Alex Duran chuckles at the nearly impossible task of loading a 46-inch flat-screen TV in the back seat of his mother's Ford Taurus on Black Friday. He said he was in the market for a smaller set, but the discount at Sears South Coast Plaza was so good that he purchased a bigger one. Credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times.You weren't imagining those killer discount deals on TVs over the Black Friday shopping weekend. The iSuppli research firm said today that LCD-TV prices dropped 22% in time for the day-after-Thanksgiving sales. But that wasn't on just occasional deals -- that was the average discount. Some sizes offered even steeper drops, especially in smaller-sized TVs. The 26-inch models were down almost 35% to an average price of $250, compared with $384 before Black Friday, according to iSuppli. The most commonly advertised models for the weekend were in the 32-inch size. The average price for those was down about 25% to $369, compared with $490 before the shopping holiday. Shoppers looking for big-screen LCD-TVs didn't get such good bargains. The 46-inch sets sold for an average of $964, down just 7%. Generally, the biggest price drops were on brand-name sets from the likes of ...

 Christian Dior Poison by Dior Credit: Christian Dior Fragrances. Online auction giant EBay Inc. was slapped with a $2.5-million fine by a Paris court today for failing to meet the terms of an earlier ruling, which prevented sales of certain perfume brands to French consumers on its website. The Commercial Court of Paris found that EBay violated a June 2008 order to halt sales of Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton perfumes. The company, known as LVMH, sells a variety of popular perfume brands, including Christian Dior, Guerlain, Kenzo and Givenchy. Mary Huser, EBay’s deputy general counsel, said the company poured millions of dollars into filtering software to check millions of daily listings to ensure that it acted in accordance with the injunction. “It is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, for the French consumer to purchase these products because of the money and technology that EBay put into place,” Huser said. “We didn’t agree with the decision to implement the injunction. But we did everything to meet the terms.” EBay said there are 200 million listings on its website every day and claimed that LVMH offered only 1,341 detailed examples in its case. And in 1,091 of those 1,341 listings, EBay said, the seller ...

If you're still looking for a gift, the Times' Technology staff has compiled a list of our 10 favorite gadgets of 2009. Check out the full list, with details.

Of all the things Google is really good at, patience isn't necessarily one of them. To prove Web applications like Gmail and Google Docs could be as sophisticated as desktop apps, Google created its own desktop software a couple years ago -- a small utility called Gears. Once it's installed on a user's computer, features like offline caching of e-mails and drag-and-drop file uploading would be unlocked. Many of those features are beginning to be adopted by HTML5, the next revision to the standard programming language that powers the Web. For the time being, Gears will still feature a number of tools that can be opened using Firefox and Internet Explorer. The technology is built into Google's Chrome browser. As Google prepares to release its first beta version of Chrome for the Mac (a developer preview has been available for months), the company is letting the sun set on its Gears project. "We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites," wrote a Google spokesman ...

Amsterdam - Just as Mininova, generally considered the largest BitTorrent index, complied with a Dutch court order to remove all unauthorized links to copyrighted media, another large BitTorrent tracker called SceneTorrents has shut down permanently, TorrentFreak reported. Members of the four-year-old site's staff were arrested recently, according to the report. SceneTorrents counted around 20,000 members. read more