Once a month I get together with my colleagues for an ad-hoc chat and lunch about anything and everything that takes our fancy; I love these occasions not just because of the geek content we discuss but also because of the observations and gossip that they bring.

A few weeks ago, the conversation went a bit like this:

Mike: I was at this show, and met a guy from [large consumer electronics manufacturer] whose son also works there in the TV division, and he was saying that HDTV sales were below expectation, and they reckon that porn is to blame.

Alec: Huh?

Mike: Well that’s the thing, the problem is that apparently HDTV porn is not actually something that you want to see close-up; you see all the stubbly bits and other things which in truth you don’t really want to know about. They reckon it’s going to hurt sales quite substantially…

Tim: So you need to degrade the picture in order to want to watch it?

Alec: Ah, that’s a job for Vista, then.

Mike: What?

Chris: Ah, yes! If you watch HD content on Vista and if you have HD equipment but one of the components is deemed by Vista to be insecure – if it allows people to copy the data – then it automatically fuzzes the picture…

Alec: …so maybe Vista will be the saviour of the HDTV porn industry? Or vice-versa?

…and so on with the puns; we recapped this conversation for Darren earlier today, and further observed that mankind (or, let’s face it, menkind) have finally invented a technology that they don’t actually want to use for porn.

More crassly worryingly for the average technology consumer, this observation removes the likelihood of a quick resolution to the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray war, because unlike (VHS vs Betamax) there is no business driver towards one or other format for mass production of media destined for eventual sale, wrapped in discreet brown paper bags.