You may have heard by now that Apple no longer has claim to the name Mighty Mouse, since small-volume mouse maker Man & Machine, who had labeled its own pointer "Mighty Mouse," managed to wiggle its way through all the red tape to a successful trademark application. There's a lot of messiness involved, but the truth of the matter is a) it was dumb for Apple to borrow a name from a cartoon character in the first place, and b) the Mighty Mouse was one of Apple's worst products to date. In the end, I'm thinking there's a hint of karma in this reversal of fortune. Hopefully Apple's next mouse will be mightier in deed than in name. [Engadget]

Even though movie-poster regulars such as Owen Gleiberman and Peter Travers have labeled it "freaky and terrifying" and "a potent frightfest" respectively, studio execs seem skittish about releasing Paramount's Paranormal Activity. Instead of manning up and giving it a nationwide release, the studio has asked potential ticket buyers to declare their intentions here. I'm all for crowdsourcing experiments, but this just seems like studio cowardice at its most yeller. They call it "the first-ever major film release decided by you"—it sure won't be the last. [Movie Site]

iPhone owners love to crap all over AT&T customer service whenever they get near a JD Power & Associates survey, but apparently, for the 1.5 million who get TV programming from the T, service couldn't be sweeter. Good ole JD released the results, naming AT&T best in the west and south, Verizon tops in the east, and WOW! numero uno in the north central region. (No, World of Warcraft didn't start a cable company... or did it?) It might not startle you to learn that none of the cable and satellite carriers who actually provide TV service to the majority of the nation appear in the (positive) results. Just wait till you serve as many people with TV as you serve with cellphones, AT&T. Then let's see where you stand. [JD Power]

Danny Sullivan, king of the search engine watchers, pinned down Sergey Brin after a Google event and showed him some bad results. Like if you type "car rental," all the major agencies are there, but when you type "california car rental," many companies disappear (including my personal favorite, Hertz). He also asked why searching "search engines" brought up discussion of search engines, but "search engine" just brought up many older search sites—notably excluding Google itself. Brin said people probably don't search for Google on Google, but Sullivan disagreed. I was actually under the impression that if you go to Google and type "google," you break the internet, so in either case, I'm just glad to be enlightened. [Search Engine Land]

p.s. I've modified the original into various versions, so you can resend them appropriately in Twitter, Digg, Fark, Facebook, and YouTube.

[Shoeboxblog—Thanks David]

They are kinda right, but they're not taking into account the 10 free songs you get a month under the pass.

Even if you take out the argument that you may already (legally) own all your iPod music in CDs, and even if you take out the argument that most people fill their iPods with pirated music, at the end, no matter what you do, you are paying for a temporary service. Once you stop paying, most of your music will be gone forever (the songs you didn't get for free every month that you get to keep). [Penny Arcade]

[The Pirate Bay]

[MAD and Flickr via Dark Roasted Blend]

If you didn't already guess which videos were used above, here's a list. There's The Simpsons, Celebrity Death Match, South Park, 2DTV, Freakazoid and of course Pirates of Silicon Valley.

What about the song you say? Well, it's by a group called, wait for it, Komputer. The song is titled, wait for it, "Bill Gates", and is the third track on their 1997 album The World of Tomorrow. If you can't seem to get the song out of your head, you can buy it on both iTunes and Amazon.com.

At the end of this week Bill Gates will leave his post at Microsoft, but his various TV and film characters will live on forever. Since Ballmer will be taking over, we can only hope that he gets the same treatment, cause a crazy-ass cartoon character of that guy would be hilarious.
Add vids we missed in the comments.
[Bill Gates' Retirement Party on Giz]

Ours would be one that has QWERTY, WiFi, 3G, a 10-megapixel camera with optical zoom, loads of battery life, DivX/XviD support and a price less than what we pay for rent.

Readers, how about you? – Jason Chen

This Gadget [Cartoon Church]