Light-emitting diodes to light up Michigan city

How many Ann Arbor, Mich., city workers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Soon, none.

Instead, they will be installing light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, to replace about 1,400 street lights.

The eco-friendly city about 30 miles west of Detroit says it will be the nation’s first to convert all downtown street lights to LED technology, which uses less than half the energy of traditional bulbs and could save the community $100,000 a year.

“LEDs pay for themselves in four years,” said Mayor John Hieftje, who announced the city’s plans this week as it joined Raleigh, N.C., and Toronto in the LED City initiative, an industry-government group working to evaluate, deploy and promote LED lighting.

“They provide the same light, but they last 10 years. We had to replace the old ones every two years.”

Lighting consumes 22 percent of the electricity produced in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, and widespread use of LED technology could cut consumption in half.

Online role-playing games are on a roll: Role-playing games with an Internet element are so much more captivating than equivalent electronic games where users don’t go online that they change users’ lives, cutting into their sleep and boosting the time they spend playing, a new study shows.

So-called massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, have become a huge phenomenon in the game world in the last five years. The largest, “World of Warcraft,” has more than 9 million players.

The study by Joshua Smyth, a Syracuse University psychology professor, says one reason for their success is they really suck in players.

Smyth divided 100 student volunteers randomly into four groups. One got tokens to play at a local arcade, a second played the adventure game “Gauntlet: Dark Legacy” on a Sony Corp. PlayStation 2 console and the third played role-playing game “Diablo II” on computers.

Only the fourth group, which played MMORPG “Dark Age of Camelot,” also on computers, had online interaction.

After a month, the MMORPG players — the fourth group — reported playing on average 14.4 hours in the previous week, more than twice as much as the next most avid players, the “Diablo II” group.

The “Dark Age of Camelot” players also reported significantly lower overall health and poorer sleep and were more likely to find the games interfered with their studies and social lives.

On the other hand, they had more fun playing and were more likely to say they had made new friends, presumably online.

Recording industry targets Usenet: The recording industry is going after an old-fashioned online bulletin board system called Usenet, filing a lawsuit against one provider on grounds it allows users to illegally distribute copyright-protected music.

Music companies, represented by the trade group Recording Industry Association of America, said Internet users have been turning to Usenet and other alternatives after the entertainment industry’s legal actions forced several online file-sharing services to close or transform into legal music distributors.

Federal copyright law offers online providers some immunity from copyright lawsuits over their users’ activities.

But the recording industry might still prevail if it can prove the service provider encourages illegal activity through its advertising or promotional materials, said Wendy Seltzer, a fellow with Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The Associated Press

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