Okay, just a quick question to lead this off, folks: how the heck is it that we still find ourselves surprised by stuff like this? We already knew days ago that Dell was planning to announce its own digital music player today, and we've known forever that Mike Dell copies Steve Jobs's every move roughly two years after the fact. So, yes, we even expected that the Dell Digital Jukebox (still the catchiest product name we've encountered since "Tork King Nut Splitter," by the way) would almost certainly be a shameless ripoff of the iPod.

And yet we still got blindsided by just how shameless Dell can be.

For instance, consider the picture of the Digital Jukebox in the USA Today article about Dell's latest "innovations," as pointed out by faithful viewer Jan Adriaenssens. At least its face isn't all-white, we suppose, and Dell changed the axis of rotation of the scroll wheel. (Good luck scrolling through 5,000 songs with that thing. Imagine the class action suit when people's thumbs start to fall off.) Oh, and the buttons are different shapes and sizes from their iPodian equivalents, and placed in different locations. Meanwhile, the screen is about as iPodesque as possible, but at least they moved the battery indicator from the upper right to the upper left. Overall, you can't look at this thing and not think "iPod." Or, more accurately, "iPod after a twenty-minute beatdown with the Ugly Stick."

And yet, even that isn't really what has us utterly flabbergasted by the seemingly bottomless depths of Dell's gaping lack of originality. If you want incontestable proof that Dell is the be-all and end-all of copycatdom, the proverbial Mariana Trench into which all creativity sinks never to be seen again, look no further than the announcement of the Dell Music Store, the company's "new music download service that offers thousands of music selections and allows seamless, legal downloading of songs to the Dell DJ." Gosh... that sounds somehow hauntingly familiar.

Details at this point are still mercifully vague, which is probably the only thing keeping our heads from catching fire from the inside, but Dell claims that the Digital Jukebox and the Dell Music Store will be "available for purchase in time for the holidays." No foolin'? We'll actually be able to buy Dell's entire online music service before the advent of the Annual Nondenominational Winter Gift-Giving Season™? Finally, something to get Scott Blum-- if the Dell Music Store turns out to be as lame as we suspect it might, ol' Scott can have a matching pair of crappy online digital music stores! He's really tough to shop for, and we were worried we were going to have to get him yet another gift certificate to Williams-Sonoma...

Occasional news of Apple wins in the education market continue; in addition to the high-profile G5 supercomputer being slapped together at Virginia Tech, in recent weeks there have also been reports of Macs-for-every-student deals with districts in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Alaska. (Time for Sesame Street, kiddies! "Three of these things belong together, three of these things are kinda the same...") Not that we're surprised, or anything; back when he gave his Frednote, CFO Anderson revealed that similar deals of varying sizes had hit triple digits, though Apple didn't plan to publicize most of them. It's just nice to hear that not every school district in this country has administrators as brain-dead as those in Pinellas County, Florida. (Tossing Macs to save money, hmmmm? Do us a favor, guys-- show us the tech support bill in a year so we can beat you about the head and shoulders with it. Assuming we can lift it, that is.)

But okay, sure, Apple's still got a reasonable foothold in the education market in this country, but what about schools in other far-flung nations-- nations such as Austria, New Zealand, or Texas? Well, we've got bupkis on any of those countries, but faithful viewer Satan Baby (awwww, Mom must be so proud) whanged us over the head with an article in Asahi Shimbun that reports on the University of Tokyo's mass migration to a slew-and-a-half of brand new Macs.

The University of Tokyo. Tokyo.

It's in Japan.

They used to talk about going on leave there on M*A*S*H.

Ah, there's the spark of recognition! So yeah, like we said, the U. of Tokyo is apparently ditching a whole mess of x86 Linux boxes in favor of The Macintosh Way. We say "apparently" because we can't read Japanese and the Babel Fish translation of the article doesn't seem to be working properly right this second, so we're just taking Mac Rumors's word for it. Reportedly "approximately 1,150 PCs will be switched to iMacs and most of the servers will also be supplied by Apple." Why, you ask (as if you didn't know)? The University cites the Mac's way-simple approach to software installation and maintenance as the primary reason for the switch. Can somebody please send one of these guys down to Pinellas County to distribute a clue or two?

Now, we're not going to pretend to know a whole heckuva lot about the University of Tokyo, but we're pretty sure that this is officially a Big Deal™; aside from the simple revenue and unit sales boost a single 1,150-Mac transaction represents, we get the distinct impression that when the University of Tokyo's score on the Japanese Higher Education Prestige Scale is converted to U.S. units, it sits closer to the Harvard/Yale side of the curve than that of, say, the Mooseburger Camp of Clown Arts Education. (No offense to all of the Mooseburger alumni out there, of course. Go Fighting Antler-Donkeys!) Here's hoping this deal jump-starts a massive wave of Japanese higher-ed Mac purchases, much like the Henrico County iBook deal seems to have catalyzed the K-12 U.S. market.

Apple's next conquest: bartending schools in Zagreb. Hot, hot, hot!

An unplanned alien abduction and our ensuing three-and-a-half-hour window of "lost time" has plunged any semblance of a schedule today into the throes of higgledy-piggledom, and truth be told, at this point we'd probably rather put some ice on our subcutaneous neck chips and call it a day. But duty calls, and we'd be remiss not to mention one of those rare occasions on which we Mac users get to be thankful for our lack of third-party software relative to what's available on the Wintel side of the tracks. Well, not counting virus attacks, of course. If you lump those in, the occasions go from "rare" to "thrice daily," so we exclude them in the interest of bolstering the signal-to-noise ratio.

Anyway, by now you're no doubt aware that the Recording Industry Association of America has decided that there's no better way to prevent casual music piracy than by suing file-sharing grandmothers, third-graders, and heavily-decorated paraplegic war vets to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars apiece. ("I love this plan!! I'm excited to be a part of it!!") For some reason, this strategy has inexplicably generated some ill will among the music-loving public; we're no experts, but we suspect the fact that the RIAA is tossing around third-of-a-billion-dollar lawsuits without actually bothering to verify that Granny could possibly be the pirate fiend it suspects her to be in the first place might play at least a minor role. Faithful viewer Peter Cook said "arrrr, matey" and waved a hook at a story covered in the Boston Globe: it seems that the RIAA has had to drop one such lawsuit against a Newbury, Massachusetts grandmother because she owns a Mac.

Yup, apparently the RIAA was convinced that Sarah Seabury Ward was a hardened scofflaw who had "illegally shared more than 2,000 songs through Kazaa"-- including a selection of Snoop Dogg tracks and "I'm A Thug" by Trick Daddy-- and therefore sued her for roughly a third of a billion dollars in damages. (The logic of how exactly a song like "I'm A Thug" is worth $150,000 continues to escape us, but clearly we're in the wrong line of work.) See, it's kinda tough for a 66-year-old Mac-using granny to share songs (gangsta rap or otherwise) over Kazaa, since Kazaa doesn't exist for the Mac. When confronted with this interesting little fact, the RIAA dropped the suit; apparently an apology was too much to expect, however. Indeed, the RIAA's lawyers even "reserve the right to refile the complaint against Mrs. Ward if and when circumstances warrant." Ooooh! No cookies for you guys, and you'll be sorry, too-- Sarah's snickerdoodles are divine!

So this is the part where we say, look out, Sarah! Don't dig your copy of Virtual PC and your Tupac posters out of that hole in your garden just yet, because The Man is still onto you! You'd best lie low until the heat dies down.

Hey, if we can't help a fellow Mac user get away with 2,000 counts of grand theft hip hop, how could we possibly look at ourselves in the mirror in the morning? Now excuse us, but we have some probing to recover from.