There is a collection of screen captures from LOTR which tries to show the difference between a DVD and HD. It has 12 shots that you can mouse over to see just how much greater detail HD has.

On a related note, here is what some Hollywood folk had to say to a member of the MPAA about their restricting HD so it will not be backwards compatible. “This is a room full of people whose living depends on this working. You’re getting pushback to the point of hostility. If you can’t sell this to us, how are you going to sell it to the target 16-45 demographic?”

Not sure where I saw this first, but it is a chart (click it to blow it up) showing the number of Apple songs sold since the Apple Music Store opened. Pretty interesting to see that in the past 30 weeks over 500 million songs were “sold” whereas it took 120 weeks to get to the first 500 million. Kudos, now open up your format.

Unforunately, Google has lost its first battle in trying to keep its search term data private. Google will probably end up losing this one so I do not think it matters if their motto is “do no evil” when the Bush adminstration’s goal is to stop evil by creating the thought police.

Lastly there is an actual good article on MySpace (i.e. not crazy the sky is falling) over at Wired Some choice quotes :

The very design of a teenager’s MySpace page can be shocking to adult eyes. A highly customizable amalgam of blogging, music sharing and social-discovery services, a typical page is a near perfect reflection of the chaos and passion of youth: a music-filled space, rudely splattered with photos and covered in barely-legible prose rendered in font colors that blend together and fade into the background.

“The profiles are hideous,” says a technology specialist at a southern Oregon school district that’s recently started blocking the site for safety reasons. “I’ve seen yellow text on a red background before.”

“It looks like a teenager’s bedroom,” says Boyd. “It’s not parsable to most adults, because it’s not supposed to be for them.”

Early this year, administrators at Powell High School in Tennessee suspended two sophomores and a junior for as long as 30 days for posting off-color messages under a teacher’s name. Last week, under threat of an ACLU lawsuit, Littleton High School in Colorado reluctantly readmitted a 16-year-old MySpace user who had been suspended for posting a satirical commentary on the school.

And my fav about the backlash (although probably not a fair comparison)

In fact, with a reported population of 57 million users, MySpace is arguably safer from such crime than other communities that haven’t been the subject of the same scrutiny. One example: California, which averaged 62 statutory rape convictions per month in the late 90s, in a state population of 33 million

Join the HD boycott if you can. I certainly will not be buying any next generation devices or media until I can play it where I want, when I want, and how I want.

The revolution will not be televised

A few quick notes. There may be a new reason to watch ads instead of skipping them with TIVO or its variants. Reported by Engadget, KFC, the other chicken, is said to be embedding a secret code for free stuff in their commercials. The catch is that you have to watch it in slowmo to see it. I think I’ll pass on this one, but given the right company I might actually watch the ad. Nah, I’ll just google it for the code.

Second, a little more serious. Yahoo has recently lifted its ban on the usage of Allah in usernames . Their reasoning for having it banned in the first place was to prevent hate speech. The funny thing is that God and other similar words are not banned, as pointed out by the person that got this whole ball rolling. You can check it all out here.

So let me get this straight. Apparently it is all right for the government to stop people from using marijuana for medical purposes in California (Gonzales v. Raich opens full opinion) but if you want to use a hallucegenic drug for a religion the Court says it is well within the law. In Raich the Court in a 6-3 decision held that because of Congress’ commerce power and the Controled Substances Act (CSA) the federal law trumped California’s, and the feds could go round up old sick ladies for breaking the law (hyperbole noted).

One of the keys to that case was the fact that marijuana was a schedule I drug. This meant it, by definition, had no medical purpose. There have been considerable attempts to get the drug moved into schedule II, but the other side has much more powerful friends. Many legal scholars have considered this to be a new high in the powers given to Congress in terms of commerce because the Constitution only gives Congress power to regulate interstate commerce (it is more complicated than that, but suffice to say that is the general rule). In that case the marijuana was completely California contained and had no chance of becoming involved in any interstate trafficking. I digress, the key points are CSA and schedule I status.

Fast forward to today, in Espirita (full case again) the facts are briefly as follows. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal (UDV) is a Christian Spiritist sect based in Brazil, with an American branch of approximately 130 individuals. Twice a month for four hours they drink a tea that contains another schedule I drug, dimethyltryptamine if you have to know. I have not finished the full unanimous opinion, but suffice to say the drug use can continue.

Chief to the case was the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). This statue puts the burden on the government to show why their law of general applicability (means applies to everyone, religion or not) should disrupt a valid religious exercise. Mind you this statute was struck down as unconstitutional as applied to the States in City of Boerne v . Flores, but apparently it is alive and well with the Federal Government. The part that gets me is that this statute was passed precisely because it did not like how the Court decided a previous case while interpreting the Constitution. The interpretation of the Constitution is of course what the Court’s job is. Now I am actually am in favor of the RFRA because anything that says I get to do what I want, as long as I am not interfering with others, is a good thing. Ipso facto (I don’t get to use it enough) I am in favor of this decision as well because it does sound like this is a sincere use of the drug for a religious purpose.

My rant is that apparently it is fine for a drug to be shipped overseas for these folks to use, but it is within a person’s rights to grow their own marijuana in the waining days of their life to escape some pain. It is fine for a law to preempt the entire state of California, but illegal to disrupt 130 people’s religion. Seems a bit inconsistent to me…

If you have not seen it yet, there is yet another web 2.0 site out there called Zillow.  Its aim is to break down the real estate cartel by giving everyone access to the public records regarding homes.  The problem from what I have been reading is that despite its massive venture capital the information is only as accurate as your local tax assessor which could be not very accurate at all. 

Anyway, its a pretty fun site and will give you at least a rough estimate of things in your neighborhood.  I am also writing this on a another web app called Zoho Writer which is pretty nice.  It is basically an online word processor, but it allows you to access the data anywhere and export it to a word document or pdf.  I actually have a post I have been meaning to write for about a week now, but I keep on forgetting and my notes for it are not with me right now.  But it will show up eventually.  And the image is one I found while going through the fark forums.

For the HDTV folks out there a word of advice from Ars Technica

I suspect that the content industry may be in for a big, nasty surprise when all of this truly hits the public in the face. Never before has the rollout of the “next big thing” been so encumbered with built-in obsolescence, user-unfriendliness, and hypocrisy. Groans the world over will be heard when early adopters learn that their TVs won’t play Blu-ray movies. Folks who bought computers recently will be disappointed when they learn that their hard-earned money couldn’t buy them end-to-end support for HD content playback.

When you tell so many people that their electronics won’t do what they should do—what they paid for them to do—many of them are not going to like it. The content industry is going to walk away from this with a certain amount of egg on their face and a fat stamp of “greed” burned into their foreheads. And a few will will realize the ultimate inanity of it all: that while the studio’s HD content won’t play on their TV or their computers, the HD content put out by the pirates will.

And that, my good friends, will be a fine example of irony.

From now on I think I’m going to try and mix serious news with a funny picture. I am sure most of you have seen this, but in case you have not, this is the one and only Spears being herself. So anyway, the topic du jour is intellectual property. This makes sense considering I plan on being an IP lawyer, but I do not feel like writing a massive opinion piece on the matter, but I’ll just say there is a lot of misleading and flat out wrong information out there. Many people probably read about Cingular’s so called patent on emoticons like While many news sites picked up on the story, few failed to do an update and say that the patent was simply an application and has no chance of being issued.

On the copyright side I have mentioned Google’s Book Search before, but University of Michigan President Sue Coleman gave a speech about Michigan’s decision to allow their library to be scanned. It was a wonderful speech and I encourage everyone to read it.

Now, with Google, the University of Michigan is involved in one of the most extensive preservation projects in world history.

Remember, we believed in this forever. We have been a leader in preservation and will continue to do so—I expect nothing less of Michigan. By digitizing today’s books, through our own efforts and in partnership with others, we are protecting the written word for all time.

Just as powerful as the preservation aspect of Google Book Search is the fact our venture will result in a magnitude of discovery that seems almost incomprehensible. I could not have imagined that in my lifetime so much diffuse information literally would be at my fingertips.

It is an educator’s dream, knowing that the vast body of information held in the libraries of Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and the New York Public Library will be universally searchable and, in the case of public domain works, accessible.

…

It means stepping up, looking forward, and saying: “Let’s do it.”

Google Book Search, with the books of the University of Michigan, makes all that possible—it takes the corpus of human knowledge and puts it in the hands of anyone who wants it.

It can, and will, change the world, and I want the University of Michigan to be part of it.

Full speech in pdf or html

Also there is still a battle brewing/on going between two groups illustrated from a recent Ars Technica post

In our own discussions here on Ars, debates on intellectual property often end up between the two poles of “copyright is dead, screw the big corporations, long live piracy because it’s my right,” and “why don’t you try working for free and see how you like it, loser.”

I encourage anyone who actually is in the middle to become educated about the value of copyrights and effective use of DRM. A great starting point is to learn about the creative commons license which is the subject of the post. (Wiki found here)

I was going to write a little about the completely uncovered judiciary committee hearings with Attorney General Gonzales, but it seems that no major news organization cares. The only thing I could find on them was over at NPR. I heard a little bit of them and had hoped to have some transcript links, but none could be found. It would have been cool too, because both sides of the aisle ripped him a new a-hole, but he didn’t seem fazed and I think it is because he has no soul. I could be wrong though. For those interested here is the NPR page and the judiciary page.

So instead I thought I would post some videos. I was not aware until today, but apparently there is a new rap battle going on after the SNL sketch came out last year. So without further comment here is the original (Lazy Sunday) , followed by the west coast response, another lazy Monday version, and the Iowa Midwest version which unfortunately is only funny because of how bad it is.

Maybe I’m missing something, but first you had this image. Now of course there is going to be a lot of upset Muslims because they are trying to shed their violent image and because it is considered blasphemous. And I understand that, but let us brainstorm some responses. One, write lots of angry letters. Two, boycott products made in the “offending” countries. Three, demonstrate peacefully. Heck even burn some flags. All these things are fine and probably somewhat called for, but I do not think the press in FREE countries should change what they are doing either. Personally I think a caricature of dear old Bush as Jesus with a sword in hand going to the Middle East would be right on, but I know a lot of people here would get in a tizzy. The response would be similar, but in the end I am willing to bet we would not do this

or this