Provided I could switch it on and off at will, I’d go with reading minds. No question.
I’d go with reading minds, but the first month or so would be pure hell.
You glance at a cute girl and she looks at you and you’re overwhelmed by the huge waves of disgust she feels for you. You talk to someone you consider a friend, and suddenly realize that they think you’re a loser and only talk to you out of pity. You visit your mom and hear her unvoiced disapointment in how you turned out in life. You take a walk to clear your head and the entire street is filled with fragments of thoughts. A neighbor convincing himself that the bitch was asking for it. A couple in an argument and the scared 5-year old who thinks she caused it. The flood of banalities from the multitudes; ten thousand minds focused on nothing but forgetting themselves in TV and alcohol and idleness.
But if you could survive getting used to the ability, it could be remarkably powerful.
How does being invisible give you the abilitly to walk through walls? 
If you can turn it on and off I’d take invisibility. Telepathy would not be a good thing. Imagine knowing what everyone thinks of you!
Sounds like somebody’s been listening to too much Cure.
Reading minds… I’d offer my services to Uncle Sam (seriously! I’m a patriot, after all). You know all those anonymous diplomatic and bureaucratic functionaries sitting in the back of the room and hanging out on the periphery of international negotiations and such? What’s one more? And nobody knows what all the people at the United Nations are there for… to say nothing of interrogations sessions and the like. Sussing out the true intentions, secret loyalties and alliances, contacts, plots, and guilt vs. innocence… I’d be a one-person source of intelligence, and it’d be a pleasure.
But to be really helpful, I’d have to learn a bunch of very tricky foreign languages, beginning with Arabic, Urdu, Pashtun and Mandarin – or at least learn to quickly and infallibly memorize what others are thinking long enough to repeat it for a translator in the next room. But nothing’s perfect. 
The Scrivener, this brings up an interesting (to me, at least) question: Are thoughts expressed in a language, or are they more abstract? Do we generate them as fully-formed lexical units or do we sort of “feel” them, and only provide words for them when we concentrate on preparing them for communication to others? If the former, you would have to learn those languages or develop a Memorex memory–although I think that wouldn’t likely be useful, as it’d be extremely difficult to keep from processing the input in a language you already know. (That is, the language center in your brain would crank everything you hear through the English Machine, and the output–however nonsensical it may be–would stay with you rather than the actual audio memory. I would suppose.) If the latter, you’d know what your subject were thinking even if you didn’t understand their native language.
How fitting is it that such questions would be raised by a Doper called “fetus”?
I think it’s an inextricable blending of the two. For instance, I may have a reified notion that such-and-such a person I know tends to be really annoying, but that “annoying” quality may be based in the way he speaks, or gestures with his hands while he talks, etc. – in which case I might have a specific image of him talking (maybe a particular moment, like from a dinner party) every time the thought of the guy crosses my mind. In that case, even a general tendency to annoy would be associated with some language, even specific words.
As for my one-woman NSA scenario, I expect that a lot of the useful intel [heh heh, espionage slang is fun!] would be pretty explicitly language-bound. The stuff worth knowing is basically the five journalistic basics: what, who, when, where, and why. If I sit down in the same room with Ahmad Jihad, I don’t care about his warm & fuzzy emotions about his mother’s curries or his childhood summers in Peshawar; I just want to know the names of his associates, where they met, who’s funding them, which materials or weapons they’re using, and so forth. And I bet it wouldn’t take me long to learn how to prod a suspect into thinking more explicit, specific thoughts with a bit of prompting, either. If the interrogator asks Ahmad who’s funding them and he imagines a short dumpy guy (though accompanied by a resolute feeling that he will never reveal true info about him), I would steer the next questions in the direction of a short dumpy guy… and Ahmad would probably fly into a panicked state in which the name would flash forth. “How could they know about Iqbal?! Are they bluffing? Oh crap…”.
Having said all this, though, my very first impulse in this thread was for invisibility, for purely selfish, prurient, and materialistic [O.K., stealing, and big-time] reasons. I went with the “patriot” option in part because I’m confident that someone with that kind of gift could eventually convince the right feds to put a small program together built around his/her gifts [i.e., the translators, bodyguards, travel budget, high-level cross-agency prioritizing managers, doctors and scientists to monitor one’s health and well-being, etc.]. If I had to choose between that scenario and working for the government for free, I have to admit that’d be a very tough choice.
Clue me in - that’s a band right?
Yep. Basically they (along with The Smiths) were the Ur-Emo bands of the early 1980’s. (Ask your parents.) The Cure’s frontman Robert Smith was also featured prominently in one of my all-time favorite **South Park ** episodes, “Mecha-Streisand,” in which he helped save the world from a Barbra Streisand-as-Godzilla monster.
Damn, I feel old now.
Invisible…it would be very cool to be able to observe everything. Although I’m sure there are things you really don’t want to hear or see it may be worth the stuff you would want to .
I’d go for invisible. I’m sure I could get some nice juicy secrets as a telepath but I’d probably be getting TMI as well. At least with invisibility you have more control over what secrets you find out. If you’re spying on someone and it gets TMI, you can just leave. But if someone’s thoughts get TMI, can you turn it off before it’s too late?
Plus with invisibility, you could easily travel the world over, just nipping what you need to eat here and there. I’d love the anonymity and autonomy it would give me.
With telepathy there would always be someone noting your comings and goings and it’s too risky someone somewhere would figure out you’re the common denominator among lots of strange shenanigans.
If it makes you feel any better, I’m 20 and I understood the original comment perfectly. Even grinned a little.
reading minds. I mean, you’d have the knowledge of yourself AND everybody around you. PLUS you would never need to guess at people’s intentions. You’d never have to study (you could “poll the audience” on every question, chances are that there would be at least a significant plurality that would get any particular question right). You’d be the perfect boy/girlfriend, you’d be able to make incredible amounts of money (as noted above). Telepathy has to be one of the most generally useful abilities in real life.
Reading minds–if you could turn the power on and off–is a power I have always coveted.
That, and the ability of flight. And the ability to look really, really good in spandex and capes.
Ooh ooh! When did flight become an option? That would be me, for sure!
But given the original choice, I’d pick reading minds, even though initially I thought invisible. I figure I’m already a little invisible (especially in my car - I wish I could find that darned switch to turn it back on so that the other drivers might see me…) hence, reading minds it is. But you have to able to turn it off - I’d NEVER get any sleep.
No superpowers for me. I’d rather develop myself to my utmost human potential, both physically and mentally.
All I need now is a dark costume, a weapons belt and a vehicle filled with high-tech gadgetry.
I think that language is extremely important to thought; I recall Helen Keller talking about how she didn’t think before she learned language. For example :
Thought, I believe, is more than just language, but I do think language is central to thought.
As for me, I’d go for mind reading; the people I care about most use English anyway. Mostly to ruin people I hate; I’d be reluctant to read the mind of someone I didn’t consider an enemy. I’d find out their secrets, and use that information against them.
Yeah, it does sound easy to set to music.
Robert Smith as Mothra, of course. And yes, that is possibly one of the greatest South Park episodes of all time.