You may have heard by now that Apple no longer has claim to the name Mighty Mouse, since small-volume mouse maker Man & Machine, who had labeled its own pointer "Mighty Mouse," managed to wiggle its way through all the red tape to a successful trademark application. There's a lot of messiness involved, but the truth of the matter is a) it was dumb for Apple to borrow a name from a cartoon character in the first place, and b) the Mighty Mouse was one of Apple's worst products to date. In the end, I'm thinking there's a hint of karma in this reversal of fortune. Hopefully Apple's next mouse will be mightier in deed than in name. [Engadget]

Even though movie-poster regulars such as Owen Gleiberman and Peter Travers have labeled it "freaky and terrifying" and "a potent frightfest" respectively, studio execs seem skittish about releasing Paramount's Paranormal Activity. Instead of manning up and giving it a nationwide release, the studio has asked potential ticket buyers to declare their intentions here. I'm all for crowdsourcing experiments, but this just seems like studio cowardice at its most yeller. They call it "the first-ever major film release decided by you"—it sure won't be the last. [Movie Site]

iPhone owners love to crap all over AT&T customer service whenever they get near a JD Power & Associates survey, but apparently, for the 1.5 million who get TV programming from the T, service couldn't be sweeter. Good ole JD released the results, naming AT&T best in the west and south, Verizon tops in the east, and WOW! numero uno in the north central region. (No, World of Warcraft didn't start a cable company... or did it?) It might not startle you to learn that none of the cable and satellite carriers who actually provide TV service to the majority of the nation appear in the (positive) results. Just wait till you serve as many people with TV as you serve with cellphones, AT&T. Then let's see where you stand. [JD Power]

Danny Sullivan, king of the search engine watchers, pinned down Sergey Brin after a Google event and showed him some bad results. Like if you type "car rental," all the major agencies are there, but when you type "california car rental," many companies disappear (including my personal favorite, Hertz). He also asked why searching "search engines" brought up discussion of search engines, but "search engine" just brought up many older search sites—notably excluding Google itself. Brin said people probably don't search for Google on Google, but Sullivan disagreed. I was actually under the impression that if you go to Google and type "google," you break the internet, so in either case, I'm just glad to be enlightened. [Search Engine Land]

CBS and PepsiCo will take out a video-enabled ad, seen above in all its stamp-sized glory, which will pitch TV content to EW subscribers in New York and Los Angeles. The ads will probably be short, but the company that makes the video hardware, Americhip, says it can support up to 40 minutes of video.

Long-form video content in a magazine sounds pretty cool—think a full episode of a TV show in EW, or a mini-documentary in The Economist—but in advertising applications, it's firmly in "gimmick" territory. This blurry shot doesn't tell us much about how video quality is, or how bulky the insert will be. I'm going to make some wagers: Low, and very.

There's an undeniable, retro-futurist draw to the whole thing, but remember what happened last time a magazine shacked up with one of print's technological enemies? It was underwhelming, and a little sad. The emotions of the future, folks!

UPDATE: Advertising Age has some more substantive info on how this thing will actually work:

When Entertainment Weekly readers open the magazine to the ad pages, they will see a small screen flicker on and start to load a video. A brief segment featuring actors from "The Big Bang Theory" will explain how to use the player, while talking about features from Entertainment Weekly and the different video selections a reader can choose. By pressing one of five different buttons, readers can watch a video montage from [a bunch of different shows]

[CNET—Image by Caroline McCarthy/CNET Updated with better photo from Ad Age]

Granted, there are a few scenarios I could imagine where this would work—leeching free wi-fi while on the go, at a friend's house who insists on watching Dancing With the Stars instead, etc, but in most cases, if you can connect to a wi-fi network, chances are you're probably near a computer, where you can enjoy every game streaming on demand for free.

But if you're a total junkie and can imagine being in one of said useful situations, this is for you. Although if you know how maddening it can be to suck down CBS's often overloaded streams via their web interface, you might want to prepare for spinning wheels of delay with this app. We'll see how it goes. [iTunes]

I loaded it and clicked on a Star Trek Original Series episode ("Menagerie"). There I was show six 8-minute segments that constituted the whole episode, and it was playing within seconds over wi-fi. It was not so fast when it switched to cell service, which was inexplicably at EDGE, but at least there was a status bar indicating how much of the clip had loaded, and it did, after less than a minute, play just fine. (That said, I wouldn't recommend spending too much time on this if all you have is a first-gen iPhone with no local wi-fi network.) I did not notice any advertising during playback.

There are a massive number of shows from the CBS family of channels, including Showtime, the CW and even CNET TV—all those video reviews. You can create a feed with your favorite channels and shows, but it's actually pretty easy to get around if you don't have any preferences, thanks to a well designed interface.

The bummer for now is that though there are CSI, Gossip Girl and Trek full episodes, most shows aren't there yet. My guess is that it's just a matter of time before more come on board. Except Big Bang Theory, which apparently isn't down with the new tech. What I really want is Hulu, Netflix and Amazon VOD, but at some point, that's gonna start eating into Apple's iTunes revenue, and AT&T's data allowances. Viva la content revolution! [iTunes link via NYTimes]

To add insult to injury, the person on the other end of the line has an actual iPhone, assuming that he isn't entirely hallucinated by the iPodder. Note: with the whole iPod thing, that would make sense, AND set off a pretty neat little story arc. NOW PAY ME, CBS. [CBS—Thanks, Kelly and David!]

Instead, CBS is looking to redesign TV.com into a Hulu-like streaming site, all while keeping the community that's grown there in place. They're hoping that by incorporating their streaming catalogue into an established site with lots of community features that they'll entice people into sticking around a little while after that episode of How I Met Your Mother is over.

The new TV.com is set to launch sometime next month. And really, it's awesome news, as the more places that offer free, legit streams of TV shows the better. As if I needed yet another reason to make me feel like a smart guy for not paying for cable. [Ars Technica]

The Chinese who attacked them were trying to keep mum on the lucrative business of mining e-waste for valuable components, including gold. According to Jim Puckett, who works for a group working to stop the dumping of toxic materials in third world countries, “A lot of people are turning a blind eye here. And if somebody makes enough noise, they're afraid this [business] is all going to dry up.”

The workers who sift through these e-waste pits get paid about $8 a day. They use caustic chemicals and often burn plastic without any type of protection uniform. The air is full of toxins, potable water needs to be trucked in, and pregnancies in the city are six times more likely to be miscarriages. All to deal with the mess we ship over. Sometimes it's easy to forget that even though we don't see our trash anymore, it still exists. And even though America has laws against e-dumping, companies regularly flout them with little repercussion.

Pelley's investigation will be broadcast on CBS this Sunday at 7pm. [CBS News via China Digital Times]

You already know about all of the different ways to watch TV online. Now you just want links to your favorite shows (plus all those new ones) as quickly as possible so you can ditch your TiVo and TV once and for all. Our Internet TV remote has the best links to every prime-time show currently streaming online at full length. Bookmark it and check back often, we'll update it as new shows come out... Note: Many of these streams will not work outside of the US, but if you're out of the country and need your fix, you know where to go without any help from us.

NBC
30 Rock
America’s Toughest Jobs
The Biggest Loser
Chuck
ER
Friday Night Lights
Heroes
Kath & Kim
Knight Rider
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
Life
Lipstick Jungle
My Name is Earl
The Office
Saturday Night Live
The Tonight Show

ABC
Boston Legal
Brothers & Sisters
Dancing With The Stars
Desperate Housewives
Dirty Sexy Money
Eli Stone
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
Grey's Anatomy
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Life On Mars
Lost
Opportunity Knocks
Private Practice
Pushing Daisies
Samantha Who?
Ugly Betty

CBS
Big Brother
CSI
CSI: Miami
CSI: NY
Eleventh Hour
The Ex List
Gary Unmarried
How I Met Your Mother
Jericho
The Mentalist
NCIS
The New Adventures of Old Christine
Numb3rs
Survivor
The Unit
Worst Week

FOX
American Dad
America's Most Wanted
Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
Bones
Cops
Do Not Disturb
Family Guy
Fringe
Hell's Kitchen
Hole in the Wall
House
Kitchen Nightmares
MADtv
The Moment of Truth
Prison Break
The Simpsons
TALKSHOW with Spike Feresten
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
til Death

The CW
4REAL
90210
America's Next Top Model
Easy Money
Everybody Hates Chris
The Game
Gossip Girl
In Harms Way
Privileged
One Tree Hill
Reaper
Smallville
Supernatural
Valentine

Comedy Central
The Daily Show
The Colbert Report
South Park

MTV
The Hills
A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila
Cribs

FX
30 Days
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Nip Tuck
Rescue Me
The Riches
Sons of Anarchy

USA
Burn Notice
Dr. Steve-O
Monk
Psych
The Starter Wife

Sci-Fi
Battlestar Galactica
Destination Truth
Eureka
Ghost Hunters
Ghost Hunters International
Sanctuary
Scare Tactics

If Netflix keeps this up and adds more shows that will be available the day after they air, there will be even fewer reasons to keep paying ungodly sums of money to Comcast or Time Warner for cable TV. Instead, you'll be able to fire up your Roku or Xbox 360 to watch whatever shows you want. What you're looking at is the future of television, my friends: delivered on demand over the internet to a number of different devices. These are just the clunky first steps, but its inevitable, and it's awesome.

Keep it up, Netflix. We're rooting for you. [WSJ via All Things D]

The ad aired on September 11 on CBS' “Big Brother” reality show. It's funnier than the first and you get to see Jerry clip his toenails and Bill do the robot, but as a Windows user, I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to think about this. “Looks like Macs aren't the only thing catering specifically to East and West coast elitists?” [ZDNet]

Following Sciacca's advice, I ran a Google search for "'Survivor' 'dvr' 'didn't record'", and found several message board posts detailing similar problems. The issue is present in other DVR types as well, including DirecTV and standalone TiVo. However, some other users say that they haven't experienced any problems with their time-shifted Survivor eps at all. To make sure this problem was confined to Survivor, I checked other popular shows like Lost and American Idol, and came up empty-handed.

We've put in a call to CBS to explain this paranormal activity, and the folks there are looking into the problem. Sciacca suggests that this may be a case of altering show metadata to instruct DVRs to stop recording—in the past, networks have been known to alter their programming to stop DVR users from getting content (and skipping ads)—but we will reserve judgment until we hear more. In the meantime, if you've been experiencing similar problems, please share. [Sound & Vision]

What's sort of shady is that they wouldn't discuss how they track how many times you've listened to a track, since you don't have to log in or register—probably based on your IP address, though. Of course, this intersects with advertiser interests, since they can better target ads based on your track history.

Another neat aspect of the re-launch is their artist royalty program, where unsigned artists can directly upload their music to Last.fm, and they'll get paid every time their track is played—basically pulling in the ad revenue that would've gone to a label, if they were on one.

And they're definitely not stopping with music. Asked about a "Last.tv" being in the works, Last.fm co-founder said that "music videos are the bridge into visual content."

The current cam count is at 27, covering expected areas like the Golden Gate Bridge and major highway interchanges around the Bay area. At this point, privacy worries seem minimal at best; most cameras overlook their targets from distant, lofty perches. When Sling starts grabbing hold of the security cameras outside shopping centers or grocery stores, put on your tinfoil hats.

Sling/CBS Partnership Press Release [Via Gearlog]

See the cams at CBS 5's site

TV shows find young, affluent viewers on 'net: study [Reuters]

each company has their own hidden agenda/reason for launching a YouTube competitor. News Corp, for instance, is doing this to sink YouTube before it draws more traffic away from MySpace (which is owned by News Corp.), whereas CBS on the other hand sees this as a way of getting closer to Google, who they're trying to strike a separate deal with on a completely different venture. The YouTube "killer" could be announced as early as this week. The question is—do you care or will YouTube remain being your personal TiVo? – Louis Ramirez

Old Model Versus a Speedster [NYT]