SlashNOT

Matthew writes: A Toshiba flat screen television attempted an escape from its Oregon owner this week by emitting a signal in the 121.5MHz international distress signal frequency. The signal was picked up by satellite and routed to the Air Force Rescue Center at Langley Air Base in Virginia.

A contingent of local police, Civil Air Patrol, and Search and Rescue Personnel visited the college dorm room where the television had been living in captivity, but failed to appreciate that its deliberate channel changes to news coverage of prison abuse indicated that it needed to be rescued from its owner, who frequently left the Television on overnight while sleeping and while gone—causing heat stress. Authorities did however warn the student to keep the Television turned off or face a $10,000 fine for willingly broadcasting a false distress signal, and Toshiba rescued the television by replacing it with another at no cost.

Matthew writes: Richard Branson, Britain’s richest crazy person and founder of Virgin Everything, has joined forces with Paul Allen, America’s richest crazy person and co-founder of Microsoft, in a bid to begin commercial flights to outer space by building spacecraft based on the design of SpaceShipOne by Burt Rutan, the Mojave desert’s richest crazy person and founder of Scaled Composites.

The new company “Virgin Galactic” will complete its first ship, the VSS Enterprise, by 2007 and begin offering tourist flights. Richard will be on the initial flight, which will hopefully go better than the numerous failed attempts he’s made at piloting a balloon around the world (which, one would think, would be much easier).

Jeremy Camp writes: OAK BROOK, IL (August 19, 2004) — McDonald’s Corporation, in an attempt to cut costs and boost profits, has introduced a new order taking system in all of it’s U.S. locations.

The new system relies on order takers from a phone center based in India. Customers who drive to the menu at the drive through will be connected to an operator in India who will take the customer’s order and send the information to the store location for fulfillment.

“Customers can expect the same friendly service they’ve received in the past, only from operators in India rather than local store employees,” says Mike Roberts, CEO, McDonald’s USA. “We are proud to contribute to the global economy by improving our bottom line while providing those in India with solid employment.”

Several thousand U.S. employees will be laid off or moved into other positions over the next few months as the transition is made. Most of those being laid off are high school students and retirees, who “can count on their parents or social security for income,” said Roberts.

McDonald’s is the world’s leading global food service retailer with more than 30,000 restaurants serving nearly 47 million people in more than 100 countries each day. Approximately 80 percent of McDonald’s restaurants worldwide are owned and operated by independent, local businessmen and women.

Mearzuh writes: In the fuzzy animal triathlon at the Olympic games in Athens, a bunny has been disqualified from the Olympic games and stripped of his gold medal last night.

Sources say that his particular bunny had been on Energizer batteries during the competiton which they believe aided him in getting the medal.

Energizer batteries had been banned from Olympic competitons due to the stimulation they produce in fuzzy animal athletes. Say the fellow competitors, “He just kept going, and going, and going…”

Matthew writes: Kodak is jumping into the digital photo organization and retouching market with it’s “You 2.0″ Photo retouching software. “We’re going way beyond the red-eye reducers and blemish erasers you get in Apple and Adobe’s products. Check out our list of features:”

Red-eye reducer Black-eye reducer Teeth whitener Teeth straightener Droopy eye opener Bunny-ear fingers remover Wandering gaze focuser

Love handle reducer Ugly baby beautifier Friend ethnicity diversifier Grin degoofifier Hair comber Hair washer Double chin subtractor Forced family photo enjoyer

“We’ve significantly raised the bar here, allowing people to be remembered as they wish they were.”

Matthew writes: Hormel has started a PR blitz to announce that the new virus spreading through spam refers to unsolicited commercial e-mail spreading a computer virus, not their canned meat product spreading a biological virus.

“We let it slide when geeks started referring to unsolicited commercial e-mail as spam, but when news sources like MSNBC are so unclear as to actually make it seem in their headlines that our product is spreading food borne illness, it’s time to take the gloves off.”

“Nobody actually reads MSNBC articles—you just see the headlines on crawlers at the bottom of the screen and on your pager watch. So we’re officially revoking MSNBC’s right to send unsolicited e-mail and call it spam. From now on, they’re going to have to refer to their spam as UCE—unsolicited commercial e-mail. We didn’t want to have to do it, but we had no choice. Let no one say that we’re not taking all possible measures to protect our valuable trademark.

matthew writes: Responding to Google’s Gmail e-mail service which includes a gigabyte of e-mail storage, Hometown Buffet has announced an “all-you-can-eat” e-mail service with no storage limitations.

“Like spam? Get all you want. We’re not going to put any artificial limits on the amount of spam you’re allowed, like some other services.” Says Hometown buffet general manager Dennis Scott.

When questioned why the famous restaurant chain felt that it had to compete with Google in an entirely new market area, Mr. Scott responded: “We are the thoughtspace leaders in ‘all-you-can- whatever’, and we don’t want to limit the power of this idea to just food. Basically, we’re going to lead in any consumable item that is cheap enough for us to provide on an unlimited basis for a fair price. We’re looking at all-you-can-breath home oxygen services for the disabled, all-you- can-drink water filtration units, an all-you-can-browse internet service, and all-you-can-be military boot camps.

matthew writes: Louis de Branges de Bourcia, the Edward C. Elliott Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Purdue’s School of Science, has solved the Riemann Hypothesis, which concerns the distribution of prime numbers and is famed for having eluded a solution since it was hypothesized in 1859.

Clad in his trademark spandex “Proof of the Four Color Supposition” costume of his alter-ego, Professor Mathematical Man, Dr. Branges announced his paper at a press conference at Perdue. The Riemann Hypothesis,

“I, Professor Mathematical Man, have solved the Riemann Hypothesis. You may remember that I also solved the Bieberbach conjecture about 20 years ago. Given good eating habits and barring the onset of Alzheimer’s, my next feats of cogitative potency shall be to solve the long standing Hasse Presumption, the Heidelberg Speculation, the Tate-Shaferevich Assumption, and the Field Suggestion, in that order. Thank you good citizens, my work here is done.”

matthew writes: 3Com corporation, the company founded by Ethernet inventor Burt Metcalf, has announced a round of layoffs aimed at reducing the excess workforce caused by its continued sucking badly in the marketplace.

Mr. Metcalf explains: “We’ve been undercut in the low-end switch market by the Linksys and Netgears of the world, and overcut in the high-end switch market by HP, Cisco, and other companies that know a lot more about packet based networks than we do. We figured the downturn was killing everyone, but as it turns out, it’s only killing us.”

“We were going to try to do something with VOIP, but that turned out to be hard as well. To remain competitive, we’re going to slash our staff, operating expenses, and name by 33%. 2Com will be a lot nimbler in the low end market, and while we don’t expect to be able to beat Linksys, D-Link, or Netgear, we do expect to loose more slowly than we have been.”

3Com’s latest high profile emarassment was the failure of its co-marketing agreement with Ben Affleck’s production company to brand its high-speed Ethernet offerings as “Giglibit Ethernet” when the tie-in movie franchise failed to attract a significant viewership.

Mearzuh writes: The world-famous shoe and apparel producer Adidas displayed to the world its next generation shoe last week in hopes of reviving the long lost days of what we call Sneakernet.

Adidas promises that unlike the olden days of Sneakernet, the next generation Sneakernet will have much more processing power and throughput capabilities. With the chips actually integrated into the shoe, one would not need to carry anything in one’s hand. One simply puts the data into the shoe, then puts the shoes on, goes to wherever this data is needed, and leaves the shoes at that destination.

“This opens up many doors to the world of communication” says a spokesman for Adidas. “We can have people running marathons and world’s fastest atheletes transport data between people in no time.”

The smart shoes are going to be available for government and educational purposes only initially, and will be available to the general public for $ 299 later this year.