While reading an article from Wired today, it dawned on me that not only do cell phone ring tones bring in $3.5B of the $32B in music sales every year, but that portion dwarfs the sales of online music through all avenues. So much for people being interested in …

SCO, the company that the rest of the UNIX community loves to hate, fired their latest salvo in the anti-Linux wars, claiming that SCO owns the copyright on 65 system include files (see the following letter supposedly from SCO to "violators"). In response, Linus has responded that he remembers vividly …

BBC News is reporting that France and Japan are in competition for the site for a breeder reactor project sponsored by the ITER Consortium (cool site, check it out) to build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. However, the article points out that France is running into some resistance from the …

If you were wondering where the Rutan's Scaled Composites was getting its money to fund their attempt at the XPrize, then you need wonder no further. Space Today points at a number of reports of Paul Allen admitting that he is bankrolling the effort.

Wal-mart's PC-only, web-based service is now available for testing, with a $0.88/song price tag and rights similar to those of Apple's iTunes Music Service ( 3 PC copies, 10 burns, unlimited digital music player transfers), it may well provide some competition. Of course, it is windows only right now …

An article from Silicon.com points us back to Adobe, who are once again attempting to push electronic books. This time, they have opened their own Adobe Digital Media Store to sell the items in hope that they can reduce the burden for those trying to publish the books. The …

For those who keep track of the graphics world, ExtremeTech has a new head-to-head review of the current crop of mobile GPUs. The ATI Mobility 9600 came out on top. For mac aficionados, that means you're in good shape if you have the most recent PowerBook G4 15" or 17 …

There is an interesting article from The Dallas Morning News that describes the phenomenon of workers who run their "offices" out of coffee houses and use WiFi and cellular phones to keep themselves connected to the world. As somebody who often falls into this category, it's amusing to see it …

Vonage, the supplier that I use for my VoIP phone, is now offering virtual telephone numbers from Canada. So, if you have customers in Toronto that you want to have call you for free, you can now sign up for Canadian number additions to your Vonage account for $4.95 …

In half the time that it took Mac users to embrace the music service from Apple, Windows users have hit the 1,000,000 downloads mark for the iTunes application, Apple announced today. Apple has also sold 1 million songs since the Windows announcement on Thursday, but there is no …

In a setback for regulators and an advancement for competition on Voice-over- IP telephone services, Vonage has prevailed in a case against the State of Minnesota Public Utility Commission, according to an article from Wired. The decision from the US District Court for the district of Minnesota on October 16th …

According to an article from Wired, Verisign is selling off Network Solutions' registrar unit to a private organization. Verisign will be keeping the underlying registry and control of the systems and contracts that maintain the .com and .net domains.

Thanks to Todd for passing along a pointer to Digit Wireless who are making an interestingly small keyboard layout for mobiles, PDAs, and other devices that require a small keyboard. As far as I can tell, there aren't any takers yet, but the dual-height mixed- mode keyboard may well be …

Congratulations to all of the folks at Project Gutenberg for the early publication of their 10,000th manuscript, the Magna Carta. These 10,000 represent thousands of hours of work by volunteers and are completely free (of copyright as well as download charges). Take a look for some of your …

SCO, the company made famous this spring by suing IBM for infringing copyright on Unix source code, has announced that they have received a $50M investment from BayStart Capital, evidencing that the economy has now recovered to the point that people are making really stupid investments again.

As the Apple home page said, "Hell Froze Over." Apple has made iTunes for Windows absolutely identical to the Macintosh version, right down to the brushed metal. Importantly, you can find Mac servers (or Windows servers) using Rendezvous and play music from one computer on another (even cross platform).

According to an article from BBC News, Chinese doctors at Sun Yat-Sen University have created a fetus from two women and a man. The process, outlawed in the US and the UK (and probably other places as well) involves taking the DNA from the "birth mother", transferring it into an …

An article from Extreme Tech announces Sharp's new RD3D notebook that has a 3D display. According to the press release on Sharp3D.com, the system uses a parallax barrier to direct different images to the left and right eyes (eliminating the need for glasses or other devices usually used to …

For those of us who like to catalog things, Baracoda has announced the BaracodaPencil, a bluetooth-enabled barcode reader. This device looks quite nifty, untethering your barcode wand from your processor by up to 10 meters. It should be available next week.

An article on Wired describes one man's bout with spam and his subsequent tenacious fight to take down the spammer that nearly cost him his business. No doubt, some of you have received the strange messages that look like they are "bounces" from mail systems for messages that appear to …