George Lucas afraid of invisible piracy boogieman (kottke.org):

Jason Kottke bursts George Lucas’s bubble: score one for Team Pyjamas. I didn’t realize the studios made more on DVD sales than they do in theaters, keeping up to 80% of each dollar versus 50%. I wonder what the number of DVD players is relative to theater screens?

100 Million DVD Players in the U.S. – DVD Town:

The Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) reported that, so far this year, another 13 million DVD players have been sold in the United States. This increases the total number to an impressive 100 million since the launch of the format in 1997.

In 2002, there were 35,170 indoor screens, and 634 outdoor.

What would you rather do, release a product that can be seen in 36,000 places that people have to travel to and that they find to be more of a hassle each time they go, or sell into a market with 100,000,000 locations, many of which require no travel and scheduling commitments? I’m not sure George is being honest with us or, worse, with himself.

Constant Craving from the album “Ingenue” by k.d. lang

Daring Fireball Projects: Markdown

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

aaargh, another of these (I use [very little of] Brad Choate’s textile 2 now, and I mean to take a look at TextPattern as well). Now this . . .

Wendy’s Blog: Legal Tags: Inexplicable airport “security”:

“But if the foot-tester device is accurate (and it’ll cause more frustration than help if it’s not), then it serves as an oracle, letting good guys and bad guys alike determine whether they’re likely to be picked up. I stepped on and off several times without being questioned. A would-be shoe bomber could probably use a more sinister variation: If the machine beeps, walk away; try again later with cooler shoes; repeat until the machine stays silent. The tester makes it easier for bad guys to see the detection devices’ limit and tailor their implements of destruction just below that cutoff.”

Could we make it any easier to calibrate a payload?

I first heard about Wendy Seltzer from one of the Learned Professors I worked with last year. She runs the Chilling Effects website, a must read for anyone interested in how the law can be used to bully or intimidate — and what your rights are.

[Posted with ecto]

ABCNEWS.com : Report: Bush Planned Iraqi Invasion Pre-Sept. 11

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill said in the “60 Minutes” interview scheduled to air on Sunday. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”
[ . . .]
O’Neill was also quoted in the book as saying the president was determined to find a reason to go to war and he was surprised nobody on the National Security Council questioned why Iraq should be invaded.

“It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it,” said O’Neill. “The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this.”‘

King George sounds a lot like King Henry II, though I’m reluctant to cast Saddam Hussein as a martyr.

Don’t expect the press to make anything of this: misusing the military of the world’s remaining superpower to pursue a family feud isn’t going to get any coverage.

[metafilter.com]
[Posted with ecto]