There are a lot of ways to save and download YouTube videos but this is by far the best implementation I’ve seen.

Courtesy of PWN! YouTube:

Step 1: View a video on YouTube (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5j4McFzies)

Step 2: In the URL location box, type pwn in front of youtube, and enter (e.g. http://www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=c5j4McFzies)

Step 3: Save out your video in either FLV or MP4.

Awesome stuff! Thanks to Leo Laporte for letting the Twitter world know about this.

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Courtesy of The New York Times:

The island, a rainy outpost in the Irish Sea, is promoting an offbeat remedy for digital piracy, which the music labels blame for billions of dollars in lost sales. Instead of fighting file-sharing, the local government wants to embrace it — and it is trying to enlist a skeptical music industry’s help.

Read the rest here.

The nominal fee for broadband users discussed in the article sounds definitely like a step in the right direction. Lets hope other nations adopt this model, assuming of course it generates the requisite revenue for the labels and artists.

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Engadget’s Windows 7 Beta In-Depth Impressions article mentioned something I haven’t really thought about with regards to Vista, 7, or even XP: The ugly underpinnings of the operating system.

Windows 7 shows where Microsoft’s industry dominating OS has hardly changed from its Windows NT heritage — it doesn’t take very many clicks to find the ugly underpinnings of the OS, aspects like the “true” device manager that have hardly received an aesthetic upgrade, not to mention a functionality upgrade, in the past decade.

I was reminded of this little gem that has also lived on in the Windows OS. Does anyone actually use these display settings? Unreal.

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