10. Your KaZaA rating changes to "Defendant"

9. Eminem insults your mother in his next single

8. Recording Industry Association of America president Hillary Rosen sends you e-mail messages with embedded .wav files of heavy breathing

7. All the spam in your inbox is from Motion Picture Association CEO Jack Valenti

6. You get a bill retroactively charging you 99 cents per downloaded track. Total bill: $29,700

5. A Tommy Mottola screen saver suddenly pops up on your computer

4. Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer picket your home with signs that read, "Piracy don't pay my bills"

3. You receive a request from someone using outdated hacker wannabe slang claiming a friend said you could "hook me up" with the latest Snoop Dogg album

2. You suddenly have numerous songs from someone named Avril Lavigne

1. CD-shaped crop circles appear in your backyard

We invite you to freely download our extended dance remix of this Top 11 list.

Thanks to Howard Blair, Douglas R. Fioto, Patrick Kingsley, Rod R., Travis Rogers, Rick Snaric, Brian Tunget and Randy Woods for their submissions.



Unfortunate Product Names

An army of brand managers will take you only so far.

• SCOoffice: The SCO Group ("Don't call us SCO!") unleashed perhaps the only office suite server that sounds eerily similar to the word "doofus." A hint for SCO: Don't produce any T-shirts that say "I'm with SCOoffice."

• There: Online entertainment provider There Inc. has created a 3-D playpen for users looking to make friends online. Let's hope that, contrary to Gertrude Stein's proclamation, there is some "there there."

• ATAbaby: Nexsan's ATAbaby disk-based storage solution sounds positive, but might we suggest a companion product, "ATAboy"?

• i2eye: D-Link's VideoPhone looks unique. What can we say except "been there, done th@."

• Event-in-a-Box: The NBA and Avaya want to make courtside reporting easier via a portable wireless network. We can't shake the image of basketball players the size of toy army men.

• Maxwell: Hughes Network Systems' new digital modem ASIC is named for Scottish physicist and mathematician James Maxwell. Max, you're in good company. Have you met Bob?



Our Favorite Skunk Works

Who says Apple ignores the command line? Some wacky developers in Cupertino have created the ASCIIMoviePlayer, which can render any QuickTime movie in ASCII characters within a terminal window. Risking eyesight and patience, our intrepid reviewer, Mike DeMaria, is now evaluating the player, using The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones.



Find more Last Mile items and submit your entries for upcoming issues.