Well, the younger Powell and his crew were busy yesterday. Rulings were made about cell phone spam and digital broadcast reproduction. On cell phone spam: you can't send it via email... which isn't surprising, but the CAN-SPAM act will now have a registry of domains for wireless providers that can't …

An article from BusinessWeek discusses the long-term health of Netflix, the online DVD rental service, after its announcement that its expenses were up and Blockbuster's announcement that they are entering the fray with a lower-priced product.

An article from the Washington Post today tells us that Bob Edwards, nearly-25-year host of NPR's Morning Edition, will be back on the air this October. But, not with NPR. NPR itself is carrying an article about his departure and subsequent arrival at XM Radio for a new show slated …

Peter Gabriel, musician and co-founder of OD2 (recently acquired by Loudeye) is interviewed by CNN on the topic of digital music. He's happy with the movement towards disintermediation and is willing to give Apple a pat on the back for pushing the industry forward.

I'd violated my usual rule and read a number of reviews before going to see Spider-Man 2, so I was expecting a surprisingly good movie. However, I've been seeing a lot of "art" films and so an action flick was pretty appealing. Short answer: the critics are right, this movie …

In its first week of operation, Apple's iTunes Music Store has sold 800,000 songs. According to Apple, their closest competitor (OD2) has sold just 1/16th the number songs last week in the UK as Apple, who sold 450,000. OD2 appears to operate: MyCokeMusic.com Virgin Music Tiscali …

In an effort to bring local channels to another 41 local areas in the US, DirecTV has launched another satellite, this time using the Sea Launch sea-borne commercial launch facility. Sea Launch uses a sea-borne launch facility usually position near the equator in the Pacific Ocean to launch commercial payloads …

The New York Times has an article discussing the work of John Lowry, a pioneer in the film and video technology area who is working to make DVDs now (and in the future) the best that they can be. Lowry's company, Lowry Digital, which was profiled by Apple in this …

In summary, like former first lady Nancy Reagan used to say, "Just say no!". I was wondering why this movie had gotten no advertising, and I believe the answer is now clear: they didn't want to spend a dollar more than they had already spent to get the film in …

George's buddies at StarWars.com have released pictures of the upcoming boxed sets for the September 21, 2004 release of the original episodes (IV-VI).

The word on the street is that we should expect to see a boxed set of the special edition of the trilogy this fall. More news as it happens, but here's the article form the Chicago Sun Times.

An article from InfoWorld gives some preliminary information about Samsung's upcoming satellite TV-receiving telephone. The announcement from Samsung earlier this week indicates that they have created a single chip that will decode the satellite signals broadcast at 2.6GHz (as opposed to 12.2GHz to 12.7GHz used by DBS …

The New York Times is reporting that Bill Moyers and others are asking The History Channel to open an internal investigation into a documentary aired last year accusing former President Lyndon B Johnson of participating in the assassination of former President John F Kennedy. The row is about a show …

The venerable NPR program Car Talk has stopped providing streaming versions of their programs in RealAudio and has switched instead to Windows Media Player. As noted in the comments from the site, you can access WMP from the Macintosh, so they aren't cutting Mac users out. Interesting (and hopefully informative …

After noticing the new IBM advertisements touting the benefits of open source (check out the IBM Open Source page), I was intrigued to see that it took only days for the ads to generate an article in BBC News. Maybe they were having a slow news day. Perhaps they were …

An article from Wired discussed rock artist Peter Gabriel and his move (with fellow artist Brian Eno) to encourage new artists to look away from the traditional record labels and toward a direct relationship with their fans via the Internet. The pair were stumping support at Midem (a music conference …

According to a press release by NASA, the Mars Rover Spirit moved off of its comfortable landing pad yesterday to the tune of Who Let The Dogs Out (by the Baha Men). The first movements were successful and generated a bunch of cool new photos that can be seen by …

The announcement last week that Hewlett-Packard would be aligning themselves with Apple in the approach to digital music was met by strong support in the Apple community and strong condemnation by both Microsoft and Dell. The press comments from these two companies spoke of "standards" and "choice", so what could …

I had no idea what to expect when we went in to see Big Fish. The film is the latest work by acclaimed, but eccentric, director Tim Burton (of Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and Nightmare Before Christmas fame). But, is it any good? I certainly thought so, but it wasn't what …

The capsule summary is that this film is at least as good as its reviews say. I had heard about Calendar Girls a few weeks back and Carol and I decided to go see it during the week in order to get a break and brighten things up. Brighten things …