Last week, I blogged about a sneak attack on personal liberty in France: the entertainment companies have managed to stack France's new copyright law with innumerable, terrible clauses (no Free/Open Source software that can be used to share copyrighted works; all such software to have mandatory DRM, ISPs to mandatorily filter all traffic) and to cook the process so that the hearing on these clauses will take place on Dec 22 and 23, when public attention will be fixed on the coming holiday.
Now the French activists at EUCD.info have produced a page of English-language materials to help Anglos get up to speed on these issues. This will be the worst copyright law in Europe if it passes, a model for how to crush innovation, privacy, due process and the public interest in order to support the hysterical terrors of American entertainment dinosaurs.
Creating your own compilations from a CD, extracting your favourite piece of music to listen to it on your computer, transfering it on a MP3 player, lending a CD to a friend, reading a DVD with free software or duplicating it to be able to enjoy it at home and in your country house : many common practices, perfectly legal, which the French government plans to forbid in fact. The copyright and neighbouring rights in the information society bill (DADVSI) (n°1206) which the French government will try to force through in the coming weeks by using an emergency procedure, actually legitimates the technical devices installed by CD and DVD editors and producers to control their use. And above all, the bill plans criminal penalty against people who would dare to remove those.Link (Thanks, Paula!)
These chip-dishes are made from melted, reformed vinyl LPs. When I was a smoker, I used to covet an old neighbor's ashtray made from a Neil Diamond record, but this is miles cooler.
This company sells plush polyhedral RPG dice, from four-sided up to twenty-sided. They even have a "gigantic tube of plush dice."
A Japanese company is making speciality lenses for cameraphones: wide-angle, telephoto and macro-focus. The lenses affix with a magnet and cost about $57.
Tastabags are re-usable nylon sandwich bags that you can put your cheese sandwiches into prior to heating them in a toaster oven; they keep the molten cheese from getting all over the place.
Want to fill your car's fuel tank in Italy? No problem -- just make sure you "out to the spy of the select bomb, to take the supplier." That's what I always do. 
Pop Ink is selling some beautiful dinner plates with vintage graphics. 
coriolinus says: "The 
According to Jay [the salesman], Classica cookware is made by Regal Ware in Wisconsin, USA. The reason they are the superior cookware is because they are made from T-304 surgical grade stainless steel.
Introducing GameByEmail's Dice-O-Matic. Made from Legos, a USB camera, and a bit of software, it's a home-grown, dice-rolling monster. Don't let it's rickety looks deceive you; this puppy can easily crank out the 20,000 rolls a day consumed by GamesByEmail. In fact, at full speed it averages almost one roll a second, well over 80,000 a day!
Albert Swank Jr., a 55-year-old civil engineer in Anchorage, Alaska, is a man with a mission. He wants to install a nuclear particle accelerator in his home. But when neighbors learned of plans to place the 20-ton device inside the house where Swank operates his engineering firm, their response was swift: Not in my backyard.
Snort-inspiring setup instructions for a bird-shaped toy(?). Erection. Jack In/Off. Coccyx. Display ossa root entelechy. 
These plush Cthulhu slippers can keep your feet warm even as they damn them to a thousand nameless hells.
This lumberjack plush toy ingeniously inverts itself to become a werewolf -- genius!
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