DirecTV and EchoStar are threatening the state of South Carolina with a lawsuit if $30M in taxes that the companies allege were illegally levied upon satellite TV customers are not refunded. The Triangle Business Journal reports that the companies (really company at this point) have made the threat to conform …

Wired is reporting that a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision has cleared the way for many of us who publish information on a small scale (and who mostly point to other media for source material) to gain some protection against libel. The protection seems to stem from an interpretation …

A very thorough head-to-head review of the ATI Radeon 9800 (128MB) and the NVidia FX/5900 (256MB) appears on OCAddiction.com (an overclocking site for the Windows community). Great review in terms of looking at a variety of both real-world and benchmarked performance issues. It appears that ATI is still …

The world has lost another fine member of the acting profession. Only two weeks after saying goodbye to Gregory Peck, the world has lost a great actress, Katharine Hepburn. Unlike Peck, I can't think of any one role that personifies Hepburn, but her first really big film was The African …

In a new twist, speakeasy, a high-speed internet provider has branched out into helping its customers provide WiFi-shared internet connections. As far as I know, this is the first company to offer a service to provide the billing and back-end support (email, etc) for customers who are sharing internet via …

In what may be a first, the Orlando Sentinel reports that a Sacramento, CA man has been found guilty of attempting to defraud DirecTV and Dish through scheming to sell satellite decoding equipment. The amazing thing is that he will be paying back a $180M settlement at $500/month for …

According to an editorial comment by Rush Limbaugh, the reason that Apple's "superior equipment" doesn't have a larger market share (he suggests double its current share) is it's politics. Um, I'm no big fan of Al Gore, but if I have to choose between Al supporting my computer and Rush …

An article from SpaceToday.net and referencing a press release from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board indicates that the board is requesting NASA put together a plan to check and repair tiles while the Shuttle is on a mission. The plan involves setting up an inspection regime for missions that …

Mike and I went to see Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle last night at the Metreon in downtown San Francisco. Nice theater, by the way, but the movie isn't going on my list of must-see films. I will admit up front that I enjoyed the first Charlie's Angels film. It was …

The National Science Foundation had a press release this week about some researchers at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) who have developed a new Hydrogen catalyst. The new catalyst (made from a combination of Tin, Nikel, and Aluminum) is considerably less expensive and as effective than the Platinum catalysts that …

The Swedish company, PrintDreams Europe AB is your hand and communicates via Bluetooth. The PrintDreams device uses RMPT (Random Movement Print Technology) to print without requiring a mechanical device to move the printer across the page. The basic idea is that you have an ink reservoir, jet, and the printer …

In what has become a pretty common ritual among providers of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), first-day glitches tarnished the roll out of Sony Entertainment Online and LucasArts's new game Star Wars: Galaxies. According to an article on CNet, users waited hours to get signed in the first …

Do not wait for the movie, go to the FTC's Do Not Call site and get your numbers in there. The site went live on Friday and anyone who signs up before the end of July should stop getting calls starting the first week of October. The longer you wait …

Charlie White (author of the infamous, and now missing Adobe "PC Preferred" article), has written an editorial piece for Digital Video Editing. Not surprisingly, it takes Apple to task on their PR this week. Although not likely to curry favor with the Macintosh crowd, it is not a bad article …

Alias|Wavefront, makers of the high-end 3D package, Maya, announced earlier this week that 25% of its commercial sales in North America (and 20% world-wide) are for the Mac OS X version of the software. The exact quote was: "Twenty-five percent of all commercial units of Maya are now sold …

It took me almost 5 days to make it through J K Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, however, it was concentrated in a total of five reading sessions: 350 pages on the plane, 3 sessions of about 45 pages each at the hotel and the marathon …

Since a bunch of the usual crowd was out in San Francisco this week, we decided to see if bigger was actually better for The Matrix Reloaded. The short (albeit useless) answer is "yes and no." The IMAX treatment certainly was a far cry from the local theater in which …

The New York Times has reviewed preliminary versions of the Microsoft MSN Messenger product and Apple's iChat AV. The long and the short is that the two programs do similar things in very different ways with different requirements. Apple's product has focused on a high-quality solution and Microsoft's has focused …

A press release from Mirror Image announced that they have been awarded patent number 6,581,090 describing their Internet communication system. It is unclear what effect this will have on the web caching industry, but I'm sure a lot of people are reading the patent today.

The long-awaited, oft-delayed massively-multiplayer online role playing game, Star Wars:Galaxies is now shipping.