Video rental stores like Hollywood are closing in the face of increased competition from Netflix, availability of movies streamed directly to laptops and a coming change in TV format. What will this technological shift mean for consumers.

While video stores have not disappeared completely, the surviving stores are struggling to compete in the era of Netflix, computer downloads and inexpensive retail sales.

In today’s story by movie critic Joe Williams, in March, Hollywood Video closed three of its local outlets, a year after the chain was bought by rival Movie Gallery.

The inventory at even the largest Hollywood Video or…

It’s as if you were transported back to the dark ages – the 1990s – before you came to depend on instant messages, e-mail, Facebook, MySpace or online research. Your sit down at your computer, click on your mail or web browser icon, and nothing happens.

What do you do? Call your cable or DSL tech support? Yell at the customer service agent? Or just turn off the computer and read a good book or watch television? Or maybe actually go outside to get some yard work finished or a walk around the block?

According to today’s story, a recent…

Spend any time online and you are destined to enounter hostility, directed at you or others. According to a story in Tuesday’s Post-Dispatch by reporter Tim Barker, the information superhighway is clogged with a digital version of road rage. Short tempers. Rude gestures. Obscenities. All bubbling under the surface waiting for an excuse to erupt.

The digital world is a place where everyone is equal. It strips away inhibition, allowing the shy and introverted to jump into conversations and situations they’d run from in the real world.
The only problem, experts say, is that it also allows, or even encourages, people…