"...robot jizz bullets." and "Is Virus Barrier X5 counting?" made me laugh the most. Excellent job on the captions.

A couple of the above posters don't seem to know the full story or are willingly ignoring the definitely illegal portion of what happened so they can chastise bb authors, given that there *are* documented cases of this illegal wiretapping being performed when there was a US citizen on the American side of the call. The FISA allowance for such wiretaps specifically allows the tap without court authorization but requires seeking such authorization within 72 hours of initiating the tap. And when that authorization is not granted, all intelligence gathered from the tap is inadmissible.

What - does the right to peaceable assembly not extend to polar bears? Why, exactly, was the bear arrested? The Greenpeace post doesn't exactly make that clear.

Looks like I'll need to go patent my "Love Mattress sheet fitting tool" to sell to all the people who buy the bed and special sheets. Wield a bunch of thin metal bars together with the same spacing as the pads on the bed, held together by heavier bars at the edges and some special tool to help manage the entire thing from one side of the bed. ??? Profit!!!

I felt the same as you when I read it, in that the problem the recording industry rep highlighted was the sharing of the files. However, like so many others I think that if there was no concern about personal-use ripping to mp3 format, it would not have been mentioned at all. Someone in the RIAA is trying to get this "ripping is always illegal" thought bubbling so they can later get it legislatively so.

On the plus side, they can contract out their face-readers to the agencies doing polygraphs, saving money for those agencies. This would eliminate the need for expensive machines that don't actually detect lies and expensive screeners who believe their machines do. The TSA has an extra income stream, while we taxpayers save money. And I'm sure they'll be so much better at catching folks telling lies than the polygraph machines and screeners were, right? :)

I cut this one out of the paper when I saw it. Naturally, my wife didn't find the humor in it that I did. But then, she's never understood my excessively awesome geekiness.

Thanks to #20 for the more complete text rip. To me, just reading the first paragraph of that text makes it sound like indeed the recording industry lawyers are claiming that having the mp3 files at all is infringing:

"C. Defendant possessed unauthorized copies of Plaintiff’s copyrighted sound recordings on his computer and actually disseminated such unauthorized copies over the KaZaA peer-to-peer network."

Yes, there is a complaint about distribution over KaZaa, but it starts out in what I read as a claim that having the copies on the computer at all is unauthorized. And that *is* in contradiction to what we've been told at least since the MGM vs. Grokster case.

Back when I could ride (too much knee damage to comfortably ride any more), I would have loved one of these. I can see the shortcomings, but as a semi-casual rider who would go on easy but lengthy rides, this still would have been handy.