You know, there are plenty of benefits to never sleeping: saving a fortune on pajamas, getting to use one's bed solely as an action-figure-populated scale reproduction of the Mos Eisley cantina on Tatooine, etc. But there are a few drawbacks, as well; for one thing, it's a lot harder to fight off the office cold-- just ask our mucous membranes. For another, both visual and auditory hallucinations are common, and while usually we can list that in the "pro" column (free entertainment!), occasionally it can make it tough to distinguish between reality and the sleep-dep light show. For example, the first time we saw Steve Ballmer we assumed he was the hallucinatory byproduct of a 37-hour no-sleep bender and the highly experimental sauerkraut-'n'-grape-jelly smoothies we'd had for breakfast; imagine our shock to find out that other people saw him, too. Scary stuff.

So we always have to be very careful whenever we think we see or hear something plotworthy, because if we incorporate something that never actually happened, that tends to throw the viewing audience for a bit of a loop and then you all just get disoriented and switch channels to Walker, Texas Ranger or whatever. But we swear we're pretty sure that all of the following really happened: 1) Steve Ballmer did, in fact, call all iPod users thieves; 2) when called on it, the guy subsequently claimed that he forgot what he'd said; and 3) now Microsoft is (sort of) apologizing to outraged iPod users and claiming that, contrary to what the company's simian CEO may or may not have remembered saying, iPod owners are actually super-duper honest.

That last bit comes courtesy of faithful viewer jkundert, who we're pretty certain we didn't hallucinate sending us an article from The Register which is also most likely a real thing in this here plane of existence. Basically, somebody was irked enough by Ballmer's initial comments and subsequent refusal to recant them (bleating like a sheep didn't quite count) that he actually fired off a complaint to Microsoft via the company's web site, and amazingly enough, he got an actual response. (Had it been us who'd received it, we'd have been dead certain that it was a hallucination.) According to Microsoft's Department of Backhanded Apologies, the company "would like to assure you that when Steve Ballmer implied that most of the music on iPods were [sic] stolen, he absolutely did not intend to single out iPod owners for criticism."

Okay, let's pause here for a reality check-- what Ballmer actually said was that "the most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen,'" so he "implied" that "most of the music on iPods is stolen" only in the same sense that we might "imply" that Ballmer was cloned from a cancerous lesion removed from the hindquarters of an unusually stupid baboon by saying that "Steve Ballmer was cloned from a cancerous lesion removed from the hindquarters of an unusually stupid baboon." And how is it that Microsoft can assert that Ballmer "did not intend to single out iPod owners" when a) he only mentions the iPod (which is kindasorta the definition of "singling out") and b) by his own admission, he doesn't remember what he said in the first place? Has Microsoft perfected some sort of human-to-baboon-tumor-clone mind meld which they haven't yet shipped as a product?

Whatever. What's truly spectacular is the way that Microsoft's CEO first publicly called all iPod owners music thieves, and now the company has evidently amended that position just slightly to state that, and we quote, "[iPod owners] are likely among the most law-abiding consumers of digital music." It's a subtle difference, but if you think about it good and hard for a while in a quiet room free of distractions while wearing your thinking cap and sipping a smart drink, you might be able to pick up on the distinction.

So, iPod owners, rejoice! According to Microsoft, you're not all thieves after all, and if you accept the premise that "it takes one to know one," the company is clearly in a position to judge. Suppose we all get certificates?

It shouldn't come as a shock to any of you to hear that Mike Dell has run out of ideas; after all, product-wise, the guy's just been copying Apple's own R&D for the past seven years, so his innovation mojo pretty much started and ended with that whole "buy really cheap components, staple 'em together, sell 'em with really thin margins to undercut the competition, make it up on volume while driving everyone else out of business" thing. And anyone who's ever been to Walmart knows that Dell's business strategy isn't all that original anyway.

But the extent to which the well has run dry may surprise you a little. You know, of course, that Mike Dell has long been obsessed with Steve Jobs to the point of copying just about everything Apple's ever done first-- and he's sick enough even to have copied the missteps. In particular, you may recall when Dell even mirrored Apple's embarrassing PowerBook 5300 battery recall in the mid-'90s by shipping and then recalling its own flammable laptop batteries in October of 2000. Talk about a lack of imagination. Heck, he was so tapped out when it came to things to do, he even did the battery recall thing again the following May.

So what's the latest in the "Dell copies Apple even when it's bad stuff" saga? Like we said, Mikey's totally out of ideas, so it's another laptop-related recall, but at least this time it's not the batteries again. No, this time around Dell has used as inspiration Apple's July 2001 power adapter recall, in which the black bricks from certain Wall Street and Lombard PowerBook units were pulled out of the field because they were apt to overheat. We're not sure exactly how many PowerBook adapters were affected, but we're pretty sure Dell's going above and beyond: according to a WIRED blurb pointed out by faithful viewer Eric Rice, Mikey-boy's yoinking just shy of a million of the suckers back from his customers, citing the exact same "risk of overheating" that Apple reported a few years back.

Dell has also surpassed Apple on the number of "reports of incidents involving the AC adapters overheating" (seven, compared to Apple's six), but in both cases "no injuries were reported." And hey, isn't this interesting? Apple's potentially faulty adapters were sold "from May 1998 until March 2000," while Dell's were sold "between September 1998 and February 2002." Sounds to us almost as if Dell started buying power adapters from Apple's manufacturer at the height of Mike's Steve-mania, but couldn't switch to the funky round alien-yo-yo ones that Apple debuted with the original iBook at the end of 1999 and started shipping with the Pismo PowerBook in the spring of 2000.

Okay, so maybe "interesting" wasn't the right word. But, you know, we feel a pretty strong obligation to keep you posted whenever Dell's Apple-obsession flares up like this, because when Mike finally winds up sitting in a clock tower while wearing a black turtleneck and picking off fleeing citizens with a high-powered rifle, we want to make sure you were informed enough to have steered well clear of the guy. We bore because we care. Now give us a hug.

We should remind our international viewers that Monday is a holiday here in the U.S.-- Columbus Day, an occasion that we described to you all last year as "a day on which we reflect on the many cultural and technical achievements of the city of Columbus, Ohio." Well, color us embarrassed, but we've since discovered that we were way off base. After a bit of research, we found that the holiday's name has changed slightly over the years, as these things do, and it turns out that Columbus Day was originally "Columbo's Day," a traditional celebration of the legendary TV detective played by Peter Falk. We apologize if our former inaccuracy caused any confusion.

In any case, Monday's a holiday to us Yanks, so we've all got an extra-long weekend with which to celebrate by donning trenchcoats and looking deceptively befuddled. And what better way to lead into the three-day weekend here on AtAT than with the latest word in the Apple vs. Beatles case? After all, Columbo spent his share of time in court, and both Steve Jobs and the scruffy lil' detective popularized the phrase "Just one more thing." (And we hear Sir Paul McCartney does an impeccable impression of the guy.)

Just a few days ago we mentioned that Apple had apparently fired its lawyers on the case, and that appears to be fact. The rumored reasoning behind Apple's change of representation was that Linklaters had been pressuring Apple to settle, and a new Macworld UK report appears to back that up: while one "industry insider" surmises that Apple canned Linklaters because the firm was "inflexible in terms of billing and reports," an anonymous source states that "settlement negotiations began, but as they progressed, both sides began to feel that they were completely in the right." So if Linklaters had actually been pushing Apple to settle for some $36 million and Apple feels it stands a solid chance of winning in court, it's not hard to figure out why Apple has hired Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer instead.

We're certainly not going to claim that we're impartial observers in this tussle (although most of the AtAT staff was raised on a steady diet of Beatles music for years before Apple shipped its first computer, so we've got emotional stakes in both camps), but based on our eyeballing of the terms of the Apple-Beatles agreement, we can certainly understand why Apple reportedly thinks it hasn't violated squat. We're far less able to imagine how the Beatles can look at the same terms and think they've got a slam-dunk win against Apple, since the company hasn't shipped any Apple-branded physical media with music on it. Perhaps the Beatles are planning to argue that shipping Macs with iTunes samples on the hard drives and iLife '04 installation discs with music loops on them puts Apple in the wrong. That'd be a stretch, though, and clearly the impetus of this case was the one-two punch of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store, and frankly, we can't see how those violate the agreement's terms in the slightest.

But hey, it's not for us to decide, and given the apparent "We Shall Prevail" attitude on both sides, it sounds like this case is headed to court where a real judge can rule. Isn't it refreshing to find one of these cases destined for a courtroom battle instead of a fat settlement check and "no admission of wrongdoing"?