All your contacts on a SIM card, book? SIM cards are great. Whenever you want to switch phones pop your SIM card out of your old phone, put it in another phone and all your contacts and your phone number comes with you. If you like that SIM card form factor, you can go old more »

Technology makes magical things happen. It can send people to Mars, including you, faithful Gadgetell reader. Technology can be used by jerks to put images that could hurt your future career on Facebook. Technology even has the power to make the rest of the world disappear — you could miss a bank robbery while tweeting. All of this is true and in this week’s Oddball Tech.

Welcome back to the oddball tech stories of the week. We all know that robots are quite good at building cars (well, some cars), vacuuming, and serving tennis balls. Did you know that they could one day help us colonize Mars? Technology is good, however sometimes it makes us do dumb things. How dumb? How about stealing a computer from a jail? It actually gets dumber. Keep reading.

The latest entry in the book of frivolous lawsuits is one filed against Apple by an Illinois couple. They are accusing the company of gift card fraud and they are seeking monetary damages for what they call Apple’s “wrongful, illegal and fraudulent acts.” The charges in the suit include one count each of violating the Illinois Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act and Consumer Protection Statutes, and 2 counts of breach of contract.

The target of their outrage? Apple’s decision in April to change the iTunes store pricing structure from a flat 99 cents per song to a one where song prices vary from 69 cents to $1.29.

Yes, they are suing over a 30 cent price increase – but it gets better

When I’m stressed, I take a minute to step back and breathe. What do bridges do when stressed? In the future, they may change color. While you’re stuck on the future bridge, your car may be using fuel created from New York scum. If you’re really stressed and want to get away from it all, how about going into outer space? Check out this edition of “Oddball Tech.”

That headline get your attention? A new bill may give the President the power to mess up the Internet. I wonder if this has anything to do with his BlackBerry. Also, goofing off can save the economy if done right. Plus, GPSs have warnings for a reason, so try to use some common sense.

Google’s official explanation for the Gmail outage blames some hapless code monkey for wayward code. Somewhere, in a dark apartment in Europe, a code monkey weeps at the deception. The official line: “Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.”

To further sweep the mess under the carpet, Google is offering users 15 days credit for those who pay for their Gmail for the two and half hour disruption to service. This move smacks of a clear sense of guilt and embarrassment.

Since leaving as the head of Microsoft last year, Bill Gates seemed destined to leave a low profile life as he pursued his philanthropic interests. However, yesterday, Gates caused a media frenzy by deciding to release a swarm of mosquitoes on audience members at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference.

Gates used the mosquitoes as part of his lecture on the importance of preventing malaria. He brought a jar of live mosquitoes on stage and then proceeded to open the jar. Gates was quoted as saying, “I brought some. Here I’ll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected.” It took him several minutes until he assured the audience that the mosquitoes were not infected with malaria.