Do you fast-forward past the ads when viewing recorded programming on your DVR? Do you purposely start watching a TV broadcast 20 minutes past its start time so you can TiVo past the commercials? Do you look at TV commercials as a few minutes of your life that you’ll never reclaim?

Then Royal Philips Electronics has some good news/bad news for you.

First the bad news. The company has applied to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a patent covering technology that could allow broadcasters to freeze a channel during a commercial, thus making viewers a truly “captive audience.”

According to the patent application, the technology would be used on a program-by-program basis, but it’s not hard to imagine a TV network applying it to all their programs.

But there’s also good news. The same technology would allow viewers to skip commercials.

The idea is that broadcasters could charge a fee to viewers who want to bypass the ads. For instance, you could watch “CSI” for free with the ads, or you could pay a fee and watch it commercial free.

So far, Philips has said the company doesn’t have any plans to use the technology in its own products, but plans on licensing it to other manufacturers.

“We developed a system where the viewer can choose, at the beginning of a movie, to either watch the movie without ads, or watch the movie with ads,” the company said. “It is up to the viewer to take this decision, and up to the broadcaster to offer the various services.”

MySpace Banned

MySpace.com might be the most popular networking Web site on the planet, but students at one community college have been told to go elsewhere for their Net connections if they want to hook up with their friends.

Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas, has told its students to use off-campus connections when connecting to MySpace. The reason? The school discovered that a large chunk of its network bandwidth was eaten up by students logging on to it.

“This was more about us being able to offer Web-based instruction, and MySpace.com was slowing everything down,” college president Carlos Garcia said.

While student reaction has been predictably negative, not all students see the MySpace ban as a bad thing.

Said one student, “The library is pretty much full with people on MySpace, and with them banning it you won’t have anything to distract you.”