But now they are getting ugly.

The Blu-ray/HD DVD war has intensified over the holiday, but their idiot followers are taking it personally. On the corporate side, both camps have been particularly aggressive this holiday season, offering a variety of discounts, free movies, and other incentives to convince consumers to back a particular format.

If you have followed their respective users across the internet, you will realize that Internet arguments are even more infantile than usual, which alone - speaks volumes. The HD DVD boys struck “First Blood” by hacking the official Blu-ray site this weekend, and an online forum had to shut down its format discussion section.

The Blu-ray hack occured last Friday, when visitors to the Blu-ray site were redirected to the website for the HD DVD format operated by the North American HD DVD Promotional Group (including Universal Studios, HP, and Intel).Oooooooooo…how creative! No one will know who did THAT! The redirection seems to have been fixed quickly, but it was no doubt a bit disconcerting to the Blu-ray camp while it lasted. There’s no word yet on who was responsible for the douchebaggery, although some have proposed a variety of entertainingly ridiculous scenarious that include the HD DVD Group paying off a hacker to do the job. Either way, this hack wasn’t a particularly malicious or damaging, but it is proof that some people don’t have lives.

The PR groups would like us to believe that this is representative of just how heated the format wars have become, but really? It is an f**king DVD format?! After I moved out of my mom’s basement, I chilled out about stuff like this. If you want to commit a felony by hacking a major internet site and go to jail for a form of corporate espionage because you think your HD version of “Borne Identity” is the sh**, Rock-on! But Rock-on with the distinct knowledge that there is something wrong with you.

To make matters worse, the tech-geek carnage has spilled over to audio-visual forums. Proving once again, that their is too much disposable income in this country. Plenty of name-calling, discussions of the merits of the two HD formats, and angry arguments over the endless Kirk vs. Picard debates have leaked into almost every AV forum out there. The AVS Forum is a particularly popular venue for home theater discussion, and the arguments there apparently got so hot that the site temporarily closed its Blu-ray and HD DVD discussion areas in November.

There was rumor that a brutal slap-fight broke out in the small NY-Comic Convention, but rumors said that the fight was broken up by their mom’s who drove them to the event.