Well, I saw the video iPod for the first time today. I stopped by an Apple store to check it out on the way between studying at the cafe and more studying at home.

My reaction over the last few hours has been vacillating between "cool" and "meh." Why? Because I can't imagine actually using a music player without a remote. Every MD player or CD player or walkman I've had since the late 80's has had some sort of remote. I just couldn't use my iPod without its remote.

Can you imagine having to take your iPod out of your pocket every single time you want to skip forward a song, in order to turn off the hold button, push 'forward', set hold again, and put it back? Maybe some people could deal with this, but I can't.

Especially now that we have podcasts. I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately because it allows me to multitask, but many of them are either random people droning on for an hour about nothing, or 10-minute news segments. A remote with a song-skip function is essential in both cases.

As for the video functionality, I think it is going to be revolutionary. The experience of viewing video on the iPod is only so-so, but the entire model it portends for video distribution, I believe, is going to change our world. Within 5-10 years, I predict that we'll be getting most of our TV via RSS feeds, downloading it with swarming protocols like bittorrent, and watching it whenever the heck we want, either on a portable device like an iPod, or on a computer or a TV hooked up to an iPod.

The thing of it is, I would much rather have 40 gigs of 320x240 TV shows and movies on an iPod that I could take with me wherever I go, than have them on DVDs that are higher quality, but always left at home. The vast majority of what Americans watch is not movies anyway; it's TV. We watch orders of magnitude more TV than movies, and PVR devices have shown people what it's like to be able to store it for later. The iPod, or something similar, is going to be the next PVR.

Unfortunately, the term "blawg" seems to be entrenched at this point, but I want to urge all the legal bloggers out there to come up with a better term.

Why? Firstly, I can't stand it. Secondly, it's homophonous with "blog," making it useless in actual English speech. Finally, it looks ugly. "Legal blog" sounds much more elegant, but is two words rather than one. I think I still prefer this, though, until a more palatable option surfaces...

You don't want to be the guy who has to explain to his client why he lost this one:

A prolix complaint larded with conclusory language, like the Complaint here, does not comply with these fundamental pleading mandates.
. . .
This Complaint, which is a blunderbuss of mostly conclusory pleading, does not meet that burden, and it was properly dismissed.

Brehm v. Eisner, 746 A.2d 244 (Del. 2000)