The following guide of UK photographers' rights is well worth a read to brush up on your knowledge:
http://www.sirimo.co.uk/ukpr.php

There's also an American version here:
http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm

Won't help you much if a guard tries to assault you and steal your camera, mind!

Reminds me of this:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007-05/invention-awards-new-velcro

Wonder if it's the same product, only as a finished product?

How sturdy is it, Cory, and do the screwdrivers stay down in place?

It looks really handy, though I skate a lot and would tend to avoid something like that as it seems like it could cause a wicked injury if you slammed hard at speed - those screwdrivers would make two nasty punctures if they popped up! (Another one to avoid is jeans with studs, they're not at all nice to land on.) Would've thought they'd have taken that into account if they're for snowboarding, though?

An Atwood Nibble on a set of keys would be another option, can't see that getting taken off you by security as there's no blade:
http://www.atwoodknives.com/home/20353239.php

Aww! Congratulations!

A song typically has two distinct rights: the actual sound recording (the "mechanical" rights) and the composition of the song (the "publishing" rights). These are then sub-divided and distributed appropriately; if you'd like to know how this works in the UK, see this diagram:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar03/images/DIY2ExpandedRoyalt.l.gif

Activision are paying for the publishing rights so they can "cover" it, but not the "mechanical" rights of the original sound recording, so yes, they're saving a bit of money. But that's how it works with covers and, quite frankly, this just sounds like sour grapes to me. It could be that the label decided they wanted to charge an extortionate rate for the mechanical rights – typically it's the labels that own the sound recordings, with the publishing usually kept by the artist or managed by a publishing company on behalf of the artist (who'll then promote the songs and take a percentage fee, in a vaguely similar way to the exchange between authors and book publishers).

The previous winning suits all relied on the sound-alike inferring that the original artist could be seen as endorsing the product advertised, which isn't the case here, as far as I can tell. I think they'll have a hard time winning as a result.

There's an entire industry built around "sample recreation", where people try to create sounds from scratch that sound identical to the original recordings, when they can't obtain the rights to the original sample due to the owners refusing to licence, asking for ridiculous amounts of money, etc. For example, C.J. Bolland spent days in the studio trying to recreate Samuel Jackson saying, "it ain't gonna be me," as whoever owns Jackie Brown wouldn't authorise its use, before luckily managing to get Jackson himself to personally approve it. If The Romantics won this lawsuit it be interesting to see how the decision would affect situations like this.

What's ironic is that track sales of songs included in Guitar Hero and similar games have increased dramatically, if the following news article is anything to go by:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071121-your-song-in-guitar-hero-equals-a-big-jump-in-digital-sales.html

So, if anything, The Romantics should be thanking Activision, not suing them.

Not that this'll help in Cory's case, but one the best tips I've heard for getting an engineer to your house early in the day is with the "bacon butty bribe":

When you're speaking to phone support requesting a callout, make sure they can enter support notes that the engineer can read, then ask them to write in "free bacon sandwich if before 10am".

Now, if you're a service tech flicking through a stack of morning callouts, and you get to choose which order to process them, who are you going to want to visit first? :) (Doesn't work on veggies, natch.)

Bird photographer Eric Hosking, most famous for his shot "Barn Owl with Prey" (an truly amazing achievement for the time), lost his left eye when an owl attacked him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hosking
http://www.poelking.com/wbuch/fruehzeit/erstfoto-4.jpg

Wow! Lovely. Everyone involved has done a fantastic job, it really shows.

One tiny suggestion: make the Google search page pretty like Khoi just did for Subtraction:
http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2007/0828_now_fully_co.php

(Oh, and previewing a post doesn't seem to work at the moment? It says: "Publish error in template 'Comment Preview': Error in tag: error in module Comment Detail: Error in tag:")