In the wake of the Cryptome brouhaha with Microsoft over the publication of the latter’s “Online Global Criminal Compliance Guide”, all sorts of people have been complaining about Microsoft’s heavy-handed DMCA tactics, and how you’d really think they would know better than to try and bluff Cryptome, of all places.

Unfortunately, this has also brought out some anti-copyright activists - or more properly, some people who are masquerading as anti-copyright activists…
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James Cary, the writer of innumerable BBC radio productions - including the smashing good Hut 33, about assorted goings-on at Bletchley Park in 1941 - wrote an interesting piece the other day about the “curiously British” tendency to quit an endeavour (in this case, sitcoms) at your, or its, peak, using an assortment of TV and radio programmes to illustrate the point.

He implies rather strongly that it’s just a cultural difference between creative types on opposing sides of the big salty wet thingy east of Canada, but I suspect that’s not quite the whole story.
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So this dude over in Minneapolis - fast on track to regaining its old glory of “Murderapolis”, but that’s a story for another day - is a bit down on his luck and needs some quick cash to get food or booze or drugs, or whatever. What’s he do?

Sells cocaine on the streets, of course. Hey, why not? No real special skills required, no real physical labor, and it can be extremely lucrative.

It’s even more lucrative, of course, when you don’t pay your supplier for your merchandise, which is an all too common “bright idea” that down-on-their-luck dealers sometimes hit upon. That rarely ends well.

What’s safer than - but just as lucrative as - selling cocaine you didn’t pay for? Why, selling fake cocaine, of course.

That’s what a guy tried to do on Friday - he sold a baggie of crushed-up drywall powder for $20. He probably would have gotten away with it, too, had he not sold it to an undercover officer.

Say what you will about America’s drugs policies, but some people really are just so stupid that it ought to be a crime.

(Fun statistical footnote: A 4×8 sheet of 7/8″ drywall weighs about 70 pounds. If you powdered the whole damn thing up and sold it at prevalent street prices for crack cocaine, it’d be worth around $635,000. It’d also last you a year… if you sold 86 hits a day, which I’m guessing would be a pretty high volume of sales.)

Over in England, there is evidently a movement afoot to manipulate the music charts. Coordinated on Facebook (where else?), this mercantile insurrection seeks - or so they say - to protest the predictable and shite nature of modern cookie-cutter pop music produced by the sorts of here today, gone tomorrow cookie-cutter pop singers so beloved of viewers of shows like American Idol or Canada’s Got Talent or The X Factor.

These folks apparently don’t want a vapid and over-produced pop jingle to be the number one single during Christmas, which is a bit of a bragging point and ensures lots of airplay, blah blah blah. I, as you might guess from my comments, pretty much completely endorse this idea.

The song these folks have decided to promote, in the hopes of becoming number one, is Rage Against the Machine’s classic anthem Killing in the Name.
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I see on the BBC that the European Union nanny-state wants to limit the volume levels of portable music players so as to protect the hearing of today’s youth. This is slightly embarrassing, as they already passed just such a law several years ago, and now apparently feel the need to be even more restrictive.

Aside from my philosophical objections to this sort of busy-body protect-you-from-yourself nannying, I believe that the whole idea is fundamentally flawed and even, dare I say, retarded? Yes, I think I dare…
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