A Wisconsin-based cheese maker has offered the highest bid ($285,000) for the infamous Middle Tennessee pot cave.

Proceeds from the sale of the cave will go to the 15th Judicial District Drug Task Force, which confiscated the property after Strunk's illegal enterprise was shut down.

"We'll use the money to fund our undercover work," said Mike "Sarge" Thompson of the drug- fighting unit.

*sigh*

Seagate Technology has agreed to reimburse potentially millions of customers and pay up to $1.79 million in plaintiff's attorney fees to settle a lawsuit accusing the world's largest maker of hard drives of overstating the data-storage capacity of those devices, court records show.
...
The plaintiffs, suing on behalf of all affected Seagate customers, allege that Seagate's marketing was deceptive because it used the decimal definition of the capacity term "gigabyte," which indicates 1 billion bytes of capacity, instead of the binary definition used by operating systems, which translates that measurement into 1.07 billion bytes, a difference of 7 percent.

Seagate was technically correct to call 1 billion bytes a gigabyte, but it's also kind of a shady practice. I'm torn, though, between my inner prescriptivist language nazi and my aversion to the totally retarded kibi/mibi/gibi prefixes.

75-year-old Mona Shaw went on a hammer wielding rampage after receiving Comcastic! customer service:

Hammer time: Shaw storms in the company's office. BAM! She whacks the keyboard of the customer service rep. BAM! Down goes the monitor. BAM! She totals the telephone. People scatter, scream, cops show up and what does she do? POW! A parting shot to the phone!

"They cuffed me right then," she says.

Her take on Comcast: "What a bunch of sub-moronic imbeciles."

I ran a few errands earlier today and decided out of laziness and hunger to drive rather than bike. (When I got out and realized how effin beautiful the weather was, I promised myself I would go for a couple hours-long ride this evening.) I needed to fill up my gas tank, and damn! gas is back up to ~$3/gal ($2.979 where I stopped). When did that happen, I wondered. I looked at my most recent receipt, and it had been five days short of two months (and $0.32/gal) since I last bought gas. That must be a new record for me. I spent $27 for a tank full, also a new record. Eh, no worries—still less than the cost of a cup of coffee per day, right?

Anyway, I started thinking about the price of gas and gas tax rates and the don't-blame-us-blame-the-dadgum-guvment gas pump stickers that show the state and federal tax rates. So for the last couple of hours I've gotten my geek on and researched the history of gas prices and tax rates over the past few decades.

(Lots of numbers and graphs below...)