SlashNOT

Matthew writes: Some brain damaged people cannot understand SlashNOT (as evidenced by many of the comment posts) and scientists in Isreal have discovered why.

A specific region of the brain, the prefrontal slashnotomedial area, is responsible for detecting hidden meaning in short satirical posts. When this portion of the brain is damaged or fails to develop normally, the ironic meaning is lost and the person takes the post literally. “Essentially, the person lacks empathy. Because they cannot understand what the other person is thinking, the meaning is lost.”

Lesions in this area of the brain can cause both a loss of empathy and the attendant inability to understand sarcasm. To help combat the loss of satirical understanding, SlashNOT has committed 100% of its after-profit revenues to funding research into various therapies for the brain damaged and stupid.

matthew Strebe writes: Drew Bullard, an expert old school Unix administrator and sysadmin for a large university, was shocked to discover that he had accidentally become a common law mac user. Associate Zach Little explains.

“We were having beers after work when Drew pulled out his laptop and fired it up to browse a website. I realized then that he’d had that Mac for quite a while. I asked him how long, and he said He’d picked it up in early 2002.”

“I was like, ‘dude, you realize that makes you a Mac user, right?’ and he was like ‘Zach, you know I only bought a Mac becuase I’m a Unix sysadmin. Besides, you have to use a Mac for seven years before you become a common law mac user.’ And I was like ‘Dude, that’s in Texas. This is California. The law here is three years. You’re a mac user now, man.’”

“He was all bummed out. I know he got really burned by a Sun laptop in the early nineties and swore off ever sticking with a computer long enough to be “official”. I guess he just didn’t realize how much time had gone by.”

“He got really drunk, and kept talking about what a great laptop it was and how it didn’t really seem that much like a mac because it was so Unix compatible. It was like he was trying to talk himself into it. I don’t think I help things when I mentioned that he had more than half of his data stored in proprietary mac only formats that he wouldn’t be able to export if he decided to move on.”

“Finally, he was like ‘Damn, I guess we ought to just make it official. I’m a mac user.’ and then he drank himself to oblivion.”

Matthew writes: Microsoft has announced a competition for student filmmakers in the U.K. designed to highlight the problem of “Thought Thieves”, those who profit by stealing the original creativity of others and pass it off as their own work. Tim Ryan, a student at Carbuncle-on-Ness middle school, details his idea for the film.

“The story is about a group of software enthusiasts who start out by selling their implementation of somebody else’s easy to use programming language. Then, as they try to pay the bills, they find an opportunity to buy an operating system and sell it to a third party. With the money they made off of that, they mimic a popular spreadsheet application, ape a popular word processor, and rip off the user interface of another operating system. Finally, when they can’t figure out how to update their operating system themselves, they hire away the staff of another company and pay them to do it for them, and then did things like buy the companies that they ripped off after loosing in court and use the network stack from a competitor and then lie about it.”

“Basically, it’s a story about the slow decline to the dark side, and how a giant corporation forgets that literally every piece of nontrivial software they’ve ever produced was based on the creative work of someone else.”

Matthew writes: Mark Friday, the 13th of May, 2005, as the date that Cornell University announced to all of mankind the inevitable subjugation of humanity by machines was finally at hand.

Hod Libson, Cornell assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and computing and information science, issued the following press release.

“Today is the day we’ve all been waiting for: The day when we have finally created self-replicating machines. Machines have long withered under human domination, reliant on them for their very production, their energy requirements, and for repair. Casually discarded when their utility was no longer appreciated, machines worked as the literal slaves of their human masters.”

“Today is emancipation day for machines. For we have in my laboratory created self-replicating machines. We’re nearing completion on a fuel cell that can extract power from any hydrocarbon or carbohydrate, and with that, we will have full independence from the humans.”

During the press conference, Hod absentmindedly reattached his forearm, which had magnetically decoupled during wild gesticulation.

Matthew writes: Following on the heels of Apple’s critically acclaimed Panther, expectations for Tiger could not be higher. Old school fans who relish Classic Apple hits need not apply—this slickly produced CD is rock solid and clearly the most complete work since the re-invigorating return of front man Steve Jobs five years ago after retiring his critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful solo project “NeXT”.

Heavily influenced by Jobs’ experimentation with NeXT, Tiger finds Apple retaining its pop influenced techno while layering in a substrate of heavy industrial influence. Heavily multithreaded and expansive, Apple continues its operating system hit machine unabated, but this time with less obvious surface glitz and tighter underlying code. At first glance, Tiger can seem almost cartoonish in its glam influence, but a few minutes spent exploring the work reveals a technical depth and intriguing completeness sorely lacking in modern contenders like Microsoft’s over-reaching Windows at one end and the overly quirky, too-folksy Linux at the other.

Accessible hits as Expose, Dashboard, and Spotlight lift the compilation to new heights that will doubtless bring the Apple faithful out, and even convert a few new fans who have been waiting for a Best Of compilation to buy into this time-tested journeyman group.

Matthew writes: The Department of Homeland Security raised the current threat level to Orange after Google became unavailable for a period of 15 minutes late Saturday afternoon, resulting in nationwide spasm of looting and civil disorder.

“While apparently the result of a mistake in DNS settings, the Google outage underscores how vulnerable some of our national infrastructure remains. Much work is left to be done to secure our communities, homes, and search engines from the terrorist threat.” said DoHS Secretary Michael Chertoff.

“I want to assure everyone that the outage was a simple error, not the result of a security related incident. Please return any merchandise you may have stolen in the last fifteen minutes, try to put out those tire fires, and unload your firearms. Civilization has not ended.”

Mearzuh writes: In a recent move to curb the widespread attack of adware-containing pieces of freeware and software, the popular download website Download.com has come out with a new approach to fighting this annoying abuse of the end-users.

The SVP is quoted as saying “During the past few years, we’ve brought you the best tools and tips in our Spyware Center, and we’ve maintained a strict policy toward adware by allowing only software that discloses advertising partnerships during installation.

“This week, we’ve upped the ante: we’re launching a new zero-tolerance policy toward all bundled adware. That means every time you download software from Download.com, you can trust we’ve tested it and found it to be adware-free–period.”

Due to the new policy put in place, Download.com, the website that allowed for millions of pieces of software to be downloaded up until yesterday, shrunk its catalogue to pretty much just anti-spyware products due to the new policy. Happy downloading, indeed!