Science and Technology

Will cloud storage help indie labels?

​We've already taken a look at the big three cloud services from Apple, Amazon and Google, but what does any of this mean to local bands and labels? With talk of Apple paying $100 million to the major labels for the rights to store content in the cloud and the launch of its paid service immine ... More >>

Fracking Aurora is a natural gas: Kenny Be's Worst-Case Scenario

​ On Thursday, June 23, 2011, the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission will explain how hydraulic fracturing (fracking) operations on the former Lowry Bombing Range comply with Arapahoe County's 2007 Sustainable Growth Objectives. It will be an easy sell...

Woody Paige repeats denial that he plagiarized Dan Le Batard, rejects claim by Norm Clarke

Woody Paige.​Update below: Last week, Denver Post columnist Woody Paige admitted using quotes without attribution from a piece by SportsBusiness Journal's John Ourand. In the same item, he also denied an old claim by sportswriter Dan Le Batard that he'd plagiarized him back in the '90s. Now, ... More >>

Your smartphone makes you look like an irritating prick

Fracking primer: State seeks to address uproar over drilling process

​Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" -- pumping massive amounts of water mixed with toxic chemicals into tight formations to extract oil and gas -- remains a sore subject among environmentalists, neighbors of drilling rigs and some lawmakers, even as energy industry boosters insist it's safe. ... More >>

How does Apple's iCloud compare to other cloud services? No streaming option, for starters.

​Yesterday, Apple described and semi-launched its newest service, iCloud, an online storage locker that will automatically sync all of your Apple devices together with music, apps and books purchased through the iTunes store. What does that mean, exactly? Well, we break it down and compare its ... More >>

Sad pay phone of the week: The pay phone on 16th and Market

​Location: Market Street Station at16th and Market. Number: Unknown. Status: Operable. Price: 50 cents for local calls. Photo Taken: 3:30 p.m. on May 10.

Astronaut Bruce McCandless II touches down at Space Day tomorrow at the DMNS

​When it comes to Astronauts, Bruce McCandless II is a straight O.G. Selected by NASA in 1966, a mere eight years after the agency was founded, he got right down to business as the CAPCOM -- the astronaut NASA designates as a mission-control liaison to the astronauts in space -- of Apollo 11, ... More >>

Alki David gathers some hip-hop and R&B acts and trolls CBS over Limewire distribution

​This might be some of the weirdest copyright related news we've run across in a while. FilmOn founder Alki David has teamed up with a slew of musicians to file a lawsuit against CBS Interactive and CNET over CNET's distribution of LimeWire. Back in November, a federal judge had to issue a res ... More >>

Sad pay phone of the week: The pay phone at the Alemeda light-rail station

Steven Pierce​Location: Alameda light-rail station. Number: Unknown. Status: Operable. Price: 50 cents for local calls. Photo: Taken 3:30 p.m. on April 28.

Sad pay phone of the week: The pay phone at 27th and Welton

​Location: 27th and Welton. Number: (303) 299- 0027 Status: Operable. Cost: 50 cents for local calls. Photo Taken: 2:30p.m. on March 31.

MapQuest turns fifteen

Sad pay phone of the week: The pay phone at 25th and Welton

​Location: On 25th and Welton near the Kingdom of Glory Christian Center. Number: Unknown. Status: Operable. Price: 35 cents for local calls. Photo Taken: 2:20 p.m. on March 31.

Renewable energy standards in CO: Lawsuit claims bias against nonrenewable electricity

​Are there still people out there who oppose green energy initiatives? Hell yes there are. The American Tradition Institute, a think tank that espouses "free-market principles of stewardship" pertaining to environmental issues, has filed a complaint against the State of Colorado, arguing that ... More >>

Sad Pay Phone of the Week: Pay Phone at Broadway and Ohio

steven pierce​Location: Next to Griff's Burger Bar at 742 South Broadway. Number: Unknown. Status: Operable. Price: $1 for four minutes Photo Taken: 1:30 p.m. on March 31.

Today: Bakers and food bloggers from across the world hold an online bake sale to benefit Second Harvest Japan

​When San Francisco food blogger Sabrina Modelle heard about the earthquake and tsunami devastation in Japan, she reacted the same way that most of us did: staring, dumbfounded, at the horrific images on the television screen, or listening in disbelief to the coverage on the radio. And it was ... More >>

Jared Polis and Diana DeGette try to tighten regulations on fracking -- again

"Gasland"​Representatives Diane DeGette and Jared Polis are taking another run at tightening federal regulations on hydraulic fracturing, a natural gas drilling technique also known as fracking. Introduced this week by the Colorado twosome and fellow Democratic rep Maurice Hinchey from New Yor ... More >>

Japanese radiation worries in U.S.: Health dept. tries to calm fears as media stokes them

​This morning, Peter Boyles spent part of his KHOW morning show wondering if we should be taking potassium iodide to protect ourselves against radiation from the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan. And at this writing, the main story on the CBS4 home page asks, "Could Japan's Radi ... More >>

LimeWire wins legal consolation prize, but remains screwed

​File sharing site LimeWire is currently at the front lines of the battle over online media distribution. They've already lost the suit brought against them by thirteen record companies, the site is boarded up and now they're negotiating damages. This is where things get interesting for the ca ... More >>

Pueblo nuclear power plant proposal hearings against backdrop of Japanese explosions

​Timing is everything. With gas prices going up, up, up due to the chaos in North Africa last month, suddenly a nuclear power plant started looking good to Pueblo County, where the commissioners are considering a proposal to make that county one of the spots in the country vying for a new nuke ... More >>

Rhapsody, Spotify headed for showdown

​Music streaming services look more and more like they'll eventually do to MP3s what MP3s did to CDs, and what CDs did to tapes, and so on. We're still a long way from a paradigm shift, but as the popular European streaming service Spotify makes headway in its mission to invade America, Rhapso ... More >>

Gas-drilling oversight bill killed by the House: What's the fracking point?

Gas well pads.​A bill that sought to increase the reporting process for water-quality complaints related to oil and gas drilling in Colorado died quietly at the statehouse yesterday, with Republican lawmakers insisting that the industry's use of hydraulic fracturing fluids, or "fracking," pose ... More >>

Attorney General John Suthers could use some Facebook friends

Hulu might die. Here's why you shouldn't care.

​News Corp. and Disney (who own Fox and ABC, respectively) are considering pulling their ad-based free streaming shows from Hulu -- remember that they are two of the three companies who founded Hulu back in 2008. Hulu has done incredibly well in terms of viewership, but its subscription-based ... More >>

How the music industry will change in 2011

​In the past decade, the music industry has seen a lot of changes, but it has struggled to keep pace with technology, piracy and consumer demands. Already this year we've started to see a few more changes take shape, from crackdowns on piracy websites, a resurgence of interest in the currently ... More >>

Astrological sign change? Let's just forget this whole thing ever happened

Sorry, Aquarius. You're too late to get me. ​When I was about seventeen years old, a friend of my dad's who was into New Agey kind of stuff took the liberty of compiling an astrological chart for me. It was several pages long and went into great detail about what the day, hour and month of my ... More >>

Over the weekend: 360 MacDev looks forward

​It was not enormous, nor was it filled with flashing lights, giant monitors or masses of people. Instead, 360 MacDev's current incarnation was a smallish gathering of like-minded individuals of all ages (more on that later) interested in getting together, talking shop and discussing theory. W ... More >>

Over $1 million in damages from copper thefts? Michael Evans, others busted for alleged scheme

Large pics below.​The still-bad economy has inspired a number of small-time metal thieves -- like Richard Goodface and Duane Brown, who allegedly swiped Denver storm grates in October. But according to the Colorado Springs Police Department, they're pikers in comparison with several suspects a ... More >>

You are a cave-man: A UCD anthropologist has some unconventional ideas on Neanderthals

Sexy?​Some 400,000 years ago, the earliest ancestors of man as we know him migrated out of Africa and into the land that would later become the snootiest place on earth: Western Europe. But that area was not so fancy then; in fact, it was rugged and cruel, and an ice age came that isolated tha ... More >>

We had a party and tweeted about it: Westword #WebAwards winners!

​If you were there last night, thank you for coming to the first-ever Westword Web Awards party at Casselman's, 2620 Walnut Street. The room swelled (see full slideshow from the Web Awards) to about 400 bloggers, photographers, shameless self-promoters and artists, who tweeted about the thing ... More >>

LimeWire shut down by permanent injunction

​Looking for WMAs of Third Eye Blind? You're going to have to look elsewhere. Effective immediately, LimeWire, the popular peer-to-peer file sharing service, has gone the way of pagers, payphones and the Walkman. In 2006, the music industry filed a suit against the service for a "massive sca ... More >>

The French are fighting piracy in a new and interesting way, but could it work here?

​The French government has revealed a plan to combat piracy that could either be the most brilliant gesture ever or the most monumental waste of government resources of all time (okay, maybe not all time, but close). The proposal: French residents can buy a 50-euro gift card with which they ... More >>

Black out: Lamar gets steamed over a troubled coal plant -- right in the middle of town

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Home Improvements

King Tut's penis: It's missing from him, and the new DAM exhibit

​The Denver Art Museum's new mega-blockbuster exhibit "Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs," features more than a hundred artifacts associated with the celebrity pharaoh. But one thing you probably won't find anywhere is Tut's penis. That's because it's apparently missing, poss ... More >>

eBay bids for Boulder's RedLaser and wins: Download app for free here

​Occipital is a Boulder startup that just hit the big time. The company's just been acquired by eBay on the strength of its RedLaser app for iPhones, which scans barcodes, allowing users to compare prices on the go. As part of its big push into mobile shopping, eBay has reduced the price of R ... More >>

Boulder's National Center for Atmospheric Research about to get shiny new supercomputers

It'll look like this. Exciting, we know​For 46 years, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has had a supercomputing center at its Mesa Laboratory headquarters in Boulder. This week, NCAR broke ground on a new facility. The center uses supercomputers -- which can process 76 trillion op ... More >>

Star Light, Star Bright

Boulder to host first Beer Bloggers and Social Media Conference

​They know each other by their blogs: The Beer Wench, 2 Beer Guys, Fermentally Challenged, Beer Goggins, and many, many others. Maybe they've run into each other a beer conference or tasting on one side of the country or another. But for the most part, these beer bloggers have never met in pe ... More >>

Five ways to stave off an iTunes store monopoly

​ With the disintegration of Lala coming May 31st, we've been left with one less choice for downloading. Lala was one of the best digital music distributors in town, offering full album streaming and low prices for downloading. After the website was gobbled up by Apple in December of last ... More >>

Ken Salazar taps "recovery czar" Chris Henderson to fix MMS

The New RepublicDrill, baby, drill: Just what does additional offshore drilling add to the mix?​In the wake of the worst American offshore oil disaster in decades, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is scrambling on several fronts to address the perception that his administration has been m ... More >>

Denver has high hopes for a new social-media policy.

Spaced Out

Cybercrime in Denver: We're number eight

"I have a feeling there's something phishy in Denver."​In the not exactly thrilling 1995 cyber-thriller The Net, Sandra Bullock's character, Angela Bennett, reveals that she was raised in La Junta -- a community whose name she pronounces as if she were Hugo Chavez. Little did Bennett know, how ... More >>

And now, presenting thirty craptastic minutes with thirty different iPhone band apps

​ Sometimes we have to wonder if folks that program for Apple's App Store are hell-bent on wasting people's time. We spent an evening with as many artist-specific iPhone apps we could get our hands on and found a few amazing things, a few interesting things and a plethora of pure and total cr ... More >>

Top ten five blogs by bands

Photo courtesy of Kanyewest.com​ Last week, Kanye christened his new web site with the above photo of his girlfriend, Amber Rose. Then, Thom Yorke announced the name of his latest band on the Radiohead blog. Which got us thinking about the other band blogs we have bookmarked. In our bitchin' ... More >>

Internet Explorer 6 is dead -- and the funeral is in Denver

May it rest in pieces.​Mention Internet Explorer to most knowledgeable computer types and you're likely to prompt a flood of profanities that would even embarrass the cast of Jersey Shore. So don't expect such folks to mourn at the funeral for Internet Explorer 6, which takes place next week u ... More >>

DISH Network rips proposed Comcast-NBC Universal merger

​Englewood's own DISH Network has launched a passionate, if long-shot, effort to stop the blockbuster merger of Comcast and NBC Universal. This morning, in letters addressed to U.S. reps Rick Boucher and Cliff Stearns, as well as to senators Herb Kohl and Orrin Hatch, DISH executive vice pres ... More >>

Colorado tribes looking to ramp up renewable energy, too

A photo of Ignacio, Colorado, home base of the Southern Ute tribe.​In recent days, the New Mexico-based Jemez Pueblo tribe has gotten plenty of ink for its plan to build "the first utility-scale solar plant on tribal land." Turns out two Colorado tribes -- the Southern Utes and Ute Mountain Ut ... More >>