Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, left, shakes hands with Santa Claus at the Transportation Department in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2005 where they signed an open skies aviation agreeement between the U.S. and the government of the North Pole to give Santa and his team greater access to rooftops across the country.

A fat guy, wearing a costume and fake beard to disguise his features, demands to force his materialistic wishes onto all of us. We, the drones greasing the unfeeling gears of capitalism, don’t need to buckle under pressure from this red velvet menace.

But seriously folks, why the fuck does the U.S. dept. of Transportation have to negotiate with Santa-Fucking-Claus? We are the most powerful nation on earth (even if our undocumented workers cost more than his slave-labor elves)!

So much for the war on Xmas.

Did you think that people with Tivo were skipping ads? According to the TV industry, you thought wrong!

Contrary to some anecdotal evidence and many industry forecasters, new research indicates that the use of digital video recorders - gadgets that allow users to record TV shows and zip through commercials - actually increases the amount of viewer exposure to ads because people with the devices end up watching more TV, executives from major TV networks said in a presentation to reporters Wednesday.

New research shows that homes with DVRs watch 12% more TV, and could boost the average prime-time audience for a show by an average of 4%, exposing viewers to more commercials.

Although most DVR users zip past ads, proprietary research from the TV networks found that 58% pay attention to commercials while fast forwarding and 53% have gone back to watch commercials they mistakenly skipped.

We are glad those TV execs stepped in to provide this helpful research that is in no way biased to help them generate more revenue. Everyone we know is constantly hitting rewind to see the ads they missed. Sometimes we even just watch the commercials on an endless loop!

Here is an interesting indicator that TV is headed over the hill:

Spots in ABC’s telecast of the Super Bowl, the most-watched television program of the year, are going for $2.4 million. That’s the same as what FOX got for ads during Super Bowl XXXIX earlier this year. It’s also the third time since 2000 that prices for ads during the game haven’t increased; the going rate was $2.2 million per 30 seconds from 2000-02.

And then the empire struck back:

AT&T;Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers’ own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors.

There is a saying about a genie being out of the bottle. Perhaps you know that one? [via BoingBoing]

Sprint is announcing today that they are making available downloadable feature-length films to certain phones:

Among them are “One-Eyed Jacks,” the Marlon Brando-Karl Malden Western, as well as “Angel and the Badman” with John Wayne. Other titles include “Night of the Living Dead” and the most recent—“Short Circuit” from 1986.

“This is what we could get rights to quickly,” said Dale Knoop, Sprint’s general manager for multimedia services. He said the company and MSpot are in negotiations for more current content, but declined to say which studios are involved.

Now we could make fun of the terrible movies, but that is simply too easy. Instead we are going to wonder who would pay money to watch a two hour movie on a two inch screen.

What does this mean for you?

Updated: IEEE standards body has approved the 802.16e standard and with that, what is commonly known as Wireless MAN or WiMAX has gone mobile. (More information here.)

It means the death of the cellular phone companies. Remember you heard it here first.

Read this review:

You may have streamed the NBC Nightly News to your Web browser. You may have watched the Video Music Awards at MTV.com. But you’ve never seen Internet television quite like this. Yesterday marked the official debut of CNN Pipeline, a 24-hour, commercial-free online television station broadcasting from its own Atlanta control room with its own news anchors.

And that only begins to describe this breathtaking new service. It streams not one, but four live video feeds straight to your desktop. If you get bored watching the latest White House press conference, you can switch to a live report from Iraq or footage of hurricane recovery efforts in New Orleans. And if the live news isn’t what you want, you can choose from dozens of on-demand news reports, spanning everything from politics and business to sports and entertainment.

The snitches over at ThinkSecret are reporting on Steve Jobs’ next front in the war on TV:

Apple’s Mac mini will be reborn as the digital hub centerpiece it was originally conceived to be, Think Secret sources have disclosed. The new Mac mini project, code-named Kaleidoscope, will feature an Intel processor and include both Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality.

We should know in about a month Apple (at MacWorld Expo in SF) whether this rumor is true and if it is Apple’s answer to Tivo. Better buckle up.