PA liquor laws are stupid, unpopular. Sky blue, Pope Catholic, Queen English.

I pride myself on being a bit of a geek, but getting the real Boba Fett to show up and object to your Star Wars/Labyrinth-themed wedding is just off the charts.

USA Today writers: tragically unhip, they pine for earlier days and shake their fists impotently at those “darn kids”.

Rope-less jumprope? Stupidest. Idea. EVER.

Christopher Hitchens has a brother and, wouldn’t you know it, they’re polar opposites. What a weird world we live in.

A former police chief and retired USMC captain restrain an unruly airline passenger to applause, excepting the chief’s wife who

barely looked up from “The Richest Man in Babylon,” the book she was reading.

“The woman sitting in front of us was very upset and asked me how I could just sit there reading,” Katie Hayden said. “Bob’s been shot at. He’s been stabbed. He’s taken knives away. He knows how to handle those situations. I figured he would go up there and step on somebody’s neck, and that would be the end of it. I knew how that situation would end. I didn’t know how the book would end.”

Wunderbar.

The Movable Type 4 beta has been released and MT4 will be licensed under an open source license. I’m downloading as we speak and will eval it ASAP.

The Camino browser hit 1.5 today. Excellent browser, much more Mac-ish than Firefox. Still no Firebug, though…

Those jihadi sons of motherless goats have introduced a new weapon in the Iraqi theater. Oh, the hubeer-manity!

I love liberal columnists. A philandering, faithless Chief Executives that lied under oath to a Federal grand jury, hey, no problem! An ex-VP and Presidential candidate takes to the Convention stage and lays a huge, creepy, tongue-filled kiss on his wife? More’s the better! But let a GOP Significant Other or two show off their natural assets and you’d think the whole country were headed straight into the toilet.

Screencast-o-Matic: nifty idea, “meh” implementation.

A Q & A with lots of A’s with two of the writer/producers of NBC’s Heroes. Well worth the time investment to read.

Plotr: quite a handy JavaScript-based graphing tool. Very cool.

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, serially uncool:

A history of video games:

I give it an “A” for concept, a “C” for actually including decent/ground-breaking games.

Fallout 3 is coming. Hooo boy!

New MacBook Pros are out, and man!, are they spiffy.

Now this is a doozy. A company called “MRT” has decided to sue Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and Real Networks because

MRT claims that Vista, Adobe Flash Player, Real Player, iTunes and the iPod have been produced “without regard for the DMCA or the rights of American Intellectual Property owners.” The DMCA, signed into law in 1998, makes it illegal to manufacture products that are designed to circumvent copy protection. Accordingly, MRT has filed Cease and Desist letters against Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and Real to stop production or sale of products that infringe on the DMCA.

MRT’s X1 SeCure Recording Control has proven effective against stream ripping, the company said in a statement, and these companies have been “actively avoiding the use of MRT’s technologies.”

(Emphasis mine.)

Oh that’s rich. That’s real rich. As if there weren’t enough examples that the DMCA is a terrible law, here we have a company essentially claiming that any media company not using their product is, in effect, not doing enough and therefore in violation of the law. It couldn’t be that perhaps those companies took a look at MRT’s offering, found it to be crap and decided to press on with their own copy protection schemes — that would be too simple! Conspiracy! Skulduggery! RICO!

Now, it seems plain to me that MRT is misreading the law and thus should have their suit laughed out of court at the first available opportunity. In order to pass the DMCA’s “anti-circumvention” sniff test, a product must be “designed to circumvent copy protection” (as referenced above). I find it a ludicrous proposition that any reasonably intelligent judge could possibly believe that Real Player, Windows Media, iTunes, Flash and the iPod were in any way, shape, or form “designed” to circumvent copy protection.

But perhaps I speak too soon. Perhaps I could counsel a few traffic light camera vendors to begin suing all cities that “refuse” to place their cameras at all stoplights. I mean, that obviously means that they are not only not interested in enforcing traffic laws but are in fact inviting and enabling drivers to break the law. They’re complicit in the lawbreaking, right? Same argument, as far as I can see.

The only solution I can see to the problem is to round up all lawyers, fire them into space and then lose the whole lot somewhere in the New Mexican desert ala Scotty.

Ars Technica has more on the subject.

Gah.

First up, Windows users looking to convert their media over to handheld-appropriate formats ought to look into Videora which handles the conversion tasks for the Microsoft-addled. Next up is Democracy, an incredible video aggregator with support for RSS “channels” and BitTorrent downloads. It’s available for Mac, Linux and Windows, so platform concerns should be nil. Mac users looking to correctly tag their iPod-ready videos so that they show up correctly in iTunes should look into Lostify, your one-stop-shop for all your video tagging needs.

Last of all, those of you looking to get caught up on TV shows you missed should check out ShareTV, a site that looks to centralize torrents for a lot of the top-flight shows currently on TV in one easily-accessible website. Be sure to give it a look.

Why, Steve? Why?

Heh. (And yes, I know it’s a Symantec ad, but it’s still true and it’s still funny…)

Bwahahahahah. Tell me again, how is a worldwide computing monoculture a good thing?

Oh well, I guess it’s back to stodgy old monopolistic megalithic behavior for the boys in Redmond.

• Counter Struck: Counter-Strike meets the real world. Heh.
• Those lucky British Microsoft sods – they got Ricky Gervais (of The Office fame) to do employee training videos for ‘em. Brilliant. (Profanity warning: you know those Brits and their saucy tongues. A few NSFW words/topics are discussed in those vids.)
• Bob Casey, Jr. ain’t reliable – Rick Santorum’s campaign says so.
• Stephen Colbert offered a challenge to video editing geeks. The results are impressive in some cases, others not so much.

Links

1. The 10 Commandments of Cell Phone Etiquette. Sounds like a good start to me.
2. Top 20 Blog Designs, plus Part Two of the series, making it the Top 40, I guess…
3. Alt fuels/kicking our dependence on hydrocarbons – no silver bullet, but is one really necessary?
4. The breakdown of modern webdesign – with handy pie charts!
5. Nuke tests in the Nevada desert apparently were so intense that they illuminated Los Angeles’ skyline at points. Wild.
6. The Logos of Web 2.0 – for all you graphic design geeks out there.
7. Web 2.0 design tutorials – ’nuff said.

Apps

1. Launchy, like Quicksilver, only for Windows.

Vids

1. You Are A Pirate. That’s the stuff of nightmares right there, kiddies.

Products

1. USB-powered Nerf missile launcher.
2. Mini radio-controlled helicopter.
3. Radio-controlled flying boat. You simply have to watch the demonstration video.
4. The Mug of vi References. I need one of those for those early morning config file edits, I tell you whut.