da3dAlus writes: "Anime Tourist has a confirmation about the fall programming on Cartoon Network, as mentioned at the San Diego Comic Con. Of greatest note is the mention of Cowboy Bebop: "It was disclosed that Cowboy Bebop will air this fall in the Adult Swim block on sunday nights. The source was unsure as to how much editing would be needed and admitted that it was 'something of a stretch for them.'" The 'Adult Swim' block begins September 2nd, and is geared towards the older Cartoon Network audience." If this is true, this is great news. Cowboy Bebop is one of the best science fiction tales that has been animated ever. I just can't explain it, but I hope they don't have to butcher it to put it on U.S. TV. Also worth noting is that a trailer for the Bebop movie is online if you can watch quicktime.

Linux won't ever be accepted as a truly mainstream OS by most vendors. The reason for this is quite simply the users. And I'm not talking about everyone, I'm talking about the 31337 h4x0r kids with the bad attitude. They're posting right here on this system, intermixed with others who often share the attitude, but also have a bit more civility. I saw this once again while learning about the Hewlett Packard 3300C flatbad scanner ... which has zippo Linux support from HP. And I don't see that changing. Keep reading and maybe I can explain why.

tenchiken asks: "Disney is at it again. A while ago they were accused of (ahem) lifting portions of Kimba for use in 'Lion King'. Now their newest movie, Atlantis has an amazing amount of similarity with GAINAX's classic Anime: 'Nadia, The Secret of Blue Waters'. Take a look at Ain't it Cool News's write up which has comparisons from the Anime point of view and of the Disney point of view. Details about the 'Lion King' and 'Kimba the White Lion' can be found here. Well, give Disney a little credit for The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, after all, those were original stories, right?" You know, I was looking at the ads for this movie just this week and I thought the exact same thing! While fiddling around on the web, I found this comparison, and it appears that both pages are using information from this Anime News Network feature. Check out the above links as they may put the similarities (and any differences) into better perspective. So are the creative juices running dry over there in Disneyworld? Or is this just your average case of an earlier work's influence on a new release?

UniDyne writes: "CargoLifter, an airship manufacturer based in Germany, plans to build giant-sized airships to drop modular buildings in remote areas and help with disaster relief. These airships are the size of the largest building in my home city: the NationsBank Headquarters here in Charlotte! This article explains the possible uses of these airships and how CargoLifter plans to build a manufacturing hangar in North Carolina. They kind of remind me of something you'd see in an anime series." Mmmmm, CargoLifter.

A lot of people ask me what I do in my free time, and the answer is simple: video games. Recently I was able to get my hands on the beta version of Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction, and here's my first impressions of it. There's some spoilers in here, but not many. I really can't spoil that much anyway, since you can't beat the expansion without defeating Baal, which is kinda assumed since he's the only prime evil left after defeating Diablo. Who didn't see that one coming?

natet writes "The Japan Patent Office once again shows it knows technology. They recently informed Amazon that unless Amazon can show them differently, they will reject the "One-Click" patent on the grounds of prior art. " So there are sane patent offices out there. On an almost completely offtopic and unrelated note, Hemos and I are planning on being in Japan for the Tokyo LinuxWorld in a few weeks, so I'll see you guys there. Bring translators and we can talk about anime ;)

Gather round kids and let me tell you a story. A story of "Convergence": a nasty buzzword many of us have dreampt of in hot lusty dreams that we wouldn't admit to our mothers. The dream is the borged media box: combining the functionality of your Tivo, your MP3 Box, DVD Player, CD Player, and so much more. It's not here yet despite lots of trying, but its getting closer.

An anonymous reader noted that there's a story on Newsforge about IBM's new ThinkPad. This story says it's the "first commercially available Linux computer with the ability to play back DVDs." The 900MHz Linux T22 will come with a commercial Linux DVD player. Meanwhile Xine, Xmovie, and OMS race to be the first one to support all the features (I need subtitles for anime darnit!) in an open source project, but since CSS plugins float around the net for each of them, actually playing DVDs is something they can do pretty well depending on your hardware. Most interesting about this LinDVD included with the ThinkPad is the implementation of one feature no user needs: Macrovision... done as a kernel module? Hrm.

Starting the show off with some cool do-it-yourselfer sorta projects: Diederik Meijer submitted the The Silicon Graphics Refrigerator Project (or: How To Turn a $175.000 High-End SGI Challenge DM Server into a Fridge). Next up, mdaughtrey built a Mechanical Hit Counter jrbx1 sent us a link to an in-dash Atari 2600. Even coolor is that the dash its in is attached to a 1978 volkswagon ;) rednax sent us a review of a kit for adding neon to your PC. If you're not skilled enough to hack how it works, at least you can pretend you're cool and hack how it looks! I Nothing is more dangerous then glewtion's link to a story about a sculpture in england that that worries people since the heat it generates cook fry a bird mid-air. Oh, and I lied: even more dangerous then art is amasci's link to making pet ball-lightning. In your microwave, duh. If you've got some spare time, MxTxL submitted something that we've been seeing more of, email games. This one is battlemail, which apparently is glorified addictive paper rock scissors. f you were an Anime character, here's some helpful hints to keep in mind. Hieronymus Coward sent us a bit about The Drew Carrey Show featuring a 2 minute segment based on the sims. I wonder if they will use the vibromatic bed, actually the next expansion comes out soon (today?) so I probably am gonna have to resurrect my neighborhood sometime soon. Thirsty? Dipfan sent in a story about Coke wanting to put soda fountain style coke in every house right next to the water dispenser. Got Carbonated Milk? Finally for a little random product plugging, Rustin H. Wright found a place selling penguin crossing signs. Finally, anotherone noted that you can use Google in full swedish bork bork chef glory.

Gendou_Knepper writes: "The ancient and beloved proto-anime classic, Robotech, is being brought to DVD by AD Vision at only $15 per six-episode disc. Check out the article at the new official site. On a side note, the original Japanese version, Macross, is being brought to us by the wonderful folks at Animeigo." Now if only someone would do the same for Starblazers (in Region 1 anyway)... also interesting, moonboy submitted an AICN story linking to info about Ghost in the Shell 2 .

After several years of reader requests, we finally cornered CowboyNeal long enough to do a Slashdot interview. Questions were posted last week. Today we brush aside the mask (or at least the hat) and get a glimpse of the real Jon Pater (aka CowboyNeal).

paranormalized sent us this link to Animenewsnetwork.com's Interview with Hayashi Hiroki. He talks a lot about his work on El Hazard, Black Heaven, and of course, Tenchi Muyo, which are coincidentally enough, three of my favorite series. Interesting points about Ryoko's relationship to 'I Dream of Jeanie,' and why he tends to make shows about a young boy surrounded by hot girls (and why he strayed so far from that to make Black Heaven)."

madro writes: "An article in the New York Times (registration req'd) discusses the emergence and influence of anime throughout recent 'children's' programming. Stuff goes way beyond the Power Rangers stuff that some parents groups protested long ago, but people don't seem to mind so much now. Funniest bit? A programming exec anticipates the end of anime thusly: 'But then it gets to the point where even the nerd gets into it, and then the cool kids have to move on to something else.'" Apparently the author watched the chimpokomon episode of South Park to get his conclusion *grin*. Actually the article is pretty funny, but I doubt that was the author's intention.

Quite a number of people have been writing the news that Akira is coming back to the US soon. The proposed release is "sometime this Spring". Akira ^[?] is one of the biggies in anime movies - and was a darn fine comic book series as well.

Dr. Worm writes: "AIC's Web page has an interview with the Tenchi Muyo guy (Kajishima Masaki) confirming a third OVA series. Finally, we get to find out what happens after the king of Jurai leaves Earth..." One of my absolute favorite series. I'm as excited about this as the rumors of the Cowboy Bebop movie.

RobM asks: "I'm currently studying Japanese, both for fun (Anime) and for profit (possible employement in Japan). To be able to better learn the language, I was planning to use my PC to read Japanese pages and then to manually translate them using one or more of the open Japanese dictionaries available. To be able to input the Kanjis I have to add to the system a Kanji input method and the related software , but none of the western distro has support for this. Moreover, there are a lot of tools for similar tasks, many of which are poorly documented and/or very old." How do the more common Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, BSD, etc.) compare when it comes to Japanese support?

da3dAlus writes: "Gundam Wing has been pulled from the Toonami block on Cartoon Network, and the 4th season of DBZ is coming to an end--but that's not nearly the end of the anime hitting U.S. cable TV. CNX: Toonami Revolution has more word on series to premiere on Toonami within the next 4 months. These include Outlaw Star (which is supposed to air as early as January 15) and the original Mobile Suit Gundam (which is set to air in mid March). Among the possible future series are Cowboy Bebop, Magic Knights RayEarth, and Rurouni Kenshin. In the meantime, you can catch an encore presentation of Blue Submarine #6 on January 5, and take heart in knowing that CN has the rights to air the remaining DBZ episodes when they're ready."

Christopher Cashell writes: "The critically acclaimed Anime film by Hayao Miyazaki and Ghibli studios, Princess Mononoke, has been released on DVD. The DVD release was initially delayed due to the public outcry when it was discovered that the original Japanese dialogue wouldn't be included. In this case, the effort from people writing Miramax paid off, as this release does include Japanese language tracks. This movie was reviewed on Slashdot when released in theaters. More information on Princess Mononoke can also be found here." and on AnimeFu (fwiw, that is Kurt The Pope & I's anime review site, check it out if you're curious). My copy hasn't arrived yet (Express.com fails me once again. When they stopped being DVDExpress, their UI went to poop, and now I have to wait weeks for titles.) but I hear they really did this disc up right; they've even got Gaimen's subtitles or Miyazaki's original script subtitles. I'm excited to see this disc. And hear Gillian Anderson again. I got to see the movie in an old local artsy theater. What a great movie.

Fuzzy_Damnit! pointed us at a site where a guy has built authentic looking Anime Hardsuits that he's selling on eBay. Features a quite impressive Nene (from Bubblegum Crisis). No. It doesn't fly. Or have weapons. You might still be able to ride a motorcycle.

Yes ladies and gentleman, its Rob's favorite time of year: No not the seasons with the fat red-suited man, or the candle thing, or that manger thing, but rather the time when the new Disney flick hits theaters. Its been a long time since Tarzan, and I've watched around 250 hours of anime since then, so click on to read my full review of the flick. (The short spoiler free version: its fun, but its very kid oriented.)