Teenagers, persuade your parents to buy this lawnmower and you can get your weekend afternoons back. From Crave, CNET's gadgets blog.

In ruling under seal until Friday, federal judge ordered TorrentSpy to log visitor activity. But company says it will appeal.

Cops who faked a fender bender, a car theft and then a police chase in order to search a car for drugs did not violate the Constitution, an appeals court rules.

There's been a lot of controversy over the past few years about offshoring of jobs, even though the anger towards it tends to be emotional rather than rational. It was exaggerated during the recession years, as companies miscalculated and thought it would save them money (not recognizing all the hidden costs) involved in the process. The other thing is that as more and more jobs went to places like India, those "hidden costs" would become not so hidden and the direct cost of hiring in India would increase. A year ago, there was a report highlighting exactly that: hiring people in India was getting expensive. So, perhaps it should come as no surprise that one of the biggest offshoring firms in India is now offshoring its own jobs to Mexico (via The Raw Feed). This is just the natural economic cycle, but we're sure it will make some people irrationally angry.

Filed under: Desktops

For some reason we kinda doubt that many Engadget readers are in a hurry to load the kids into the station wagon and head on down to Wal-Mart for some cheap computer action, but we'd be remiss in our journalistic duties were we not to give you the final lowdown on that pair of Dell bundles hitting the retail behemoth this weekend. Since we already knew the specs of the 'high-end' $698 package, the only real surprise here is that you're getting almost the same machine for $498 -- the only difference being a 250GB vs. 320GB hard drive -- with the price drop instead coming at the expense of "extras" like a monitor, speakers, and memory card reader. A little later in the month, those lucky enough to have been accepted into Sam's Club will have their choice of an $828 multimedia bundle featuring the same Dimension E521 desktop supplemented by NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE graphics and another gig of RAM, or a 15.4-inch dual-core Inspiron 1501 notebook with a DVD burner and 2GB / 120GB of RAM / storage for a few cents under $900. Seems like Wal-Mart should be able to push a pretty decent amount of these out the door -- which is good news for Dell, because Michael and friends need all the help they can get to reclaim their top spot from those crafty competitors over at HP.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Slashdot points us to an interesting article about a guy involved in a legal fight with computer maker Gateway over whether or not he agreed to an arbitration clause in an end user license agreement (EULA) for his new computer. In this case, the guy claims his computer never worked properly, so he couldn't even see the on-screen license agreement that apparently included an arbitration clause, saying that he would agree to arbitrate any dispute, rather than take it to court. He then sued Gateway over problems with the machine. The case here doesn't have anything to do with whether or not that lawsuit has merit, but whether or not it could even go to court at all. Gateway contends that the guy shouldn't be able to take them to court because of the arbitration clause. But, of course, the guy claims he couldn't read the license agreement, so he certainly never agreed to it. The court found that the guy made a compelling enough case that he had not seen the license agreement, and therefore can not be forced to go to arbitration (even as some experts suggest that he actually would be better off going to arbitration, rather than through the courts). However, it also raises the question (not answered here) over what does constitute an official agreement. I've been told by lawyers that such arbitration clauses aren't even enforceable in California, but either way, with plenty of evidence that most people never read the EULAs they agree to, could they argue that the clauses don't apply as well?