Sorry BadAnalogyGuy - you need to RTFA. The issue here is not the ambient noise produced by the earphones, but the damage to the listener. (...trying to think of a bad analogy...). Imagine you're a car, and you want to put the wrong kind of gas in your tank... (never mind)

The EU govenment is trying to protect us from ourselves. Hmmm....which makes me wonder why they don't try to impose any limits on rock concerts. I'll bet they're over 85db, and it affects 10s of thousands of people at a time.

Interesting. On the one hand, I think this is a good idea. Folks tend to (illegally) listen with the earphones while driving. Also, it seems that at least half of the people you pass on busy streets are listening as well - I wonder how many pedestrian accidents are related to missing auditory cues from the environment?

On the other hand, I'm one of those people that tend to listen at full volume while walking. I had a friend one time tell me that he heard my earbuds from all the way across the street (seriously). My chronic tinnitus aside, if you limit my decibelage, I will find a way to crank it. Besides, what is the use of limiting the decibels if you can just override it anyway?

OK, so I'm an "indie" artist, and I have a ton of friends who are indie artists as well. We actually just got signed to a minor record label after years of trying to sell our CDs at gigs, carshows, and chick-fil-a grand opentings, etc. Fortunately, we used iTunes to sell our music instead of imeem. I have to tell you that at .99$ a tune we weren't making a whole lot of $$. In fact, all of my indie friends mentioned above pretty much have full time jobs to pay the bills - the music thing for most of us is something we do just because we love to play.

The point is that I would guess that the imeem accounts are probably just micropayments - maybe in the range of 5-20$. I wouldn't expect any laywer to go after this kind of chump change, not even for a class action suit. I think us poor starving musician types will just have to suck it up as usual while we get hassled by the man.

While most of the posts so far have focused on the paper aspect, what's interesting to me is the fact that the batteries can be printed. Assuming that you don't need the paper, this opens up a pretty significant world of possibilities. For example, imagine a solar powered aircraft that has the energy stored in the paint? This would give a pretty significant performance increase due to the lack of need for a standard battery.

Also, if there's no need for paper, could you use it as a liquid? Pour it into the interstitial space of your machine? The potential for space savings are staggering.

It's interesting commentary to me on social networking - this whole dust up appears to be from the use of the name "friend" to signify a virtual relationship. I wonder if this issue would have come up if the name were changed to something neutral like "node" or "connection". Using a name like that would at least avoid the superficial appearance of impropriety.