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Bill Gates is seen here trying to wirelessly share The Captain and Tennille’s Love will Keep us Together with a friend on one of the special invisible Zune’s that Microsoft brought out this week.

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Cruising the pack-ice very slowly, we discovered this Polar Bear and her cubs in the afternoon of June 18th 2006, in the Hinlopen Strait on the eastside of Spitsbergen.
They had just caught a Bearded Seal and were feasting on it.
We were very lucky to be able to watch this wonderfull event for almost three quarters of an hour.

I’ve got so many old family photos of me, my mom, and my little sister that are just like these: happy, nurturing, covered from head to toe in blood.

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Superman has the power to leap tall buildings. But leaping onto a cellphone screen is proving a little trickier.

Warner Brothers recently created a six-episode series of short videos for mobile devices based on the popular Superman television show, “Smallville.” The episodes tracked the history of Oliver Queen, the “Smallville” billionaire mayor who, like Clark Kent, has a superhero alter ego, the Green Arrow.

For Warner, it was a way to tell the Green Arrow story that might have otherwise been missed. “We were never able to do that in the show,” Lisa Gregorian, the executive vice president of worldwide television marketing for Warner Brothers Television Group, said of the “Smallville Legends” mobile series.

But while short, multiepisode cellphone series are growing in popularity, the lucrative advertising dollars prevalent in other entertainment segments — and which studios rely on for profit — have been slow to migrate to the supersmall screen. Sprint, which underwrote the series as part of an overall deal with Warner, was the only sponsor, Ms. Gregorian said.

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In 2006, $421 million was spent on mobile phone advertising, said a study by the market research firm eMarketer. By contrast, broadcast television advertising was estimated at $48 billion last year, according to the Universal McCann media agency.

“If you think about what the market could be from an advertising perspective, it is a dream,” said Linda Barrabee, an analyst for wireless mobile communications at the Yankee Group, a research firm in Boston.

If you think about what the market could be from an end-user perspective, it’s a nightmare.

“That’s why you see a lot of companies playing with different concepts and ideas,” she said, but added that “it’s hard to target advertising in a meaningful way. From a brand perspective, they haven’t figured it out.”

Good. Keep it that way. I don’t want your crap on my phone. Ever.

Many in Hollywood are betting that interest in mobile video will be hastened by the debut of the new touch-screen iPhone from Apple, which are expected to begin selling this summer. With a 3 1/2-inch screen and no cumbersome keypad, many people believe it will be easier for Americans to watch movies and television shows like their peers in Europe and Asia readily do.

“The iPhone is going to shake things up and make cellphone companies look like they are behind the curve,” said Thomas Lesinski, president of digital entertainment for Paramount Pictures. “It is going to be good for us.”

And it’s going to be good for the end-user as well: the iPhone runs OS X, so it’ll no doubt it will be hacked to run this and this as well.

Apple had a patent on a telephone back in 1985, although it looked quite different:

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As the climate grows more and more desperate for record labels, their answer to their mostly self-inflicted wounds seems to be to screw the consumer over even more. A couple of examples that quickly come to mind:

* The ABSURD retail pricing of Year Zero in Australia. Shame on you, UMG. Year Zero is selling for $34.99 Australian dollars ($29.10 US). No wonder people steal music. Avril Lavigne’s record in the same store was $21.99 ($18.21 US).By the way, when I asked a label rep about this his response was: “It’s because we know you have a real core audience that will pay whatever it costs when you put something out – you know, true fans. It’s the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy.”

So… I guess as a reward for being a “true fan” you get ripped off.

* The dreaded EURO Maxi-single. Nothing but a consumer rip-off that I’ve been talked into my whole career. No more.

The point is, I am trying my best to make sure the music and items NIN puts in the marketplace have value, substance and are worth you considering purchasing. I am not allowing Capital G to be repackaged into several configurations that result in you getting ripped off.

We are planning a full-length remix collection of substance that will be announced soon.

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A Redford Township church that believes wealth is God’s reward is raising eyebrows for buying its pastor a $3.65 million mansion and taking it off the tax rolls.

This month, township officials grudgingly conceded they had no choice but to remove the 11,000-square-foot home overlooking Maybury State Park from its assessment rolls, losing $40,000 annually in taxes.

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Conservative pundit Ann Coulter has been cleared of allegations that she falsified her Palm Beach County voter’s registration and voted illegally — this, after a high-level FBI agent made unsolicited phone calls to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office to vouch for Coulter.

The caller wasn’t just any G-man. According to PBSO documents, he was Supervisory Special Agent Jim Fitzgerald, of the FBI Academy’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Va. — the closest reality gets to the serial-killer catchers on CBS’ Criminal Minds.

So why would an FBI profiler who went after the Unabomber take time from his busy day to even think about a municipal election snafu?

The story behind these pictures:

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Beijing, China: Xu Jiehua (r), the wife of the detained Chinese environmental activist Wu Yilong, sits behind water samples collected by Wu Yilong from Chinese urban rivers and lakes.