Bill Gates appeared for the full hour on the Wednesday, March 3 edition of The Charlie Rose Show. It is well worth watching.

Hopefully, audio will be posted soon to the archives at charlierose.com. As yet, they are just selling the videotape, but most shows are available in streaming audio after a few days' delay.

It's a wide-ranging conversation about Microsoft, the Gates foundation, developments in biotechnology and other applied fields, and more.

While you're there, you may also be interested in a February 27 interview with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.

Well, the final episode may not be so final.

The end of 'Sex'

The Sopranos return on March 7. And then one more season after that, but with only ten episodes.

It seems that Gandolfini and Falco are not being swamped with offers for other roles and aren't getting some roles they think they should. Good thing they will have made millions of dollars on "The Sopranos" to help them struggle through.

Out of the Pen for the Penultimate 'Sopranos' Season

It is a credit to Mr. David's comic gift that his narrow, egomaniacal milieu turns out to have universal appeal.

Yay! It's the return of TV worth watching.

Sexy Women Out, Cantankerous Guy In

In this Memorandum Opinion and Order, we deny complaints received from the Parents Television Council and from certain individuals who have alleged that various television station licensees aired program material during the "Golden Globe Awards" program on January 19, 2003, that violates the federal restrictions regarding the broadcast of obscene and indecent material.

This is really, really [expletive] funny.

FCC Ruling On Complaints Against Various Broadcast Licensees ...

... In effect, kids today are living off the entertainment capital of the previous generation.

Boob-Tube End Times

The answer ... is No."

Funny.

The moral here, of course, is that escapism is bad for you.

The Springfield Files

A season of "24" is work, [but] ... "Alias," which entirely reinvented itself this season -- again -- is pure, crazy, spy fantasy fun.

Alias rocks.

Spy vs. spy

Cable TV seems to have become the home of any programming with the least hint of political controversy. Meanwhile, the networks grow increasingly brave about broadcasting shows featuring lingerie models parading in the latest fashions, and ordinary people competing for cash by eating live insects.

At this time of year, we can be thankful that "free" television is so aggressively engaged in its own creative destruction. Would that other outmoded industries shared this apparent zest for death.

The ineffectiveness of much-maligned "banner" advertising is not a failure of the Internet in general or the Web in particular. Rather, it is a sign of the times.

In the industrial era, the typical middle class laborer suffered through day after day filled with tedious, repetitive tasks. Many workers found themselves performing one simple task, over and over, for hours on end. Television was an escape and a diversion that delivered variety, in rapid fire segments, interspersed with messages from sponsors promising to satiate the public's new and growing desire for consumer products. At a time when much of the public was still employed in jobs that involved manual labor, an evening on the couch in front of the television was a well-earned respite after a hard day's work. The intangibility of television was a welcome contrast to the hard products of the assembly line, and the intentional inanity of the sitcom was simple escapism.

In today's world, sedentary "knowledge workers" spend their days at a desk, in front of a computer and a telephone, struggling to juggle a multitude of ill-defined tasks. In many cases, workers can no longer point to a pallet full of products, neatly packaged for shipment, as evidence of eight hours' effort well spent. Instead, they are left to measure their productivity by tallying up the number of emails sent and the PowerPoint slides generated. At the end of a day like that, broadcast television is far less attractive than it was in the previous era. When friends can reach each other by telephone, immediately, at any time of day or night, regardless of their location, without any prior coordination among them, and when even a "normal" family rarely gets everyone together for evening dinner, it hardly seems appropriate to demand that the entire nation sit down together for an episode of "The Bachelor." As the world of work becomes increasingly unreal, television adapts to the change, foil-like, to offer viewers the real, but it overcorrects, and thus ends up creating the surreal.

TiVo is the cellular telephone of television. TiVo does to time what mobile telephony does to space. To argue against the inevitability of TiVo is to deny the proven successes of Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, T-Mobile, and the rest. The broadcast flag is but a finger against the dam that is the Internet.

In this environment, the road less traveled by is the product less advertised, or not at all, and this will make all the difference. This apparent contradiction of Metcalfe's Law is in fact the very engine of growth in a network society, because it keeps the world forever in transition.

CBS Cancels 'The Reagans'

To avoid a duel, Homer moves the Simpsons to Grandpa's old farm, and grows a profitable, but dangerous, hybrid crop.

This is the "capsule" [episode summary] for the tomacco episode.

Simpsons Episode AABF19: E-I-E-I-D'oh!