RIAA already attempts to get $150,000 per album shared, which from what I understand, they can rarely collect the full mount of because most people sharing could never afford that much money, ever. Let alone for multiple albums. But, because they have decided apparently, that once you can't actually collect a retardedly huge amount of money, that the best way to fix that is to make it even more retarded. So... Welcome to the $1,500,000 penalty club. By trying to push the PRO-IP Act through Congress, RIAA (satan) is trying to increase the statutory damages for compilation albums to a whopping $1.5 million. So if you get busted for sharing an album with 10 different artists on it, you are pooched for $1.5 million. Personally I think that this move is to correct an original mistake that RIAA probably made, by accidentally dropping a zero on the original damages request. Interestingly, this also presents the opportunity for limits on damages to the still silly sum of $1.5 million. Since after all, most people don't actually share out an album, but instead share out a boatload of songs, couldn't their entire hard drive be considered a Compilation Album? Really, what constitutes an album anymore? Could you not get around the album penalty by sharing only 9 out of the 10 songs that are on an album? Then you could only get hit for the per song penalty. And if it gets over 1.5 million, just claim that you have created a 800Gig compilation album. Lawyers make me laugh lots. BTW, if my blathering saves you from more that 1.5mil in damages, send me some nice beer. Via Gizmodo

I'm watching The Colbert Report and just finished watching The Daily Show which caused me to realize something. They don't suck. I find that odd. No writers, yet the shows don't suck? How is that? Yes, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are brilliantly snarky and humorous guys, but still. Hmmm, are they getting writing under the table? Either that or they are working way too many hours.

My good friend Barry is expecting his first child and the question of a video camera came up. I of course, have lot's of opinion on the subject, but actually from very recent experience with the birth of my daughter. So I weighed in on the subject gave my 2 cents. In short, don’t get a video camera. What I mean is, getting just a video camera is a waste, you wont use it past the first few times. What we did instead was got a good pocket-point-and-shoot that also shoots video. It was good enough, since I am NOT a videographer. All the bells and whistles on a camera never really get used, so in the end all you should care about is the picture quality and size of the device itself. By getting a point and shoot with video, you are getting two devices in 1, so you only ever need 1 thing in your pocket. It might have been the smartest device decision I have made in a long time. On the con-side for a single device. The sound is not great, but its good enough I think in most cases. Many cameras don’t allow you to zoom while recording video, only while not recording, which makes no technical sense to me except to get people to buy a video camera because they think they need to zoom during video recording… You don’t, it makes you look like you are shooting wanes world intros… I went with the Casio Exilim ex-275 and would recommend it or similar. Size is smaller than my wallet. It shoots 7.2 megapixel stills @4:3 ratio which is what you are probably used to and 640x480 video@30 frames per sec. The lens doesn’t suck. Big rear display. Simple controls. What to look for:

Size. If it doesn’t fit in your pocket, you will never bring it with you when you think you might not need it. Always bring it… Lens. Glass good, not glass, bad. Bigger lens = more light = better picture. Better lens = less aberration = better picture. Real zoom matters, digital zoom ignore (and frankly turn it off right when you buy it since its actually just cropping and zooming the photo so you lose data/detail). Flip/rotatable screen. Important to some folks. Im very good at blind aiming, so I didn’t care about that. Up to you. Memory format – don’t buy a sony, expensive memory. Get something that uses SD would be my advice, since it is the most established and cheapest. Megapixels are important, but only when the lens is better. A crappy lens will take a crappy photo, so you will see the crappiness in better detail with higher MP. But with a good lens, mp can matter. So with a better lens, bigger MP matters, crappier lens, MP becomes less important. Yes you can blow up a bigger MP photo to a larger size, but what looks like shit at 3x5 is gonna look like bigger shit at 8x10. For video, make sure it shoots at least 640x480 @30fps (though it may say 29fps which is fine). Also make sure it can shoot as long as you want. Some cameras limit the time to 30 seconds, dumb, though you should mentally limit most shots to under 45 seconds anyway as a good practice.

Tripod – buy this thing: http://www.joby.com/products/gorillapod/original/ its great and you can find it cheap probably and you will be surprised how much you use it. This site is awesome for info, but overloading. http://www.dpreview.com/ If you really want a video camera, the same rules apply, lens, zoom, format, etc. I'll look for it on ebay in a few months...

I was just looking at the Netflix pricing structure and noticed something that I think most people might not realize. Probably because you would just assume the pricing per disk decreases as you increase the number of disks you can have out at 1 time. I rounded every price up by 1 penny just to make the math easier, and as a result, the best bang for the buck is the 3 disk plan at $16.99 per month. Any plan with more disks and you pay 6 bucks per disk you can have out. The 3 disk plan comes out to $5.67 per disk you can have out at a time. And of course the lower plans are worse, with the 2 disk plan being 7 bucks a disk. I just was surprised the pricing did not go down, or at the very least, stay the same per disk. but to have a "best deal" right in the middle of the choices seems a bit weird to me.

WebMynd is a kind of dvr/tivo for your web browsing. It is a firefox extension that records every website you visit, not just as a URL but as a complete copy of the page. Pretty cool eh? It's not just a picture, or just a bookmark, it's an actual copy of the page you visit, and as a result, you don't really need to bookmark or tag anything, since you can just search your history. To me, this sounds like a great idea, and is something I was actually thinking of developing myself. However, I may still do it now that I installed WebMynd... The site is very short on info, and you don't find out the fine print until AFTER you install the plugin, which pissed me off enough to immediately uninstall it. It's free, if you only want to search the past week. Longer than 1 week, and you gotta pony up 20 bucks to be able to search the past year of your surfing. Charging is not the problem. Pretending you don't charge, and then, "oh surprise!" BITE ME. Frankly WebMynd should be able to make a boatload of cash by selling metrics and data and advertising. But of course, if they don't want to get into that, i understand. But then tell people right up front what the deal is. Don't just spring it on them. Regardless of the shitty practice, the system is still pretty cool. It is by no stretch the best you are going to see, and probably will be a bunch of copycats in a few days that will make WebMynd look like a turd, but alas, thats the breaks on the intertubes, and while they are the only guy doing it (that I know of) they are the best. WebMynd

All in the head has a great little bookmarklet and instructions on how to add a custom springboard/homepage icon to you iPhone for a website that may not yet have one. If you have tried adding a few sites to your iPhone's home screen, you will undoubtedly have noticed that most are just a screen grab of the webpage you were looking at. Very quickly these all start to look the same, and kind of take the "ooomf" out of your pretty springboard. It's pretty easy, though there are some issues it seems for some people. For example, I had to manually go through the bookmark url and remove all the extra %22 which are the percent sign. But once I did, it worked perfectly.

If you have traveled outside the US between Feb 1, 1996 and Nov 8, 2006, you really should keep an eye out for a document that should come from the U.S. District Court Settlement Administrator. Although you can just go there now and fill out the form without the document, it's easier since it has a number with all your info. It is to get a refund for some transaction fees related to your credit card spending when traveling abroad. If you fill out the form online, it takes a whopping 30 seconds at most (if you do the form 1 or 2, 3 is for people that traveled a very large amount) and will get you at least $25. I traveled a total of 22 days outside the US, though i forgot about the assorted mexico trips... go figure. My guess is that will net me about $75 bucks, though I have no idea really, it will be like a birthday surprise I suppose. To find out more go to CCFSettlement.com Even if you didn't get a claim form in the mail, you can still apparently fill it out, and possibly qualify for a refund as well.

Why doesn't the uvula (the hanging thing in the back of your throat) gain weight? I know the reason, but I think it is a flaw in evolution, and frankly Doctors should come up with a procedure to make it gain in size as you gain in size. This would be the ultimate diet method. You would not be able to eat beyond a certain density level because your throat would start getting plugged up with the giant fat dude uvula you would be sporting if your overweight. Come on, it's brilliant. You could get a fat cell or two implanted into you uvula when you are good weight, hook up whatever vessels need to be, and as you gain, so will the fat cells, making it harder to swallow that pizza your choking down by the pie-full.

I have added an icon to BrainDonkey so that you can now have a beautiful icon on the homescreen of your iPhone. Trust me when I say it is the most spectacular piece of crap you have ever seen. BUT, it is better than the default screen grab you end up with without it. If you want to make your own icon for your website, you can check out the official instructions at the Apple Dev Center or else go to this guys blog, which much better instructions.

In playing around with the new iPhone update 1.1.3 I have come across a bit of a quirky issue that I hope Apple will resolve in a future update. The cool new feature is that you can reorganize your home screen, and add bookmarks/webclips to that screen. So instead of creating a bookmark in safari, you can now just click an icon on the home screen and it will bring you right to the website you want. Cool. However there seems to be an annoying bit of inconsistency in how it works. Adding the bookmark to the home screen is easy enough, via a new plus icon in the bottom toolbar of safari. However using the home screen shortcuts to websites quickly will overload you with browser windows. It seems to sporadically reuse the correct window, but sometimes just open a new one. For example, I have a webclip that brings me to google reader. But if I read anything at all, and later click the icon again, I end up with a new window. Now I understand why, since the URL is different now because I read something, it doesn't want to lose my window in case it's important, but this is still annoying. I ended up with 8 windows since the keynote today (i didn't close them on purpose to see how things went) and eventually it started reusing them. But if i use the normal safari bookmark, it will just use whatever current window I am on when I click the bookmark. I think a nice addition would be to add an option to the webclip "add to home" page where you type the name for the icon, would be a 'reuse browser windows' checkbox or something. That way you could set a webclip to always pick a browser window that is open. I understand why it works the way it does since there is no way to know if the window contains something you want to save for later, so you don't want to click an icon, resulting in a loss of that page. But an option to allow for it might be nice.