Star Wars : Episode III slated to open the Cannes Film Festival

After months of negotiations, a deal was struck between George Lucas and festival administrators to have Episode III : Revenge of the Sith as the opening film of the 58th Cannes Film Festival, which starts on May 11th. Rumors are that Ewan McGregor will attend. But if you don't already have an invite - you'll have to wait till the movie opens on May 19th like the rest of the world. Maybe we'll get some reports from people who saw it at Cannes - let's hope they say it's worth seeing!

C'mon America - we can do better!!

Apparently we aren't downloading enough pirated TV shows - the UK leads the world in TV piracy, at 38.4% of the world's TV downloads. It seems people in the UK love their peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, ans love using BitTorrent in particular. America comes in 3rd, with a paltry 7.3%. America strives to be #1 in so many other avenues - why not this one, right?

Where has the time gone?

It's been one year (and change) since I wrote the first post on this blog, and in that time I've had 2,596 hits on the site and written almost 170 posts. The only thing I'd like to see change is the amount of people browsing to the blog using Firefox - only 12% of the hits were Firefox, and 83% were Internet Explorer (Mozilla, Netscape, and Safari account for the other 5%). But hey, Firefox 1.0 has been downloaded 25 million times, so the more people using it the better - and that percentage will just continue to move the right way. Here's to another year - thanks to all of my readers (yes, both of you) for making the first one a great one!

NapsterToGo copy protection defeated

The new Napster and it's NapsterToGo unlimited download for a monthly fee service have been dealt a blow by their users - they've figured out a way around the copy protection built into the song files. I suppose it was just a matter of time before a crack was found, but that was surprisingly quick!

Not that it's a surprise, but...

The NHL has announced that it has officially cancelled the 2004-2005 hockey season. And in the process becomes the FIRST major North American professional sports league to lose an entire season due to a labor dispute. Sad news, but the way the talks were going (or rather, not going) it was not really going to end any other way. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman was quoted as saying "I have no choice but to cancel the 2004-05 season," adding "This is a sad, regrettable day that all of us wish could have been avoided." Agreed. But when you've got the owners demanding a salary cap, the players saying "No way" and then when they finally bandied about offers on a actual cap - couldn't come to an agreement. Players say "We'll agree to $49 million per team" and owners come back with "Nope. $42.5 million". And they'd both come down already - the players were saying $52 million and the owners wanted $40 million. Darn it, they were so close. And even if they had come to an agreement, this season would have been pretty much over - what would they have done, go straight to the playoffs? I guess hockey fans will have to hope something happens in the interim before next season is supposed to begin - or the whole NHL might just fold and cease to exist.

New trailer for The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

There is a new longer trailer for The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy available online - if you go to Amazon's page, it's viewable right within their main page. It shows actual footage from the film, and it's a pretty good look at what the movie will be like. I'm getting excited for this - can't wait till April 29th!!