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There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web.

• The above photo is from a pinhole camera placed on a turntable for the duration of the Doors' 'L'America.' [From: Tim Franco, via: Kitsune Noir]
• Wired's got an excerpt from William Gibson's new novel 'Zero History,' part three of the cyberpunk author's latest trilogy. [From: Wired]
• If you're already bored with manually clicking through Google Street View's maps, Globe Genie will magically whisk you to a random place (sortable by continent). [From: Globe Genie, via: BoingBoing]

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We're not sure exactly how high you have to be to text the local sheriff to score some weed, but we figure it's somewhere in the range of "really" to "inspiringly." Where this Helena, Montana teenager lands on the scale doesn't really matter. What does matter is that the boy and his friend managed to confuse their dealer's phone number with that of the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff. Sheriff Leo Dutton initially thought the text message he received ("Hey Dawg, do you have a $20 I can buy right now?") was a prank. But, after asking the teens to clarify how much is in a $20 bag of pot (which should have set off some alarms), the sheriff got these anonymous texters to agree to meet him in person and make the transaction. When the teen and his friend arrived at the meeting place -- with a parent in tow no less (for some reason that we can't quite figure out) -- he was greeted by a detective from the Missouri River Drug Task Force. No citations were issued because, in the words of Dutton, the father "was a big, military-looking guy and he wasn't happy."

One of the basic lessons when engaging in illegal activity is to take extra care when communicating nefarious plans across high tech devices. Apparently these teens haven't learned from the mistakes of others, but then, they rarely do.

In the never-ending battle between fantasy and sci-fi, we'll side with the latter every time. (And we'll take a sci-fi con over a renaissance faire any day of the week, thank-you-very-much.) No virtual playground entertains like one inhabited by robots, astronauts, spaceships and ray-guns. With the recent release of 'StarCraft II,' we're jonesing for some free-to-play sci-fi excellence, so we've rounded up some of our recent faves. Fight baddies with helmet-mounted guns and laser ninjas, or help lonely astronauts and grappling hook-equipped robots traverse the galaxy.

Unbeknownst to us, space ninjas LOVE gold. And wall jumping. And, most importantly, they are ninjas in frickin' space. These are the lessons we walked away with after playing the aptly titled action platformer 'Space Ninja.' Players control a pixelated, blue, blocky hero through levels brimming with laser-blasting enemies of various shapes and sizes, as well as gun turrets and bubbling cauldrons of lava. Using the upper three arrow keys for movement, the down key to take a peek at the lower areas of a level and the space bar for blasting, players are charged with killing enemies and grabbing the golden loot sprinkled throughout each stage. Getting used to the wall-jumping mechanic is thankfully easy, as it's not only crucial for survival, but for getting to hidden treasure, as well. The drabness of the levels can grow tiresome, but 'Space Ninja' is definitely fun for brief spurts of acrobatic side-scrolling mania.

French workers, in an entirely unorthodox turn of events, have gone on strike today to protest President Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to raise the national retirement age by a couple of years. If recent history is any indication, today's strike will make headlines around the country, but it certainly won't do the kind of damage that Facebook recently did to French Immigration Minister Eric Besson's personal life.

As the Independent reports, the controversial 52-year-old Besson was forced to postpone his own wedding, due to threats he had received from the Facebook community. After a French paper revealed the place and time of Besson's marriage to a 24-year-old bombshell of an art student, a Facebook group vowing to "create havoc" at the ceremony was quickly formed. Besson, of course, was absolutely shocked that the paper would publish such personal information. "There should be a Chinese wall between public matters and private matters and this wall is being breached," Besson emphatically, if not eloquently, declared during a recent appearance on national television. "I do not want my children, my new wife or my ex-wife to be collateral damage for my political choices."

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Media pot-stirrers typically denounce video game violence because of its supposedly negative effects on impressionable children. In California, though, participating in violent games -- even if the violence is only implied -- apparently indicates the presence of dangerous and deep-seated emotional flaws in adults.

California's Merced Sun-Star recently devoted an entire column to the 'Mafia Wars' activity of local city councilman and retired police officer Nelson Crabb. The author seems to believe that Crabb's "association with gore and violence" deserves attention, particularly the appearance of terms like "Street Thug" and "Master Burglar" on Crabb's Facebook page. According to the piece, Crabb's in-game bribes and "Shake Downs" reportedly "even relate to city business." (Crabb should probably keep any 'GTA' activity on the down-low.)

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James Bridle has compiled the editing history of the Iraq War Wikipedia entry from December 2004 and November 2009 into a twelve-volume collection "the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia." With relevant and irrelevant additions, defacements and debates, Bridle presents not the history of the war, but the way in which we remember it. "This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification."

The collection is made up of the 12,000 changes since the article's birth, totaling almost 7,000 printed pages. This process of creating history is vital for Bridle, who sees Wikipedia as "not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot" -- even when "someone erases the whole thing and just writes 'Saddam Hussein was a d**khead'."

During the five months that he was held captive by Islamic militants in Afghanistan, Japanese journalist Kosuke Tsuneoka never thought he'd ever see his friends or family again. Now, however, he's finally back home -- thanks, in part, to Twitter.

As the AP reports, Tsuneoka recently seized a golden opportunity to communicate with the outside world, when one of his captors asked him how to use a new cell phone. The militants were reportedly interested in accessing news from Al-Jazeera, but the journalist convinced them to try Twitter, instead. While he was showing them how to use the micro-blogging site, Tsuneoka managed to send out a message via Twitter, confirming that he was alive. Two days later, the militant group decided to set him free, reportedly without even collecting a ransom from the Japanese government. It's still unclear why the extremists decided to release Tsuneoka, although the fact that the journalist converted to Islam in 2000 likely helped his cause.

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They pale in comparison to the teen with the $21,000 Verizon bill, but brother and sister Sam, 13, and Sarah Ivanhoe, 11, while on vacation to the Dead Sea with their mom, amassed a cell phone bill that cost nearly as much as their trip. According to My Fox Houston, Cindy, who pays for her kids' phones, received a bill totaling more than $9,700 from Verizon Wireless upon returning home to Houston, Texas. While overseas, Sam and Sarah had racked up extra roaming charges by checking their Facebook accounts, sending text messages and playing online games. Apparently, visiting a foreign land and sleeping in bedouin tents isn't as exciting as social networking. The kids told My Fox Houston that they had received alerts about the roaming charges, which they naturally ignored, and Cindy said she had never dreamed the bill could be so expensive -- even though she had noticed her kids using their phones. Verizon has decided to knock $4,000 off the Ivanhoes' bill, most likely because Cindy claims she didn't receive any roaming alerts to her phone.

We usually leave our cell phones at home when we're taking a short trip out of the country. If we really need to communicate, computers are always available for e-mail access, helping us avoid both a hefty phone bill and constant calls from Mom while trying to relax.

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Tommy Christopher, a White House correspondent for Mediaite and owner of Daily Dose, had a heart attack on Sunday. So, presumably after calling 911, he took to Twitter to write: "I gotta be me. Livetweeting my heart attack. Beat that!" A minute later, he updated his condition, tweeting "Paramedics think I will live." Emboldened by his optimistic prognosis, he tweeted again, less than 30 minutes later, "This is not like the movies. Most deadpan heart attack evar [sic]."

Our knee-jerk reaction was shocked, mild disgust that someone might be so concerned about their social networking account that they would post minute-by-minute updates on their emergency medical condition. But Christopher is a journalist, and presumably comfortable with immediate reporting under pressure. But does his live-tweeting about a heart attack augur the death of decorum in communication, or stand alone as a man's possible final words in the face of his own demise?

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