Quantum information is the physics of knowledge. To be more specific, the field of quantum information studies the implications that quantum mechanics has on the fundamental nature of information. By studying this relationship between quantum theory and information, it is possible to design a new type of computer—a quantum computer.

Remember the format wars? Ars looks back at the heated battles between VHS and Betamax as well as HD DVD and Blu-ray, wondering if, now that the dust has settled, the end of the format wars is nigh. I have this love/hate relationship with format wars.

No, it's not reality television versus talk shows, or Top 40 radio against "the best of the '80s—and more!" The wars I'm thinking about pit technologies against one another, usually in a battle to the death of one or more of the contestants. It's One format to rule them all every time, and the streets are littered with the remains of the losers.

Over the holidays, Steam gave gamers quite the present: an ongoing series of sales with big-name games running as low as $2.50. It was hard to resist many of the deals, and many of us snapped up a large variety of games across a series of platforms. Bioshock for $5? Killing Floor for $5? Burnout Paradise for under $10? Who could say no?

Avatar's story is exactly what you expect from the trailers, but the visuals and 3D effects more than make up for the cookie-cutter characters. Sigourney Weaver adds soul to the film, and every dollar spent on this mammoth production is seen on the screen. Our review inside.

There's a chance that today will go down as the day of the first announcement that we've detected the presence of particles of dark matter. Two talks from members of the CDMS consortium, which runs a detector designed to spot the presence of a likely dark matter candidate, have indicated that they've spotted two events that bear the signatures of something called a neutralino, a hypothesized particle that has many of the properties of dark matter. With only two of these detections, however, there's still a 23 percent chance that random background events produced the signals.

Microsoft has begun issuing temporary bans to players taking advantage of an exploit in Modern Warfare 2, while Infinity Ward works on a patch to fix the issue. While the servers may be kept slightly cleaner for the efforts, the amount of control Microsoft holds over owners of their consoles, and the arbitrary way they are able to wield it, is troubling.

The USB flash drive has replaced the floppy disk drive as the best storage medium for transferring files, but it also has its uses as a replacement for CDs and DVDs. USB drives tend to be higher in capacity than disc media, but since they are more expensive, they cannot (yet) really be used as a replacement. There are reasons why you would, however, choose a USB device over a DVD disc, and bootable software is definitely one of them. Not only is it faster to copy data such as setup files from a USB drive, but during usage the access times are also significantly faster.

In a couple of years, crossing the 1Gbps threshold with a WiFi access point will be routine. That access point will likely have two radios, one for each major spectrum band, and support a host of older flavors for compatibility. Eventually, WiFi will approach the robustness and speed needed to make it a completely viable replacement for Ethernet for most users.

With another month gone (boy that one flew by), it's time to take a look at what Microsoft Careers, a great source for scraps on future Microsoft products, had to say about Windows 8 over the last 30 days or so. This month we saw seven job postings regarding the successor to both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, each one offering a small glimpse into what Microsoft is thinking about. Before we go through them in chronological order, we should note that some of them have already been removed and others have been slightly reworded, so what you see below is the original unedited versions Microsoft first posted and which we saved until now. The first job posting is from November 3, 2009 and is looking for someone to fill the Software Engineering: Test job category by working on critical updates that will be delivered through Windows Update for Windows 8: (READ MORE)

Every now and then, the public gets a glimpse at what goes into the making of scientific consensus on an important question. No, we're not talking about the infamous climate change emails—we're talking about how science really comes to its conclusions, a process that involves a few hundred years of work.