We’ve had some debate on the topic of next-generation gaming consoles at the office and so far, we’ve been unable to reach a consensus on which is the way to go, Xbox 360 or PS3. I tinkered around with the new Xbox at a Best Buy the other night and while it’s quite impressive, it does seem to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. I does not look like leapfrog technology, the way that the PS2 was to the original Playstation.

All of that said, the Xbox 360 is very cool. But will it be able to withstand the predatory juggernaut of Sony? I have long suspected that the PS3 won’t hit stores in America until Christmas 2006–they’ve used these promise-and-delay tactics before to try to keep consumers from buying a superior rival system that beat them to market. But even with a one-year lag, Sony’s installed base is so much bigger than Microsoft’s that I had a hard time envisioning them losing this generation of the console war. Until now.

This story on Sony’s application for U.S. Patent #6,816,972 looks like corporate suicide. Sony has gone and patented technology which would:

verify that when software was inserted into a “machine” (read: console), it was registered to that machine. If it couldn’t, the technology would prompt the machine to shut down, preventing the software from being accessed.

Such measures would be fine and dandy, were they targeted at pirated software. But the patented tech–which bears the name of Sony Computer Entertainment president Ken Kutaragi–is specifically designed to prevent used software from being sold. “Since only titles for which legitimate software has actually been purchased and which have been initially registered in the machine table can be used, resale (so-called used software purchase) after purchase by an end-user becomes practically impossible,” it reads. Such measures would also prevent lent or rented software from being played.

In other words, if Sony puts this technology into action, you could no longer play borrowed, used, or rented games on your Playstation.

When asked if they intended to use this technology, a Sony spokesperson would say only that, “We have made no official statement regarding coding for PS3 games.” Not much of a denial.

And, as Sony’s DRM rootkit fiasco has shown, they’re not, as a company, opposed to being User Hostile.

Advantage: Xbox.

Who would have guessed that in a corporate battle, Microsoft would be the morally superior, consumer-friendly party?

Two great pieces up today. The first is Skinner’s charming review of the new Fiona Apple disc. A very finely-written essay.

The second is Sonny Bunch’s excellent assessment of how ESPN is ruining America’s sports columnists. Great stuff.

Kinsley is back at Slate and still using the same too-clever-by-half logic on which his career was built. Here he is telling us that Judge Aliton is “too conservative”:

The Republican counterargument will be fourfold: A) He is not very conservative; B) no one knows how conservative he is, and no one is going to find out, because discussing his views in any detail would involve “prejudging” future issues before the court; C) it doesn’t matter whether he is conservative—even raising the question “politicizes” what ought to be a nonpartisan search for judicial excellence; and D) sure he’s conservative. Very conservative. Who won the election?

Actually D), the most valid argument, is one you will never hear, although the Harriet Miers detour showed what happens if Republican activists suspect that a nominee really might not be onboard the ideological train.

The other Republican arguments are laughable. Of course Alito is very conservative. That’s why he got nominated.

Get it? Kinsley says that Harriet Miers got thrown overboard because she wasn’t conservative enough. He then says that you know Sam Aliton is “very conservative” by the simple fact that he was nominated. But wait, Miers wasn’t conservative, and she got nominated.

So was Miers a conservative who was rejected for reasons other than ideology? Or does the act of nomination not, in itself, signify deep conservatism in the nominee? Kinsley, of course, wants it both ways.

(I know the Miers fight was three whole weeks ago, but it’s worth recalling that her rejection was about competence, not ideology.)

Despairing Eagles fans, it could be worse. The Jets just signed a free-agent rookie tight end who hasn’t played organized football since 8th grade.

I like to think of Mark Steyn as the love child of George Will and Matt Labash. His latest is a keeper:

My colleague Rod Liddle writes elsewhere in these pages about the media’s strange reluctance to use the M-word vis-à-vis the rioting ‘youths’. I’m sure he’s received, as I have, plenty of emails arguing that there’s no Islamist component, they’re not the madrasa crowd, they may be Muslim but they’re secular and Westernised and into drugs. It’s the lack of jobs; these riots derive from conditions peculiar to France, etc. As one correspondent wrote, ‘You right-wing shit-for-brains think everything’s about jihad.’

Well, it’s true there are Muslims and there are Muslims: some blow up Tube trains and some rampage through French streets and some claim Mossad’s put something in the chewing gum to make Arab men susceptible to the seduction techniques of Jewesses. Some kill Dutch film-makers and some complain about Piglet coffee mugs on co-workers’ desks, and millions of Muslims don’t do any of the above but apparently don’t feel strongly enough about them to say a word in protest. And it’s also true that it’s better to have your Peugeot torched than to be blown apart on the Piccadilly Line. But what all these techniques — and those of lobby groups who offer themselves as interlocutors between bewildered European elites and ‘moderate’ Muslims — have in common is that they advance the Islamification of Europe. . . .

Now go back to that bland statistic you hear a lot these days: ‘about 10 per cent of France’s population is Muslim’. Give or take a million here, a million there, that’s broadly correct, as far as it goes. But the population spread isn’t even. And when it comes to those living in France aged 20 and under, about 30 per cent are said to be Muslim and in the major urban centres about 45 per cent. If it came down to street-by-street fighting, as Michel Gurfinkiel, the editor of Valeurs Actuelles, points out, ‘the combatant ratio in any ethnic war may thus be one to one’ — already, right now, in 2005. It is not necessary, incidentally, for Islam to become a statistical majority in order to function as one. At the height of its power in the 8th century, the ‘Islamic world’ stretched from Spain to India, yet its population was only minority Muslim. Nonetheless, by 2010, more elderly white Catholic ethnic frogs will have croaked and more fit healthy Muslim youths will be hitting the streets. One day they’ll even be on the beach at St Trop, and if you and your infidel whore happen to be lying there wearing nothing but two coats of Ambre Solaire when they show up, you better hope that the BBC and CNN are right about there being no religio-ethno-cultural component to their ‘grievances’.

Does Ms. Alba really wish she had the role of Padmé in Star Wars?

If anything, it’s Natalie Portman who is probably envious. While poor Ms. Portman is out performing for the groundlings in Shakespeare in the Park, Jessica is achieving complete bronzification on the set of an aquatic thriller. And when Ms. Alba won the role of Nancy Callahan (“She grew up. She filled out.”) in Sin City, Natalie was no doubt seething and wishing it was she.

Do you think Portman actually wanted to do Chekhov’s The Seagull? No, of course not. It was when she lost out to Alba for the role of Honey.

Sometimes, life just isn’t fair.

The Cake Editrix sends us to the Llama Butchers, who have this picture of what the network news looks like in France.

We get Brit Hume, they get her. Despite everything, God bless the French.

Bonus: Is she Elizabeth Rohm‘s hotter, more talented sister?

Update: Galley Friend L.B. sends along this amazing footage of Melissa Theuriau, the French Edward R. Murrow. (And this link to her Best Of and this link to her homepage.) Two observations:

(1) I could watch her insult America for hours on end.

(2) If, 50 years from now, someone makes a movie about Theuriau’s career and calls it Good Night, and Good Luck, it will have a very, very different connotation.

Galley Brother B.J. sends this breaking news on Jessica Alba:

Jessica Alba fears she is being typecast, because she only gets offered role as whores and sexy maids.

The Sin City actress is grateful for the opportunities she has been given in Hollywood – but would kill for the parts offered to rival actress Natalie Portman.

She tells gossip site PageSix.com: “The scripts I get are always for the whore, or the motorcycle chick in leather, or the horny maid. I get all those screenplays that start, ‘Tawnya is in the shower. The water streams down her naked, perky breasts.’ Somehow, I don’t think this is happening to Natalie Portman.”

Matus, take it away. . .