“Flame retardants high in farmed salmon, study says”, according to a trade site I sometimes use at work. This seems like an unusual ingredient, but then again what do I know about the workings of the chemical industry…?

While I was in India in March, Time Warner sold off Warner Music Group to some private VCs. This is more interesting than it sounds…

The whole of WMG was only worth $2 billion – not petty cash, but not a lot in context. Even if you assume Warners will never sign another successful act, the deal implies that the copyright to about 20% of the entire recorded music industry is worth about the same as the worldwide takings of Titanic.

It’s not fair to blame filesharing alone for the low price – total management incompetence is also relevant, as are CD copying and professional pirates. But it’s pretty clear that the expansion of these ways of getting the music you want, when you want it, for free has hit record labels hard (and iTunes and its rivals aren’t replacing free MP3 downloads, but are destroying the ‘pay $15 for an album on which you only like three songs’ model). Hence the RIAA’s deranged crusades against fileswapping students and soldiers.

If I worked in the mainstream movie industry, I’d be scared, and not just from the coke paranoia. Downloading a movie over an ADSL connection is approximately as fast and convenient as downloading an album over dialup (not very) – and as with CD sales in the late 1990s, DVD sales are still growing fast. But in three years or so, home Internet connections will be fast enough to download movies in a few minutes.

This is something the movie industry has long claimed that it’s ready for, and maybe the combination of legal download stores and sueing people’s arses off will mean we don’t see movie studios being flogged to vulture funds for a pittance a couple of years down the line.

But given the ease with which all extant forms of DRM can be subverted, it would appear that either legal download stores will have to charge the DVD price of $20-30 a download (‘hmm, everyone’s using P2P for some reason’), or the standard price of permanent movie ownership will need to fall to the rental cost of $3-5 (‘hmm, our revenues have just quartered’). This doesn’t strike me as a model for long-term profit growth.

“Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world”. And that’s not an opinion, it’s a definition.

If you’re sceptical, read the whole article (by someone named Philip Agre, of whom I hadn’t previously heard). And if you happen to have conservative friends, forward it on. If they’re sufficiently aristocratic, they’ll quietly chuckle to themselves; if not then they might just question their own beliefs…

The London Borough of Newham got an excellent deal on its software contract renewal with Microsoft by seriously considering Linux instead. Which is fair enough; I’m more concerned that their advisors, IT consultancy CapGemini, seem to have lost all vestiges of sanity.

According to CapGemini consultant Leslie Burr, “open-source software has more security issues” than Microsoft. He also says “we established that Microsoft had invested considerable time and energy into the security of their systems”.

The second quote is true, if misleading: Microsoft does invest a great deal of time and energy attempting to fix the holes in their systems before everyone gets worm-infected. However, the idea that someone who is paid to know a lot about IT might not only believe but also *say* the first quote is a scary one.

Perhaps CapGemini assesses an IT platform’s security based on how often the supplier releases critical updates?

I realised while failing to get to sleep last night (I miss A/C) that I was wrong to suggest it was the engineers’ fault that ultra-clever consumer electronics products have crap UIs. As with most things in life, it’s actually the fault of the marketers.

The first example is my Nokia 6600. I didn’t expect this to work in the US with my UK SIM card beyond basic SMS and call functionality, but actually it can manage GPRS roaming (I’m slightly scared of how the billing’s going to work, but selah) – but it did.

The insanely stupid thing that almost mitigatated the technological excellence here wasn’t that the phone worked on AT&T Wireless but not T-Mobile; I’m guessing the Krauts haven’t yet got GPRS enabled in New York. It was that some marketing idiot, I assume at Orange, decided that my phone would have network selection disabled by default. So if it randomly selected T-Mobile, and I wanted to use GPRS, I’d need to switch it off and back on again and hope that it picked AT&T this time.

The second example is the iPod mini, the purchase of which some of my more regular readers may remember. Setting it up on a knackered old laptop in the US, I was amazed at how easily it was to rip all the CDs I had with me, transfer them to the iPod, and have a noticeably better journey home.

Getting home, I thought ‘aha, I’ll install iTunes on my home PC and copy all the tracks I ripped in New York from my iPod’. But the iTunes software isn’t set up to do this. It can show me all the details of all the songs on my iPod, but it can’t do anything with them. Instead, you need to search through the hidden folders on the iPod (which also appears as another hard drive) for files with a .m4a extension, copy them to a folder, and import them into iTunes separately. And it takes you about half an hour to work this out, because the iPod obviously *isn’t* just another hard drive…

The only reason Apple could possibly have set it up this way, I realised last night, is to appease the bloodsucking leeches of the music industry.

Drunk, hungover, away, working, listening to aforementioned iPod, having a broken home PC. All of these things have kept me away from SBBS for a few days. Now, however, I return like a phoenix.

Unfortunately, I can also think of about as many interesting and/or amusing things to say as a phoenix. If I were a newspaper columnist who had to say something (anything!) substantive, I’d probably go off on a dull techie rant about how consumer electronics manufacturers have managed to solve the extremely-hard-to-solve problems of fitting a CD library into a 1cm by 5cm by 10cm package, and of creating a similarly sized device that gives you fast Internet access everwhere in the world – but not the comparatively-easy-to-solve UI problems that mean both devices perform below their potential [1].

But I’m not, so I won’t. Instead, you should muse on human rights versus vending machine rights, and possibly also on why the president’s idiocy matters. I’d also recommend reading about a more exciting but (hopefully) more doomed campaign by an unglamorous war hero to oust a terrible, terrible corrupt, warmongering Republican. The fact that it’s written by a certified, certifiable genius with a head full of ether and mescaline helps, as you might expect.

[1] Perhaps engineers shouldn’t be put in charge of consumer-focused projects. Despite the obvious intuitional bias to the contrary, it may be that designing a functional UI is actually harder than doing clever things with microelectronics.

I’ve now got an iPod mini. And you haven’t. Ha ha.

John Kerry is not the most liberal senator, and anyone who says that he is is stupid, lying, or both. Pass it on…

(this is a highly praiseworthy googlebombing effort, in case you were wondering.)

The Russians have been responsible for a wide variety of unpleasant things in the course of recorded history. However, this gin-based energy drink may well be the most horrible.

So last week’s ‘terror alerts’ were not only unnecessary, but also blew a major undercover operation to track down terrorists.

Really, I’m so surprised.

Why the fuck does GWB poll ahead of Kerry on his handling of the War on Some Terrorists? A crippled, lobotomized goat could do a better job.

Update: link fixed. Thanks Michael…