Wait until you hear why.

Kiera Wilmot is a sixteen-year-old student with good grades and a “perfect” behavior record. Or at least she was. She has been expelled from her Florida school after creating a small chemical reaction that caused no damage or harm, and additionally been arrested and charged with possession and discharge of a weapon on school grounds and discharging a destructive device. According to the Miami New Times, she will be tried as an adult.

The Federal Communications Commission wants a piece of our minds. I suggest you keep your use of profanity to the minimum.

According to Jezebel’s translation, these young ladies are charging $2.50 for easy cases, $6.25 for medium, and $12.50 for hard, but they won’t work on their own birthdays. I’d say that’s a good deal.

The new and growing market for eBooks has allowed companies to call into question some of the basic and universal characteristics of reading and owning books. That you can loan them to your friends, for example, or that by purchasing a book you’re also purchasing the ability to read it whenever you want, wherever you want, until you lose it, donate it, give it away, or wear through its well-loved spine.

eBook publishers have, to put it mildly, established that these are qualities of a book that they do not intend to carry over to the new format, which is to a certain extent fine, so long as consumers know what they’re getting into. But the eBook market also has other problems, namely accusations of price fixing, and, due to the combination of software that limits the kind of device a given eBook can be read on and the dominance of the Kindle over the eReader market, bullying tactics. A new lawsuit filed by three independent bookstores is looking to strike at the heart of the problem: the insistance of eReader makers that their books should not be readable on other devices.

As the daughter of an attorney, I feel compelled to say that this is something you can always work out with a loved one beforehand, in writing. (CubicleBot)

Seriously, Finland? We understand that Internet piracy is a problem, but this is just too much. Police raided the home of a nine-year-old girl and confiscated her laptop — her Winnie the Pooh laptop – because she was accused of downloading one song off The Pirate Bay. That really happened. We all live in this world now.

Back in the spring of this year, the parents of the little girl were told their Internet connection had been used in an act of online piracy. Their daughter had come across a song she was searching for on The Pirate Bay and downloaded it. She later bought the album. The family was told to pay 600 euros for the incident and sign a non-disclosure agreement, but they refused at the time. On Tuesday, things got real when Finnish police showed up at their door with a search warrant, and took their daughter’s Winnie the Pooh laptop.

Read more of this story at Geekosystem.com.

Zoe Lofgren made sure that her name echoed loudly through the hallowed halls of the internet (did you know we have halls? Yeah, like tons of halls. Acres. With pillars and junk.) a year ago during the SOPA/PIPA debates in congress, by loudly opposing it, and even engaging in a Reddit AMA, hoping to drum up some attention to the pretty alarming powers the bill gave to rights holders and the pretty alarming requirements it made of internet service providers. While I won’t say she brought the issue to Reddit’s attention in the first place, her engagement with a large and influential internet community became part of a temporary internet revolution that culminated in Wikipedia, Tumblr, Reddit, Google, and a host of other websites going completely dark or otherwise completely devoting a day to raising awareness of the bill.

She has returned to Reddit recently, at the turn of the tide to perform a rather interesting experiment:

Yeaaah…what about all those Imperial officers who get injured in the line of duty? Who can they turn to?

(via igeektrooper)

I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t mess with Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. but a German luggage company is about to step up to the main man in a big way. The company, Rimowa GmbH, is suing Marvel and owner Disney’s Buena Vista Home Entertainment. Why? See that magnificent DVD case above? That’s one of Rimowa GmbH’s designs. We know that for sure because they allowed Marvel to let Samuel L. Jackson carry it in The Avengers. What they didn’t do was allow Marvel to mass produce and sell it. Oops.