Steven Gray

Last Friday, December 2, Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. District Court for Northern California denied Apple's formal request for a preliminary injunction against Samsung to prevent Samsung from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet and three of its Android phones in the United States.

The purpose of a preliminary injunction is to prevent one party to a lawsuit from inflicting harm on another party before the court can adjudicate their conflicting claims at a full trial. In effect, the injunction attempts to preserve the status quo between the two parties by freezing them in place.

Last week we served up some highlights gleaned from the first six months of our recently concluded full year of tweeting at @PCWPluggedIn. Now we're back with our favorites from the second half of the year. As we noted last week, the goal of our Twitter feed is to amuse our followers and, secondarily, to link them to the serious and informative PCWorld.com articles that inspired our comments. But at PCW Plugged In, we leave the seriousness to others.

From the mysterious proliferation of fake Apple stores in China to the insecurity of Sony's PlayStation Network to the forgetfulness of barhopping engineers bearing prototype phones, we found many sources of mirth as the spring and summer unfolded. Fittingly, our half-year starting point falls on April 1.

We've been collaborating on the @PCWPluggedIn Twitter feed since September 27 of last year. Our mission: to find the humor in such fundamentally humorless tech-related phenomena as work, robots, vanishing privacy, online scams, patent infringement lawsuits, Steve Ballmer, and Steve Jobs.

Over the past year, we've posted some 1375 tweets on these and other tech subjects, tying each one to a story newly posted on PCWorld.com. Going through all of the entries is like reading a demented tech diary written by someone who has no attention span whatsoever. Still, certain recurring themes of 2010-2011 emerge: Facebook's privacy issues, the media's fascination with the white iPhone, the contested triumph of the tablet, the depredations of Anonymous, and endless tech industry litigation.

This Week's Top Story: PSN Fiasco

PlayStation Network lurches to life. Sony's slogan "make.believe" will no longer apply to network security.

Recently, PCWorld's Business Center has posted a couple of articles that debate whether it's in the best interest of employees to take a 10 percent pay cut to telecommute or not to do so. I'm not going to get embroiled in the controversy over the joys of working at home versus the pleasures of working at the office because, honestly, if I had the choice I wouldn't work at all. But since that "dream job" choice is impractical for me and (I suspect) for many of you, I've developed an alternative action plan that will enable you to take a 10 percent pay cut regardless of where you work.

If you've reached a certain age (and according to demographic data we've gleaned from our surveys, you probably have), the odds are that you could stand to lose a little weight. And what better way to achieve that goal than to pay someone to help you do it? That's where my plan--Take a 10 Percent Pay Cut to Skip Lunch--comes in. The genius of this strategy is that it enables you simultaneously to shed unwanted pounds and to help your company succeed in today's challenging business climate.

Your iPhone's tracking you. Your game network just surrendered all your personal data. And your mom is posting your potty-training videos on Facebook. Like many of us, you're laboring under the delusion that privacy matters--that there's such a thing as too much (public) information. It's time to get over it! Soon we'll all recognize the positives of exposing every aspect of our lives. What a relief it will be when we've finally revealed everything and have nothing left to hide. Herewith, the potential benefits of our upcoming, privacy-free utopia:

• Better security, plus entertainment, 24/7: Tune into the airport security "Grope-cam" channel.

The halls of PCWorld (which also happen to be the halls of Macworld) echo with angry cries as the People of the Laptop and the People of the Tablet dispute one of the critical issues of our time. Indeed.

But of course there's a third way, a way that is sure to antagonize ThinkPadders and iPadders alike: the way of the clipboard. For $5.79 (tax not included) or less, you can buy a perfectly serviceable Masonite or Lucite clipboard, load it with paper from the recycle bin near the printer, and select from an array of vendor-supplied ballpoint pens--and you'll have an instant mobile workstation.

Artwork: Chip TaylorAbout a year ago, I wrote an article for this site that began by praising the craft required to produce a spam header intriguing enough to coax an innocent recipient into opening the unsolicited message (see "Straight to the Spam Folder: Astonishing E-Mail Messages You'll Never Open"). Then I spent the rest of the story mocking various spam headers that editors at PCWorld had recently received.

It turns out that I enjoyed the mocking more than the praising. So here are several dozen new specimens of the spammer's art--rescued from my e-mail program's spam filter over the past year, lovingly curated, and then given the Fozzie Bear treatment. As before, the header is exactly as found in the quarantine zone, though the senders' names have been altered slightly for the usual cowardly legal reasons.

Spamming is an underappreciated art form. In fact, "hated" may be a more accurate adjective. Like mimes in a public square, spammers seek to capture the attention of people who actively try to avoid them. Thus they must strike fast and hard, bewildering their prey with astonishing bombast, no-holds-barred familiarity, and too-good-to-be-true promises. Much depends on the effectiveness of their initial pitch--the e-mail header--and in exploiting that space, they put practitioners of haiku to shame, delivering their come-on to the rubes (that is, us) in a single line and usually in far fewer than 17 syllables.

And yet if you equip your e-mail program with a good spam filter (we at PC World use the Postini service), you're unlikely to see the fruits of the spammer's labor unless you enter the world of the Quarantine Summary, where "potential junk or virus-infected messages" go to die. If you think of your daily trip to the quarantine zone as a usually fruitless scan for wrongly incarcerated messages, it can't help but seem a nuisance. But if you go there looking for poetry, Delphic mystery, and fortune-cookie philosophy, you can discover gems of unrecognized genius.