I'd just like to send a big thank you, AC, for posting this. I usually skim /. comments but I slowed way down to saver every richly satirical line (and so spot-on too). I'm glad to see you re-posted it from the Onion because, as I read through it, I kept thinking there's no way in hell anybody could quickly pound out such a gem off the top of their head.

At 115 GJ fully charged, the TNT energy equivalent* of this NaS battery is 27.5 tons TNT.

* 4.184 GJ / ton TNT (source -- Wikipedia "TNT Equivalent")

A correct reading of the US Constitution / Bill of Rights would render the coalition's four principles both obvious and binding (with "should" replaced by "shall"). Unfortunately, the Justice Department continues (even under Obama) to press for policies that violate the US Constitution. The Justice Department, for example, still claims under the Obama administration that the government should be permitted unfettered access to real time cell phone location data on any citizen, at any time, for any reason, and without court order. I voted for President Obama but his track record to date on behalf of the citizens of this country is very poor, and in foreign policy he is a virtual Bush III.

No, don't hold your breath waiting for the Justice Department and/or the Obama administration to take any significant initiative to protect the privacy rights of citizens. The Digital Due Process coalition's goals are laudable, but they will get nowhere with this or any future executive branch. These issues will ultimately be decided by the US Supreme Court.

VDM Publishing has nothing on Philip M. Parker, who has been doing something similar for years on Amazon with publicly available studies and reports. Go to Amazon, select books, and type in Philip M. Parker in the Amazon search bar. You’ll see that he has over 107,182 “books” for sale on Amazon, the vast majority of which are little more than on-demand reprints of publicly available data (much of which is accessible on the web for free). In many cases there are hundreds of such “books” for sale by Philip M. Parker in which the only difference between them is the title and a short introduction. A reviewer who purchased one such book wrote in Amazon, “This book is nothing but a glorified dump from someone’s internet search.” And, yet, hundreds of thousands of such “books” are available on Amazon, many of which are no doubt purchased by unsuspecting customers.

Now try this: With the same Philip M. Parker book search in Amazon, use the “sort by” feature and sort by price, high to low. Sitting at the top of the heap is “The 2007-2012 World Outlook for Grapes,” for $795. Indeed, it turns out there are thousands of $795 “books” for sale on Amazon by Philip M. Parker.

There is a lot of sleaze lurking just below the surface at Amazon, mostly from its Marketplace Sellers. Unfortunately, as long is it helps rather than hurts Amazon’s bottom line, Amazon seems quite content to let sleazy sellers ply their wares. Take, for example, the Amazon Marketplace seller Mysilverfox. When new DVDs come out, Mysilverfox typically lists them for sale in all three categories: new, used, and collectable. And for the "collectable" DVD, Mysilverfox typically charges 2x, 3x, or more over the list price of the DVD. Now, I wonder how many naive people buy the “collectable” DVD? I suspect the number is much higher than one might intuitively think.

I have more, but this is starting to turn into a rant, so I’ll sign off now.