WEDNESDAY ROUNDUP:


TRANQUILITY BASE, HERE ... THE EAGLE HAS LANDED ... AGAIN?
Space Daily is reporting that President Bush may announce a new manned space initiative which will outlines a return to the moon.

Space exploration actually exploring. Now there's a novel concept.


HERE KITTY, KITTY
Napster 2.0 launches today.


MUST SEE PCTV
Canopus announces USB TV Tuner for laptops. No price yet, but my VISAs quaking!

JFK-CGI
Showbizdata reports that ABC has yet another special on the Kennedy Assasination. In this latest treatise, they use CGI, maps, blueprints, physical measurements, more than 500 photos, films, and autopsy reports to reconstruct the assassination of President John Kennedy 40 years ago.

The result? There's "no room for doubt" that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. All that time and money to tell us what the Warren Commission knew 40 years ago.

Oh gee, what a surprise.

YAHOO TECH TUESDAY
Yahoo Tech Tuesday focuses on music this week. Talking about iTunes, how to rip CDs into MP3s, and other cool tricks.

GET AN ILIFE
AppleInsider reports that Apple's popular ILife suite of multimedia products will get a makeover for the new year. The new ILife, which is skeined to be released in January, will include a new and improved iTunes 5.0, The and updates to iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD. No word yet on when iTunes 5 will be available to Windows users. But considering that Apple is being deluged by PCers wanting to download music, E-R guesses that it won't be long after.

DMCA - IT'S NOT JUST A BAD IDEA, IT'S THE LAW
Slashdot reports that the Library of Congress has posted a list of legal and illegal activities under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Behavior that is 'verbotten' includes skipping commercials on DVDs, playing CDs in PCs, and reading eBooks on PDA's.

Take me away.

FREEBIES
If you hate Windows so much that you're willing to try anything to replace it, but you fear the Penguin, you may want to try FREE-BSD. Version 4.9 has just been released and it includes DVD Player support.


MOD OF THE WEEK
As a new E-R feature, we highlight this cool BOOMBOX MOD. Called, THE BASS-STATION, the Boombox includes wireless 802.11b, a 120GB hard drive, and an MP3 decoder. Besides being able to play MP3s, it can also stream audio to other devices in its local area network and double as a file-server for file-sharing.


LIFE IMITATING ART - MUGGLE STYLE
Nokia is developing a picture frame which will play video - much like the moving, framed pictures in HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE.

DATA BYTEING BACK
A new study reports that the average person creates about 800MB of data every year. It goes on to say that in 2002, 5 "exabytes" of new information was stored in print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media. That's 5 million terabytes -- or 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes -- which is enough data to fill the print collections of the entire Library of Congress 500,000 times!

Welcome to the information age.

LEARNING YOUR ABCDVDPCs
The Post reports on a new study showing that infants and children are going digital earlier these days. Infants, toddlers and preschoolers are spending more time watching DVDs and playing on computers than reading books (though I don't know of many babies reading these days). The effect? Children are becoming far more media-savvy. And that isn't necessarily a good thing.