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...