I went to a No Limit Hold'Em poker event last night in Cambridge.  I busted out within an hour and choose not to rebuy.  Such is life.

While at the event last night, I found out about this site where you can find out about poker events in the Twin Cities, which is very helpful:

http://www.twincitiespoker.com/

I'm more of a once every two months kind of a poker player myself, but I did feel a little rusty last night and that tends to motivate me to play more.  Hopefully I can resist that urge.

Mark Cuban riffs on copyright protection

I think Mark has the right approach here.  Copyright protection is:

a) anti-consumer
b) technically not workable
c) sold by companies whose main product is fear

There are only losers in this game.

My attitude toward copyright protection is the only thing that works: "help honest people stay honest".  If you ship a digital product without copyright protection, a consumer may accidentally do something illegal with it (like borrow it to a neighbor who then copies it and resells it illegally for profit).  If I ship a product, I'm okay with the simplest possible copyright protection that keeps honest people honest.  I don't worry about the people who are dishonest, because then I would have to engage in a never-ending arms race that only ends up hurting my customers by making the product harder to use.

It's not clear to me why this attitude toward copyright protection is not more widespread (i.e. stop wasting time trying to prevent dishonest people from being dishonest).

For more proof (and there is tons of proof available, I just happened to notice this one instance at the time I wrote this post) that this game is nothing but an arms race that even the biggest companies can never win, see:

Sony PSP cracked

Rick Segal: Sometimes it's hard to be an American [via Robert Scoble]

Wow, powerful stuff.  Ever since the start of the Iraq war, I have been somewhat embarrassed to be an American.  I'll feel slightly better after Bush's second term as president is over.  Clinton was an embarrassment as well, but mostly to himself.  Bush's government has made America many new enemies.

This can only be bad for Apple.  They are losing significant amounts of backward compatibility with pre-OS X software.  Their short term sales will be hurt by people's reluctance to buy "obsolete" hardware.  For some indeterminate amount of time, some OS X software that has not been ported will run under an emulator, which is okay, but hardly a pleasant experience.  Emulation is definitely a downgrade from a user perspective.

I'm not sure if it's good news for Intel or not.  The Pentium M and Pentium 4 have serious architectural issues.  In the short term, Intel will likely sell more processors (it's a significant size new customer for them).  Intel may become less dependent on Dell for sales.  In the long term, it's less clear that it's a real positive for them (they are already sometimes considered a monopoly-like company).

AMD is currently the x86 performance leader, so it's good for them.  Even if Apple doesn't buy AMD processors in the short term, like Dell, they will feel significant customer pressure to do so.  If AMD does land either Dell or Apple as a customer, they should be able to significantly increase their production capacity and their revenues.

It doesn't appear that there will be a mass market alternative to x86 anymore, which is probably bad for customers.  If AMD decides to stop innovating, the architecture could stagnant for years (Intel took its eye off the x86 ball years ago).

Disclosure: I am long AMD stock.