SlashNOT

drew writes:

Dell and Ford Motor Company have announced an expansion of their recent sales partnership created to drive anemic sales for both companies.

“Our ‘Buy a Focus, get a Dell’ sales promotion has been somewhat successful, but we feel that with just a little tweaking, we’re going to have a phenomenal marketing campaign. So we’ve modified it to the ‘Buy a Dell, get a Focus’. So far, we’ve seen a big jump in the sales numbers.”

According to the marketing group responsible for the promotion, Dell’s sales are up over 400%. The promotion is limited to Dell products whose value is greater than that of a Focus, or $ 3000. Ford has also been moving units briskly under the campaign, but their sales numbers were not available as of the time of this writing.

Matthew writes: In a bizarre juxtaposition of coincidence, horror, and postmodern industrial lore, the “Human Finger in a Bowl of Chili” urban legend has accidentally come true.

This particular urban legend has been told many ways but it usually involves meaty dark soups such as chili or menudo. The story is a member of an urban legent species with many variations, from mice and cockroaches in soda bottles to deep-fried rats served up in a bucket of chicken.

But this particular urban legend turned to suburban horror earlier this week when an unidentified woman bit down on a human finger that had been cooked in her bowl of Wendy’s chili in Santa Clara, CA. Authorities have been on a hunt for the rest of the person since yesterday. The person is believed to have been a woman because the finger had a long, manicured nail.

A spokesman for Wendy’s confirmed that “All of our employees have ten digits” but added that he had ordered a recount just to be on the safe side. He also indicated that all of their Chili suppliers have indicated no accidents. “It’s probably just a piece of a meatpacker’s ex-wife that didn’t get ground up small enough. I don’t expect any employee liability problems to come out of this.”

When asked whether customers were still buying chili Thursday, an employee at the Wendy’s responded darkly, “We always sell a lot of chili.”

SCRaTCH writes: Leading music distributors have announced that they have joined forces in the latest attempt to rid the internet of the parasitic plague dubbed “File Sharing”.

In an astonishingly original report published today, it has been revealed that they are going to destroy File-Sharing by the end of next month by only releasing music that is of such poor quality, no-one would want to download it in the first place.

An insider in the music industry explained:

“Initially we passed off this File-Sharing as a load of silly piffle but after a while we realised that these people needed to be stopped. We set up a crack team of cyber-spies to research piracy and after 18 months of research on one web-site, we drew a blank. We realised that a new approach was needed”

“One of our brain-storming sessions came up with the idea of changing the names of the mp3’s to something different. We tested this idea by uploading Queen’s ‘Under Pressure’ and renaming it to “Mozarts Clarinet Concerto”. This was a HUGE success. We didn’t get a single download. But we knew we needed to do more.

“We tried flooding Kazaa with MP3’s that let out a high-pitched scream every few seconds but they were actually embraced by so-called “Techno Remix Culture”. Some Gabba people in Rotterdam simply did something to it with a device called a ‘Goldwave’, ramped it up to 260 bpm, added a heavy bass-drum every 1/16th of a second and they had a European hit in all those Underground rave-things. The high pitched squeal became the most sampled sound in the history of Dance Music, no matter what speed they played it at. We were gutted”

“What made the situation worse is that they were on an Indie label and made a packet off the eventual album by releasing the promo for free to File-Sharers. They had no packaging or distribution costs either. Its a disgrace”

Our insider continued…..

“We were really excited about this new “Trusted Computing Platform” and had the idea of making our own soundcard which would detect anything being played through it that was below 44.1khz stereo and, when it did, it was gonna like EXPLODE and blow the bastards to bits and make them see that we meant business and WE’D HAVE WON.

“But the do-gooders kept whinging about whether PC users would buy hardware that could kill them and even those Trusted Computing people didn’t trust us and they wouldn’t let us run the whole thing from this office - so we’re taking legal action against them”

Summing up, our man revealed that a final broadside is due.

“We’re pressing hard to get P2P recognised as a Terrorist Act but in the meantime, we’re releasing music that is so crap, no-one is going to want to download it”

However, rumour is rife in the File-Sharing community that P2P will continue unabated

“It doesn’t matter how crap the music is” said one sharer “If it comes up in a search - i’ll download it. I’ve got stacks of stuff here that I download & never listen to. I’ll put it with that lot”

matthew writes: Conspiracy Theorist Vikraat Shiiraji is claiming that India’s planned moon mission is an elaborate ruse designed to siphon billions from the country and that it will actually be staged in Bollywood.

“You have to look at the facts on the face of this thing. The Government is really just trying to play catch-up with China. There’s no significant launch facility anywhere in India. Yes, Indian scientists are progressing rapidly but we’re still decades away from being able to mount a serious effort in the space arena.”

“And the signs of the government’s deceptions are everywhere. Look at the fanciful headdress attached to the helmets, the way the visvanaut’s break into cabaret dances suddenly for no apparent reason while they test systems, and the over-the-top safety procedures that they’re training for, such as leaping so high on the moon that they are able to achieve escape velocity and float safely back to the command module after the lander fails. They’re actually planning the dramatic tension for the climactic sequence!

Matthew writes: The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider has disappeared suddenly this Saturday evening leaving an oddly smooth bowl shaped crater with a bizarre dust mound near the center of the crater.

While the exact cause of the sudden disappearance is unkown, speculation centers around the work of Dr. Horatiu Nastase, who was working on increasing the size and duration of suspected sub-atomic black holes that he had been producing. Because it was the weekend, only Dr. Nastase and two collaborating scientists are believed to have been inside the building.

Because there appears to be no remaining reckage or debris from the incident, authorities have ruled out a conventional explosion.

Mearzuh writes:

Googlebombers attacked President bush this week in an apparent character assassination attempt. The attack, in which a multiplicity of blogs all linked to the president’s biography on the whitehouse website using stories containing the words “miserable failure”. This caused Google to redirect legitimate seakers of miserable failure to the president’s website.

Follow these instructions and see for yourself:
1) Go to www.google.com
2) Type: miserable failure
3) Click on the “I feel lucky” button
4) Voila, you’re looking at a miserable failure on its official website

The Secret Service has announced that they have numerous bloggers in custody and are interviewing the detainees to determine exactly how they are connected to al Queda.

Retaliatory attacks by the President’s supporters have been less effective, as the partisans split their attacks against Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore.

Matthew writes: For immediate release – vmware, the market leaders in x86 virtualization technology has announced its plans to hemorrhage marketshare to a large crop of up-and-coming competitors.

“For years, we were the only name in x86 virtualization, except for VirtualPC which didn’t count because it only ran on Macs. We trickled out the technology to software developers and IT geeks who we knew would think it was cool, because it was pretty much impossible to explain to normal people.”

“Then, CIO magazine ran an article on virtualization and suddenly everyone thought it was cool. We were snapped up by EMC, Microsoft bought VirtualPC and ported it to the PC, virtuozzo cropped up out of the web hosting market, and a bunch of open source projects like XEN, coLinux, and User Mode Linux cropped up seemingly overnight. Now everybody and their dog is running multiple operating systems on their computers.”

“This confluence of events has positioned vmware to hemorrhage marketshare faster than Novell in the nineties. With our combination of a closed development platform, extraordinarily high prices for what others are practically giving away, our commitment to falling behind technologically in the critical automatic hardware pooling space, we feel that there’s been no better time to announce that our future is blight.”