Comepetition Drowning

Bland Hamilton and the Olympics

A bit of context. If you live in the UK and wish to watch the Olympics on the idiot box, you have to watch it via the BBC. Even if you are unfortunate enough to subscribe to another provider, they use the same images with a different moron talking over them. Or sometimes the same moron who is doubling up commentator jobs. The BBC always buys the exclusive rights to the event and there is nothing you can do about it. This position of exclusivity is one the BBC chooses to abuse worse than a Catholic priest at a gathering of alter boys. To give my viewing experience a bit of context, my earliest Olympic memory is of one Dick Frosby using his revolutionary high jump technique for the very first time (Work it out).

The first Saturday of the Olympics and there is a tremendous range of skills and athletic prowess on display. This year, the 2012 That There London Games, there was a choice of archery, badminton, beach volleyball, boxing, Road Cycling, cross country eventing, fencing, football, gymnastics, handball, judo, rowing, shooting, table tennis, tennis, volleyball and Weightlifting. And some clowns splashing about in an oversized bath. This is a veritable wealth of choice. Not just from a sporting perspective, there is some genuine entertainment to be had here. Whilst this was a quiet year the cross country eventing always contains the possibility of a fall, and the hilarious spectacle of some upper class twit being killed or crippled by a horse rolling on top of them. Always the dog meat's, sorry, horse's fault, though if it wins the passenger that it has been forced to haul around the course gets the medal. Very egalitarian.

Weightlifting is my sport of choice, because I still play it to a competitive level. I love cycling and I like watching cycling, weird but that is the way I am made. Olympic judo is the only time you will see judo on the box in this country on the BBC. Amateur boxing is as good as boxing gets, before the insidious influence of money and the win at all cost attitude takes the life out of it. Whilst gymnastics is a paedophile dream come true, there is also a vast array of sporting entertainment to chose from. So what do the BBC chose to transmit from this treasure chest of recreational delight? Something they know would just ruin my shit. The same thing it shows every Olympics, the swimming. Not just the swimming, but the boring bits of the swimming. I find swimming utterly tedious even at the medal stage, heat 1 of 94 in round 1 of 164 induces dangerous, brain function stopping, levels of catalepsy. All commentated on by the voice of swimming, Bland Hamilton. Yes, that is his name, look it up on wiki-pedia (before somebody changes it back again). Admittedly the BBC did sack him, but not because he was boring. They replaced him with somebody so boring I cannot even remember their name. Do you know when the last time somebody drowned at the Olympics? That's right, never. I do not even have that vicarious pleasure to look forward to. If Freeview was my only source of televisual entertainment, I would be seriously contemplating suicide.

Thanks to his Royal Holiness Sir Tim Berners-Lee, I have the interweb thing. And not only for specialist interest content either, the BBC are streaming every single event. This is the first Olympics, and there have been a few of them, where I have managed to completely avoid the non-drowning clowns in an oversized bath. I did this by watching the shitty streams that the BBC managed to cough up. Typically they used flash as a container instead of HTML5. They say the streams are in HD, but that depends on your definition of HD. They actually fail by any definition of high definition other than the BBC's own. What they mean is each stream is optimised for viewing in a screen of 1680 by 1050. Not transmitted at this resolution, which would be HD, albeit an old definition of HD. No, they are transmitted at 832 by 468, or numbers pulled out of their arses to give them their technical title. You expand the stream to full screen, the quality does not change, but it does fill most of your monitor with blocky video. But who the hell has a 16X10 monitor or television these days? No body I have ever met. Like everybody else on the planet I have 1920 by 1080 equipment. Expanding on this makes the container fill the screen, adds a huge black border, then pumps the video to 16X10. Very unsatisfactory experience. I was going to watch it on my netbook, with a tiny 1024 screen. But expanding the video did not actually make it any bigger. The container filled the screen and the video stream did not change. Probably works on an iFruit machine, but not being a twat I do not own one. So the netbook only got used when I was watching multiple streams simultaneously. One on the server, one on the desktop, one on the netbook. That is the sort of future I used to dream of living in, sat on the shitter watching the Olympics whilst firing off emails of complaint to the BBC.

Whilst the BBC have upped their game to the point where I have not been forced to use computer poison like Realplayer, it was overall a disappointing experience but not as painful as it has been in the past. Eventually they may employ somebody who knows what they are doing and we will get to see the games properly. Until then it was not 'at least I avoided the swimming' more like 'at most I avoided the swimming'.

The boy Jobs is gone

Lamenting the late Steve Jobs

I do not own an Apple product. I do not like Apple products because currently they are over priced and technically dubious. That is my view and is worth a good deal more than you paid for it. So why is the world mourning (and if it isn't, it should be) the passing of a vegetarian Buddhist who had absolutely no environmental concerns what so ever?

Because he was there at the beginning?
Admittedly he was building computers before IBM built their PC, before MircoShaft wrote their rubbish and before His Royal Holiness Sir Tim Berners-Lee built the interweb. No, his contribution is far greater than just being there when it started. The Altair 8080 can quite rightly lay claim to being the very first home computer, even though it was only usable by the most serious of geeks. Jobs looked at that and decided what it needed was a keyboard and maybe a VDU. Sounds obvious now, but revolutionary thinking back in the 70's. Though he did set a certain standard with the Apple II. It had a simple flip top lid allowing easy access to the innards of the computer. The new standard being if you flipped it, you invalidated the warranty.

In 1981 IBM released the XT Personal Computer and within six months it was the industry standard. If it was not an IBM compatible PC, it was not worth having. Unlike the Apple, it was built of off the shelf parts so the average user could build it to their own configuration. Jobs looked at it and decided what it needed was that GUI stuff they invented over at Xerox PARC a few years ago. The result was expensive and did not bother your average office drones or home user much. Unless you worked in publishing where it became the de facto standard. Every journalist and type setter in the country chose the Macintosh as their tool of preference. Graphic designers started to follow suit. This gave Apple an admittedly niche, but vast and still existent, user base. Despite the Luddite oppression of middle managers and their evil, small minded, attempts to prevent the introduction of WIMPs into the work place, I imagine there are very few people left working on eighty by twenty five text screen terminals. Though Roger, a previous manager and total dick, preferred reading three and a half million lines of code through a VT420 machine rather than a graphical interface with True Type fonts. He could not see the point of a GUI, so nobody in the office was allowed to use one. After I killed him his obituary did not add up to much more than 'Gone, soon to be forgotten'. So, because of people like this, Apple sacked Jobs. A sentence that contains everything you need to know about management.

Here we come to Jobs' most important contribution to computing. Not all that iBollocks frippery that came later, they are just gewgaws and trinkets. Steve Wozniak said that Jobs developed products that people enjoyed using not just working on. The product that Jobs developed at this time was the NeXT computer. And who enjoyed using NeXTStep and the NeXT Cube? The characters over at id Software and His Royal Almightiness Sir Tim Berners-Lee to name just two.

There are certain cultural events whose importance it is difficult to overstate, especially as we peer back at them through the mists of time and consider them mundane. Heartbreak Hotel led the immortal John Lennon to pronounce that music had two time periods, Before Presley and After Presley. Similarly in the computing world there is Before Doom and Gaming Machines. By this time MicroShaft Windozes was a steam roller of a product, but even they had to delay the launch of 95 until they could prove that it could play Doom. As for the achievements of His Royal Supremeness Sir Tim Berners-Lee, well you are reading this aren't you? The NeXT Cube upon which he ran the first web server, developed HTTP and the first web browser are stored in a museum in Zurich where they are worshipped daily with ritual human sacrifice. And quite rightly so.

Would these two events have come about without Jobs? Of course. Also he had no direct involvement in their creation. Yet they used his machines, machines so successful that Apple bought the company for an amount of money that I cannot even begin to comprehend. Jobs was not only back in Apple, he was back running the company again.

Then he went all 'i'.

The iMac, a transparent computer that set new standards in design; it had a shit keyboard, a mouse that did not work, no floppy drive and a read only CD drive. And all for just three times the price of an XT compatible.

The iBook, a low spec. laptop aimed at the education market. No, I had never heard of it either.

The iPod, a stylish must have thing for people on the go; a machine for making your ears bleed using sound with all the quality of medium wave radio.

iTunes, every song ever recorded for 99p each; with the exception of every song that I want to hear, including the Beatles back catalogue. At a bandwidth that would make the cassette tape player in my dad's old Ford Cortina vomit with disgust. Installed iTunes on my pc last week. When it came to uninstalling I found three new services and four other products that it had somehow left behind and refused to remove.

The iPhone, does everything in one hand held device. Everything except record voice, customize ring tones with your own mp3s, send MMS messages, replace the battery, voice dialling, instant messaging and simple cut and paste. And all for more than you would pay for a desktop computer. (Some of these faults have been rectified in the later versions, but not all and at the expense of being able to make phone calls. Still more expensive than a desktop).

The iPad, a what ever, for pillocks with too much money. What has my netbook got that the iPad hasn't? Well, a keyboard, a USB port, a card reader and a hard drive for four. All for less than half the price. Apple are also currently suing every other manufacturer of computer hardware in the world, claiming they infringe copyright. This is what gave IBM such a bad name when they did the same thing with their software litigation.

These lumps of shit all sell well. So does crack cocaine. Sales are a pretty poor bench mark for quality. I do not allow them into my life so they cannot ruin my shit. Unlike the workers at his Foxconn factory in China. Conditions are so horrendous that there have been fourteen suicides in the sixteen months leading up to May 2011 (Apple addressed this problem by putting up jump proof netting). Twenty Chinese universities described the factories as labour camps and detailed worker abuse and illegal overtime. And let us not forget the child labour they employ. When the authorities in China accuse you of harsh practise, it must be the stuff of nightmares.

So why should we be mourning him? Because he set up the digital effects house Pixar, that's why.

woo high five dude

So what, exactly, does the iBollocks do?

I always prefer a desk next to the window, but that is not an option at this new place, stuck as I am in a windowless cell. Not much of an improvement over my last lodgings, and that was a lunatic asylum. Yes, once again I allowed myself to be captured, (note: when paying a 200kg woman for sex, do not let her fall asleep on top of you). I managed to escape and secure employment. I have resolved the National Insurance Number issues by becoming a contractor. By the time they have figured out who I am not, I have finished the project and moved onto the next one. Everybody happy. By that I mean, I am happy and that is all that is important.

I had the choice of stealing the identity of some poor schlep with a dead end job or a that of a multi-millionaire playboy with a string of bendy escorts all experts in bonkers tantric sex. The choice was easy, the schlep. Otherwise I would have ended up with an iPad and that is such a catastrophic piece of shit it would have made being incarcerated in the deepest dungeon of the 'Residence Of The Pathologically Atypical' a paradise on earth. The iPad does not even have a keyboard. Like all people who's knuckles do not quite scrape  along the ground when stood upright (if I stand on my toes), I can touch type. I am, however, completely unable to touch type on a keyboard that has no locators under the f and j keys. 'It is great for video' whines the Steve Job lick-spittles, well not as good as my 40” high definition LED television it isn't. And the quality of youtube is so low you may as well as watch it on a mobile that only has a text display, because that is as good as it gets. 'It has apps.' So fucking what. That is like saying a bridge has an alimentary canal, absolutely no use whatsoever and not used by anybody. 'It connects to iTunes.' Pause.

And so we come to the crux of the problem. There is a perfectly dreadful show on the terrestrial television channel which shows pornography that is presented by a bunch of media types. In their utterly fatuous and moronic way they discuss the merits of electrical single use items, or gadgets as they call them. They pull out the latest mp3 player and start to waffle on about how cool or convenient or pretty or small or easy to use it is. Unless it is made by Apple, in which case they will just start to foam at the mouth, have eye popping spasmodic orgasms and try and have sex with it. They even pretend they enjoy it. The single criterion they should be discussing is the one they never even mention. What is the quality of the sound it produces? Because those little bits of shit that have to be shoved into your ears are going to have to compete with my five way, bass re-flexed, ceramic tweeted, floor standing speakers. Not only do they cause at least the same amount of damage to your ears as the inserts, the speakers can also liquidise your insides. Which is as much fun as it sounds.

They never bother to mention that because they think the only source of music is iTunes, which has exactly the same output quality as old fashioned medium wave radio. Some brainless bint, who only has the gig because she is sleeping with the producer, stands there telling me I can replace my eye wateringly expensive Hi-Fi with some piece of shit that sounds like it belongs in a 1970's Ford Cortina. I do not want my music convenient, or cool, or edgy, or hip, or strapped to my arse as I work out in a gym. There is only one thing I want my music to be, and that is good. I do not listen to music to make a 'statement' or be fashionable. I listen to music for my own aesthetic pleasure. If other people like, dislike, disapprove or are even offended by my taste in music that is just fine. That is their right, welcome to freedom of speech.

Personally I could not give a flying fornication what anybody thinks my taste in music is. In the same way I do not care how 'cool' the iPad is. It makes claim to be a computer, does it do computer stuff? The answer is no, with the caveat you are going to pay the price of a desktop to not do it. I spend all day working with computers and all evening deriving pleasure via my own computer. Whether that invloves playing games, downloading pornography or writing this junk all of them involve a keyboard. I need to use said keyboard without looking at it, hence tactile keys with bits sticking out of the f and j. I will admit my netbook is not as efficient as an iPad when it comes to whooping like a castrated howler monkey and high five-ing perfect strangers. But there again, I bought my netbook to process my words, not ruin my shit.

After all this time, I am still mad

The Cost Of Reading This Rubbish

Have you any concept of how difficult it is for somebody who has escaped from long term incarceration in a mental institute to find work? Getting access to a computer and a broadband account was the hard work, extracting myself from 'the facility' after I had illegal access to the database was merely problematical. To facilitate my work, and to cover my movements, I recently purchased an external hard drive. Take note of this next sentence, it is very important.

I bought an externally powered, USB connected, hard drive unit with a three hundred and twenty gigabyte capacity at a cost of thirty five quid, or pounds (£35) to use the vulgar term.

People reading this are now divided into two camps, those with acne and no brains thinking 'Yeah, so what?' but in text speak, and those with lank hair and no mates thinking 'HOW MUCH?' in capitals.

So what is remarkable about the sentence? Well, let me take you back to about fifteen years ago when I bought my first hard drive, which I still have, along with the receipt. This internal IDE hard drive cost one hundred and forty quid (£140) and had a forty Megabyte capacity. That was considered a decent size and a cheap price in those days, 350p a Megabyte as opposed to the current hundredth of a pence a Megabyte. At the time I worked for a company of some seventy lost and desperate souls where we had a never ending stream of issues with network capacity. To solve all these problems the company invested a thousand pounds, vulgar term, on a one gigabyte hard drive. A hard drive so large it could not be formatted by the usual operating systems. Using Novell NetWare and the large drive utility Compserf, the drive was formatted and partitioned in to blocks that could be read by Windows 3.11. Like most companies at the time take up of Windoze 95 was slow. This huge hard drive solved all our data storage problems. Now such a drive would not even accommodate a MicroSoft bloat ware operating system.

The forty megabyte drive, which could still accommodate some of the smaller Linux operating systems, was more capacity than I could fill. (I am speaking of a time before the popularity of the web which now provides me with unlimited amounts of specialist images for the undiscerning gentleman). After I had loaded windows 3.1 I still had nearly two thirds of the drive to run Doom and Ultima Underworld. Unless you were there when the Shareware game Doom arrived on the scene, you can not even begin to estimate the impact it had on the computing, let alone gaming, world. MicroShaft, jealous of this success, decided to ruin the computing world's shit by bloating their operating systems. Soon even a massive forty megabyte hard drive could barely contain their gross, blubbery, hugely redundant, Easter egg ridden bloat ware. Famously Windoze 95 almost became Windoze 96 because customers all wanted it to do the same thing, run Doom. Nobody was going to buy a system that couldn't and it took MicroShaft 6 months to get it working. Hence the September, rather than March, release date.

So we were sold disk compression utilities. This was software that, in theory, could double the size of a hard drive with clever, hidden, software. What it actually did was kill the performance of the machine and delete all of the data on the hard drive. Also Doom, with its Dos4GW dos extender, did not like it. So pretty much nobody used it. As a direct consequence hard drives got bigger at, so we were told, tremendous cost and expense to the poor, nay destitute, drive manufacturers.

Cirrus Logic then threw a spanner in the works with their one megabyte video card. This retailed at ca. £300 a unit. It was also starting to reach the end of its development cycle. In June 1993 they made an announcement, from August, this same card will be available for £57.50, an 80% cut in price. All the other manufacturers started wailing and wringing their hands in despair, warning that they will all go bankrupt and there will never be new development of video technology, ever. Now if you quickly wish to lose the desire to live, ask a geek what video system he has in his desktop. Long before he has finished droning on about SLI and Crossfire and pipelines and shaders you will be trying to kill yourself by ramming a pencil into your ear.

What has transpired is that all those years we pumped all those hard earned pounds into the pockets of the manufacturers were pretty much wasted. Equipment was vastly overpriced and development deliberately slowed to force the suckers, sorry customers, to buy it. These days, thanks to the video wars between Nvidia and ATI, development is screaming along at a pace that game developers have given up trying to match it. Drive technology is becoming so cheap they will soon be coming free in boxes of cornflakes. This despite experts informing the world that a two and a half inch platter will never be able to hold more than a gigabyte of data. Even memory, despite the conflagration at the Kobe semi conductor factory, is as cheap as the proverbial chips, which is not surprising because that is what they are.

So why is it ten years ago when I bought a cutting edge, state of the art, future proof for at least for a couple of weeks, desktop computer it cost £2,500 and last week when I bought a cutting edge, state of the art, future proof for at least for a couple of weeks, desktop computer it also cost £2,500?

And they call me mad! Even without finding the bodies.

We are stopping you doing it for our own good.

Once again it is censorship time.

In a typical massive over reaction to a single violent crime the British government has announced a new range of laws. To quote the BBC, "Possessing and accessing extreme internet pornography could become illegal under government proposals."

Some upper class, public school, inbred, catholic, social working tosser has now decided that freedom of thinking is a bad idea. Paul Goggins, the aforementioned tosser and government minister, appeared on the BBC Radio 4's Today programme and said "The aim is for a new offence of possessing violent and abusive pornography, which could be punishable by up to three years in prison." He also went on to say "such images were extremely offensive to the vast majority and had no place in society."

Well, shit for brains, you clearly have not noticed, they are not in society they are on the internet. On the internet is not the same thing as being in society. Items for sale in a registered sex shop are not said to be littering the high street or even on public display. To get them you first have to enter the sex shop. The conscious and deliberate decision to enter the foul smelling and unpleasant premises first has to made, then the action of walking in taken. Entrance to these places is protected by "adults only" signs and parents. Particularly fathers, who can often be seen outside such establishments, punching their offspring whilst shouting "Follow me in there again you little shit and you will be for it."

I have never accessed the type of material that is worrying St Goggins of Wythenshawe, but I do have extremely questionable taste when it comes to the matter of sexual gratification. What those tastes are, are my own business, not for display or discussion with the general public. They do not involve animals, unwilling participants, children or St Goggins. So fuck off and mind your own business, what I get up to is absolutely no concern of yours. My tastes are like my opinions, mine. I do not need the likes of that bucktoothed old bitch who is always banging on about children's rights or St. Goggins to tell me what my opinions ought to be. I do not need having my shit ruined by the likes of St Goggins controlling my access to the internet because he can not stop his own, inbred, children using a computer. If parents do not know how to control their child's activities, make it illegal for them to own one (child that is, not a computer).

Since access is to be controlled, how is it to be decided what is unfit for the great unwashed to view without breaking the law by having somebody look at it? And how are they going to look at it without themselves becoming mass murderers? Which is what it all comes down to. St Goggins and that bucktoothed old bitch refer to the general populace as 'ordinary' people, the implication being that they are somehow extraordinary and not subject to the passions and impulses that plague and control 'ordinary' people. What political lackeys forget is that my taxes pay their wages and they only have a job because I choose to vote. They are servants of society, a society of which I am an active member.

Whilst I am obviously open to the corrupting influence of any sort of media, our political lackeys, who consider themselves our betters, also consider themselves above such vulgarism. Such attitudes can be summed up by the prosecuting barrister at the obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover, who famously said "Is this really the sort of book you would want your wife or even your servants to read?" To which somebody replied "I do not care if my wife or my servants read it, just so long as it is not my bloody game keeper!"

Just Give Us Your Fucking Money

Make talentless wankers history

Lately it seems that every time I turn on my television set, that fat, useless, Irish wanker, Dildo, is there, snapping his fingers. This is, apparently, something to do with a charity called "make poverty history", an organisation that aggressively promotes capitalism over indigenous lifestyles in third world countries. I have never figured out what the finger clicking is about, I just watch long enough to realise that Dildo has absolutely no sense of timing whatsoever.

This advert is one of a plethora of charity ads currently doing the rounds. They usually consist of some terrible scene of torture with a lugubrious voice over saying.

"See this, this is all your fault this is. You are doing this to this poor child/animal/third world county. This is happening because you wont give us your fucking money. That's right. This child/animal/third world country is being tortured because you spent your hard earned cash on a well deserved holiday instead of giving it to us, you bastard. Just because you spend sixty hours a week working in a shitty cubicle farm in conditions that a battery farmed pig would not put up with, does not give you the right to spend your own money on yourself. This is your fault, so give us your fucking money."

Usually voiced by some "personality" who has more money than you will ever see in your entire working life.

Bad enough that someone of absolutely infinitesimal talent has a colossal amount of money. At least I avoided contributing to that by not buying their shit CDs. He is now on my television, which I have to pay to watch, listening to him tell me how good capitalism is for the third world. Because if you think for one minute that some local warlord or drug cartel is not going to exploit "fair trade" for their own capital gain, then you are even more stupid than I think you are. For reference, I already think you are pretty damn stupid. European farming practises are not suitable for the plains of central Africa, you only have to see the damage caused to the local ecosystem by the sinking of a single well to realise that. The water taken from the well is great for the local, non nomadic, villagers and their livestock. But totally shit for the wildlife and the indigenous nomadic people who used to rely on having a decent water table.

Now, to top it all, I am one of the worlds poor, having eventually been laid off. Good. It was a shit company and I wanted a break anyway. In a classic piece of management cock up, the redundancy notices were handed out on a Friday. This Friday, however, was the first of April traditionally called April Fool's day. Some of the drones who were getting the chop thought it was a joke and were confused, others upset, or, like me after finding out it was not a joke, elated. Either way we all reacted in the same manner and trashed the place. The money saved from giving us the shove will be spent on rebuilding the majority of the office block that we managed to destroy. A few managers will be on extended sick leave, recovering in traction after having their shit totally ruined. I am thinking of starting a charity to help keep up the payments on my mortgage. All I need is to get hold of some media personality. I do not care if he is willing to give up his time and effort to aid the cause. If they are so passionate about it, let them give up their money, ALL of it. Sell the jets, the houses and the limo's and go back to living on a council estate with nothing to keep them warm but their total lack of talent. And get off my fucking television.

There is no more music

Who are the real thieves?

Christmas has just past and I have no doubt that music and films on digital versatile media made up a substantial number of the gifts given this year. Which is strange when you consider that they do not exist. Popular music does not exist, no music is currently being produced. There are no films being made and there are no cinemas. Any you do happen across must merely be a figment of your imagination. I know that these previous statements are true because the film making industry, which obviously no longer exists, says they are true.

This was said in 1982. Jack Valenti stated, categorically, that if the video cassette recorder and the blank recordable video cassette tape were not banned, then the film and music making industry would cease to exist. Since they were not banned and Valenti is not a liar, then the entertainment industry as we know and hate it, must have been bankrupted some time in the early 1990's. Long before the advent of home broadband and its' ability to download and distribute music and film. The unthinkable alternative is that Jack Valenti is just a worthless, lying, gobshite. A tool of the talent repressing media cartels that fill our lives with so much unmitigated rubbish.

So what is the truth of the current state of the music industry. According to the BBC news service album sales have never been better, ever. Which is disappointing since music has never been worse, ever, with the possible exception of punk. Despite recent reductions, which have caused an increase in sales and overall profits, CD's are still massively overpriced. The record companies, and Valenti, claim they are recovering development costs. An out and out lie and a fucking cheek because Phillips did all the development and gave away the technology, the same as they did for the music cassette in 1970. The music cassette, for the younger reader, was responsible for the death of the music industry in the seventies which is why the CD was not invented by the music industry.

The problem with the cartels is that they do not understand music or entertainment, only the business. They call all artists content providers, whether they be musicians or film directors. It does not matter to the suits what the content, or even the nature of the content, is, they want something they can force sell. That is why we have to put up with the truly hopeless being judged by the absolutely worthless and then being asked to fork out hard earned cash to buy the result, or pop idol as it is called. This leaves us with the obscene spectacle of the utterly talentless Mariah Carey being paid £20,000,000 to not record any more music.

The cartels have embraced the evil that is the download and now sell music over the internet. Should they be applauded for this step into the twentieth century, despite the fact the rest of us are in the twenty first? Hardly. iTunes have already been reported for overpricing their produce.

I have been accused of being cynical by just about everybody I have ever met. Yet even I would not have the balls to implement the latest Brittany Spears scam. An album of her greatest hits has just been released. Greatest hits albums used to be targeted at the occasional fan, someone who does not want the entire catalogue but would pay for a compendium of the artists best work. Not anymore. This album has four previously unreleased tracks on it. Die hard fans now have to get mummy to buy this album for them, even though they already possess eighty percent of the content (sic).

Stealing music via the internet apparently funds global terrorism and drug trafficking. Having had my shit ruined by both terrorism and drugs I will state now, unequivocally, it is a price I am prepared to pay if it means an end to Valenti, Glickman and the soulless drivel that is spewing out of my television, cinema and radio.