Ah, the many dangers of wearing two hats at once: providing two targets instead of one when the local kids run amuck during snowball season; drawing the potentially violent ire of members of the international Men Without Hats fan club; even running afoul of federal Excessive Head Apparel legislation. But trust us-- even a fine, a beating, and a slushball to the temple combined is nothing compared to the inner turmoil Steve Jobs must be feeling as he tries to balance his Apple hat alongside his jaunty little Pixar chapeau (despite easily having the head geography to accommodate both). Being CEO of two companies is surely tough enough without those occasional situations that pit one side against the other.

Case in point: remember way back when Disney CEO Michael Eisner revealed himself to be tragically unhip when he interpreted "rip" in Apple's "Rip. Mix. Burn." ad campaign to mean "rip off" instead of "encode legally according to fair use as allowed by copyright law"? Ol' Mikey went howling to Congress about how computer manufacturers like Apple were flat-out encouraging digital piracy in their very ads. And of course Steve was far more polite than he could or even should have been about Eisner's ignorance when countering this charge in the press... over and over and over again. But that was then and this is now (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), and according to the Wall Street Journal, Steve's been making noises of a spookily Eisnerian bent of late.

See, it's one thing when the piracy's all about music, because as we all know, "Apple isn't in the music business." (Shhh. We know, but Beatles lawyers are everywhere. Shut up.) But Pixar, on the other hand, is very much in the movie business, and with Pixar box office returns in the billions and DVD sales accounting for a vast chunk of the company's income, piracy is a serious concern. That's why Steve had to decide which hat to wear more prominently at "a recent private meeting with Hollywood studio heads and tech czars"-- and his Hollywood hat came out on top in the end: "Mr. Jobs argued that studios shouldn't license their movies for use in the planned 'high-definition DVD' format until Hollywood is assured by the tech industry that the discs can't be copied" and "even suggested that high-definition DVD burners not be bundled with computers at all." Yipes!

In other words, it's possible that Macs may not be available with HD-DVD-R SuperDuperdrives when such things exist, because Steve's worried that computer owners would just dupe off a zillion copies of The Incredibles and there'd be more bootleg burns of Pixar flicks floating around than AOL CD-ROMs. Which is a kick in the pants, really, because his Apple hat surely makes him aware that honest Mac users would love to buy Macs with SuperDuperdrives for burning their own high-def iMovied creations using hiDVD. So here's hoping that when Steve yells about adequate copy prevention measures for copyrighted HD-DVD content, the tech industry takes him seriously. And the tech industry, obviously, includes Apple, too, which just makes the whole thing a little too weird; talking to yourself is one thing, but yelling at yourself is sketchy no matter how many hats you wear.