Ran­dom Something Awful Jokes:

Two fish are in a tank.
One turns to the other and says ‘Hey, how do you drive this thing?’

More sexist fun on Inter­na­tio­nal Women’s day:
Three blon­des were trap­ped on an island. During their explo­ra­tion of the island, one of them stum­bles across a lamp. So she rubs it and a genie pops out. “I will give you one wish each.” said the genie.

So the first blonde asks to be 10% smar­ter so she can work out a way off the island. So the genie turns her into a redhead and she swims off the island.

The second blonde asks to be 20% smar­ter. So the genie turns her into bru­nette and she builds a raft out of logs and vines and sails off the island.

The last blonde goes all out and asks to be 100% smar­ter. So the genie tur­ned her into a man and he cros­sed the bridge.

Click the link for more ran­dom jokes.

Engad­get is carr­ying an article con­cer­ning the latest SONY flash pla­yers. It’s been a while since a Sony pro­duct has impres­sed me. Howe­ver these look very sleak, small, handy and very use­ful. 1GB with FM tuner, jog dial and 50 hours bat­tery life makes this an iPod shuf­fle bea­ter. Slightly more costly though it seems. I finally see Sony get­ting back on track, their new stance towards their crip­pled music codec is refreshing. Oh and this: three-line orga­nic elec­tro­lu­mi­nes­cence dis­plays!!!

Engad­get: “Sony finally bus­ted out all those new flash-based Net­work Walk­man digi­tal audio pla­yers they acci­den­tally (or “acci­den­tally”) lea­ked out last month. First up: their new 400 and 500 series. It’s pretty ine­vi­ta­ble that the 512MB NW-E505 (pic­tu­red above), 1GB NW-E507, 512MB NW-E405, and 1GB NW-E407 are going to get com­pa­red to the iPod shuf­fle, so we’ll just get that out of the way right quick.. All four pla­yers have three-line orga­nic elec­tro­lu­mi­nes­cence dis­plays, up to 50 hours of bat­tery life (if you con­nect directly to your PC via USB you can score a quick hit of three hours of play­back time after just three minu­tes of char­ging), jog dial navi­ga­tion, and native sup­port for play­back of MP3 files, as well as ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus, WMA, and WAV. The only real dif­fe­rence bet­ween the 400 and the 500 series is that the NW-E505 and NW-507 have built-in FM tuners. None of these’ll be out for a cou­ple more months, but the NW-E405 will sell for $130, the NW-407 for $180, the NW-E505 for $150, while the NW-E507 rounds things out at $200.”

EFF: Deep Links: “The clear rule of law this Court announ­ced in Sony has ser­ved the nation well for more than 20 years. Intel, which pro­vi­des the digi­tal buil­ding blocks at the heart of the infor­ma­tion eco­nomy, and other tech­no­logy inno­va­tors have relied on the Sony rule in deve­lo­ping and deplo­ying digi­tal tech­no­lo­gies that, though desig­ned for nonin­frin­ging uses, could be put to infrin­ging uses. The various tests pro­po­sed by Peti­tio­ners would require an inven­tor to pre­dict, at the time it crea­tes a new pro­duct, not only how peo­ple will use a pro­duct that has yet to be desig­ned, let alone intro­du­ced in the mar­ket­place, but also which of the various poten­tial uses will ulti­ma­tely pre­do­mi­nate over the other poten­tial uses. Such pre­di­ca­tions are impos­si­ble in the real world, espe­cially since the uses to which pro­ducts are put rou­ti­nely change over time.

Digi­tal tech­no­lo­gies are by their nature cop­ying tech­no­lo­gies; there will always be a risk that any digi­tal tech­no­logy, howe­ver well inten­tio­ned its desig­ner, will be put to infrin­ging uses. Faced with impos­si­ble pre­dic­tions about how as yet unde­ve­lo­ped tech­no­lo­gies might be used, ambi­guous tests that would be unpre­dic­ta­ble in their appli­ca­tion, and nearly limit­less sta­tu­tory dama­ges for gues­sing wrong about the unk­no­wa­ble, inno­va­tors, such as Intel, would grow timid. It would be irra­tio­nal to bring new pro­ducts to mar­ket in the face of mas­sive uncer­tainty; inno­va­tors, such as Intel, would have no choice but to withhold from the mar­ket socially and eco­no­mi­cally use­ful pro­ducts. The natio­nal eco­nomy, which has grown through tech­no­lo­gi­cal inno­va­tion over the 20 years since this Court deci­ded Sony, would suffer. …

The enter­tain­ment indus­tries have repea­tedly pre­dic­ted that new tech­no­lo­gies would des­troy their busi­nes­ses. Although their con­cerns are unders­tan­da­ble, new tech­no­lo­gies that are capa­ble of subs­tan­tial nonin­frin­ging use have, over time, bene­fi­ted both the enter­tain­ment indus­tries and the public. or exam­ple, pro­fes­sio­nal base­ball ini­tially barred radio broad­casts of games out of fear that radio would reduce atten­dance; the film stu­dios fea­red that VCRs would be the end of movie thea­ters (and before that, refu­sed to license thea­tri­cal movies for tele­vi­sion dis­tri­bu­tion); the music industry fea­red that free, over-the-air radio would put record dis­tri­bu­tion out of busi­ness; and the film stu­dios ini­tially resis­ted the intro­duc­tion of DVD tech­no­logy. Ulti­ma­tely all of these inno­va­tions pro­ved enor­mously pro­fi­ta­ble to enter­tain­ment companies.”