Intimidating robes and powdered wigs.

First-hand accounts of oral arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft are starting to show up. Several can be seen at
LawMeme and CopyFight. (Transcripts won't be made available for quite a while.)

The basic consensus is that the Justices asked hard questions of both sides, and that there's no way to know what they'll decide. No surprise there. Still, I'm looking forwarding to hearing more detail about the questions and responses.

The laptop battery industry must love these.

Silly gadget purchase of the day: a USB-powered light and a USB-powered fan. I don't know why, but using a data port only to draw power seems silly to me. I bought them mostly as novelties, but both have proved useful already. So that shows how much I know.

Tastes like chicken slime.

If you're squeamish, don't read about hagfish slime scones.

Jump up onto the thing, then duck under the swinging thing.

Tonight I bought Sly Cooper and the Thevius Raccoonus, the latest, greatest 3-D platformer for the PS2. It's gorgeous, gameplay is excellent, and the voice acting is even decent. It's not quite at the level of Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, which set the bar unusually high for jump-around-and-collect-things games. It's not far off, though, and it's taking all my will power not to keep playing through the night.

It shouldn't take long to finish--after three hours, I'm already a fifth of the way through--but perhaps it will tide me over until Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 come out.

Watch commercials. It's your duty.

From LawMeme, the MPAA have asked the judge in the ReplayTV case to name the Electronic Frontier Foundation a competitor, so that the EFF lawyers can be barred from sensitive movie industry documents in the case.

Silly MPAA. The EFF is a political organization. They're not participating in your industry--they're trying to raise awareness of the way its members behave.

For those who have lost count, the ReplayTV case is the one wherein broadcast companies say you're stealing when you skip commercials, because that violates an implicit contract with the broadcaster.

An analogy occured to me today. When I pay my credit card balance in full each month, and thus pay no interest, the credit card company makes no money from me. Does that make me a thief, or just shrewd? Am I morally obliged to let charges accrue?

Much gnashing of slide-rules.

Rough Science: a Survivor-like show where the contestants are scientists, and where the tasks involve creating machines, devices, and substances from indigenous materials.

I'll watch it, as long as there's no voting-off-the-island crap.

I negate your serif by flagrantly flipping this bit.

Noah pointed me to Typophile: The smaller picture, a collaborative effort to build up a typeface, one random pixel at a time. (Also linked on memepool today.)

It really is an excellent project. In addition to observing the current state of letters and contributing to the final form, you can watch animations of how the letters have progessed. It seems most letters converged quickly to recognizable forms, but have diverged since, possibly due to Web Moron Sabotage. Statistical analysis reveals impressively clear characters, with the only significant variance involving optional serif locations.

I love projects like this.