more expensive format, with less backwards compatibility and with more stringent usage restrictions. I can't quite feel like celebrating.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2008/02/hasta_la_vista_hd_dvd.html