Users who bought music from Microsoft’s MSN Music Store (no one I know, but still) will not be able to play it on the newly-announced Zune portable player. (Oh, did I mention Zune is made by Microsoft too?)

Let’s see how many different classes of people they’ve alienated this time:

1. There are the users who bought players from their hardware partners. If they want to “upgrade” to a Zune, they’ll have to re-buy their music.
2. Their hardware partners, because this is going to affect their sales, no doubt.
3. Their music suppliers, because they’re discontinuing the MSN Store.
4. And this is in addition to all of us Mac OS X and Linux users for whom Microsoft doesn’t even have a media player (not that we care, but still.)

From playsforsure.com:

Look for the PlaysForSure logo if you’re shopping for a music or video device and you want to make sure the digital music and video you purchase will play back on it every time.

Heh. I’d just buy an iPod, then. :)

And the irony to top it all is that this initiative was called ‘Plays for Sure’. Yeah, right.

If you’ve recovered from that tongue-twister of a title (there I go again!), here’s the news! A high-schooler’s parent in Houston is asking the school to ban ‘Fahrenheit 451‘, Ray Bradbury’s book (and later, a movie) about the horrors of a government that burns books and controls all knowledge. The grounds for the objection are the language used in the book. C’mon, the language used by high schoolers these days is nothing compared to what’s in the book. And oh, by the way, the guy, Alton Verm, says he hasn’t even read the book about whose content he’s objecting. Someone please tell me this is the 1^st of April.

The irony (apart from the obvious irony in someone trying to ban a book about banning books) is that this happened just after Banned Books Week.

Update: A friend pointed me to a similar case where an art teacher got fired for taking her students to an art museum where a student was offended by a naked statue.

If this is reason enough to fire a 28-year-veteran school teacher, I think these easily-offended students should just spend their childhood in the confines of their home, snug in their overprotective nests with their parents. After all, there’s so much else to be offended about in this world. At least that way, the rest of them would be able to explore, appreciate, and understand life, without getting their teachers fired for doing their job.

Update 2: There seem to be far too many of these occurrences these days. A Christian parent from Georgia wants to ban the Harry Potter series from her kids’ school’s media center. The reason? “I think the anti-Christian bias — it’s just got to stop.” I kid you not.

And one element that’s common in almost all these frivolous complaints is this:

“She admitted that she has not read the book series partially because “they’re really very long and I have four kids.”

I’ll end this short post here, so you may quickly go to either have a hearty laugh, or weep quietly at the anti-intellectualism in society today.