Just in time for the weekend, it's another installment of Roll-Your-Eyes Lawsuit Theater! Nothing spells R 'n' R like, well, "R," "n," and another "R"-- but unconscionably frivolous lawsuits take a close second. Seriously, what could possibly make for more entertaining weekend fare than the continued abuse of the court system by predatory lawyers and their greedy and/or incomprehensibly ignorant "injured parties"? Yes, Roll-Your-Eyes Lawsuit Theater: keeping the spirit of the "I'm Obese Because Colonel Sanders Put A Gun To My Head While Burger King and Wendy Held Me Down And Ronald McDonald Force-Fed Me Crap" lawsuit alive.

This week on Roll-Your-Eyes Lawsuit Theater: "Someone has absconded with my gigabytes!" You know how an 80 GB hard drive generally only stores about 75 GB of actual computer data? That's due largely to the fact that hard drive manufacturers thought it'd be a kick to buck convention and define a gigabyte by its literal meaning: a billion bytes. Of course, since all the computer data we deal with is a binary phenomenon, everyone else on the planet defines a gigabyte as 1024 times 1024 times 1024 = 1,073,742,000 bytes-- hence the discrepancy. On top of that, some of the storage space gets eaten up in the formatting so that you can actually store and retrieve data on the thing in the first place. The upshot is that L.A.-dwelling Lanchau Dan, Adam Selkowitz, John Zahabian, and Tim Swan are apparently livid that the computers they bought with "150 GB" hard drives are able to store 10 GB less porn than they expected.

Which is why Dan, Selkowitz, Zahabian, and Swan apparently hired a bunch of lawyers to get jiggy with it: Reuters reports that the four have filed suit against eight computer manufacturers (including Apple) and are shooting for class action status so that everybody upset over their inadequate porn storage capacities can jump on board. All this, because of a conversion factor? Granted, it's confusing that there are "hard drive gigabytes" and "everything else gigabytes," but you don't see a lot of litigation over the fact that there are Fahrenheit degrees and Celsius degrees. Man, here's hoping these guys never encounter a Celsius temperature reading, or they'll sue The Weather Channel when they get heatstroke for wearing winter coats in 32°C weather.

Now, we're not saying there isn't some shiftiness going on when it comes to hard drive capacity labeling, but doesn't it seem just a wee bit untoward to you that these four guys are suing computer manufacturers instead of the hard drive manufacturers? (Gee, could it possibly be because Apple and Dell have more money than Maxtor and Western Digital? Naaaahhh...) After all, it's the drive guys that decided to redefine the gigabyte purely in the context of magnetic storage; what's Apple going to do, put itself at a competitive disadvantage by "correcting" the labeled drive specs? It's not like Apple doesn't specifically state that, in the context of the hard drive, "1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less" on all of its specs pages. Or maybe the plaintiffs figure that the computer manufacturers are at fault for building binary systems instead of decimal ones.

It seems to us like the simple solution is for Apple and the other defendants to offer the following settlement to each plaintiff: a cheap calculator and a quick math lesson. In Apple's case, they can also teach the plaintiffs how to launch Disk Utility. We just used it to look at our Power Mac's internal 80 GB hard drive, and it's actually got a capacity of 80,025,996,288 bytes; that means we're actually getting almost 26 "MB" more than Apple advertised! We've been lied to! Heck, we're going to file suit against Apple for the overage! When we buy a system with an 80 GB drive, we expect an 80 GB drive, consarn it, not an 80.025996288 GB one...

Wow, did you know that, according to Forbes, you only need to scrape together about $600 million in order to be one of the 400 richest people in the U.S.A.? Seriously, how hard could that be? You could, for example, just win Powerball every other week for a year. Or persuade everyone on the planet to give you a dime to stop singing "I Will Survive." And even if you're not as lucky or as poor a singer as that, it seems to us that anyone with a little gusto, a dash of smarts, and a strong work ethic should be able to raise at least $600 million in the space of a year at the most. After all, Steve did it.

It's true! MacMinute notes that the incomparable Mr. Jobs is currently ranked 78th on the Forbes 400 list for being worth $2.3 billion. The interesting bit, though, is that Steve was only 122nd last year, with a personal worth of $1.6 billion. How, you ask, does a guy vault up 44 pegs by racking up an extra $700 million in twelve short months when his annual salary at Apple is only a dollar a year? Well, there are plenty of possibilities, but AtAT sources claim that the answer is simply this: paper route!

Yes, we're told that for the past year Steve has been moonlighting as a paperboy for the weekly Cupertino Courier, delivering issues to subscribers before he heads into the office every Wednesday morning. Running the route in his Gulfstream jet proved impractical, so he quickly switched over to a Schwinn Mini Mesa customized with handlebar streamers, a '70s-era banana seat, and a nice big basket that can carry dozens of papers to be tossed gently onto the serene porches of slumbering customers. The gig pays $13.7 million a week, which Steve has reportedly described to bestest buddy Larry Ellison (who is, incidentally, ranked ninth on the Forbes 400) as "pretty sweet."

Having jumped 44 notches to number 78 on the list of Forbesian Fatcats by slingin' dead trees is no small accomplishment, but Steve still has a ways to go before he cracks the top ten. Not that we think Steve is really the type to make it a personal goal to amass disgustingly excessive piles of filthy lucre just for the sake of improving his ranking on some magazine's list, but really, he'd be performing a public service: look whose ugly mug is currently sitting at #10. With the Dellster at $13 billion, Steve's got a whopping $10.7 billion to go; maybe he should take up mowing lawns on the weekends, too.

So we've been messing with the iTunes Music Store for the past five months, now, and apart from some first-day glitches, we've found it to be a marvel of online retaily goodness. Whenever you're dealing with a data set of over 200,000 records, there are bound to be little problems cropping up now and then; in our experience, Apple has done a spectacular job, and errors are few and far between-- but if you look hard enough, you'll turn up some goofiness eventually.

For example, faithful viewer Gerard Jeronowitz discovered an interesting anomaly the other day. You know how the iTMS occasionally offers "partial albums," from which you can only purchase music on a track-by-track basis instead of in one big glob? And you know how sometimes certain tracks from a given album are designated "Album Only," meaning that they can't be purchased separately but must be obtained only by buying the whole album? Well, those are two great tastes that don't taste great together; Gerard noticed that Prince's album 1999 is sold as an à-la-carte partial album ("Little Red Corvette" is missing in action), but three of the songs offered-- "D.M.S.R.," "Automatic," and "Lady Cab Driver"-- are unpurchasable because they're "Album Only." Can't buy the album, can't buy the songs... D'oh!

Another little glitch even made the papers: faithful viewer Ian Hornby tipped us off to a Globe and Mail article about how, for some reason, the iTMS had branded a London Philharmonic Orchestra recording of Handel's Messiah with the same "EXPLICIT" tag the company slaps all over unexpurgated work by creative pottymouths the likes of Eminem, Korn, and The Andrews Sisters. "Obviously there's been some sort of error," said Apple spokesperson Lara Vacante; the error was fixed shortly after it was reported on Tuesday. (We were actually a little disappointed to learn it was an error; for a brief, shining moment we thought we'd finally stumbled upon Handel's long-fabled "Fo' Shiznit: Bizitches an' Hos" remix. The search continues.)

Lastly, we've uncovered one last little issue ourselves: if you try to purchase Mario Lanza Sings Christmas Carols, Andy Griffith: Just As I Am-- 30 Favorite Old Time Hymns, and Mobstability by Twista & The Speedknot Mobstaz all within the same 90-minute period, your Mac will actually punch you in the face. It is currently not known whether this is a bug or a feature.