Monday, October 24, 2005

God Bless The Stupid - They Keep Us Entertained, Don't They?

World's Dumbest Bank Robber!

A note handed to a bank teller demanding $20, $50 and $100 bills "the quicker the better" was written on a pay stub that led police to a robbery suspect even though the name and address were crossed out with a marker.
"It wasn't a huge forensic undertaking," Steven Moran, Bensalem director of public safety, said Wednesday. "We just put it under a light."

That's right, folks, he told the bank his full name and address!


In a stroke of genius, MIT grads fail to reproduce something that Kevin Pereira from Attack of the Show on G4 managed - Archimedes' Death Ray. Seriously - AotS televised theirs, and got it to burn up CDs, Wood, Paper, and anything else they put in front of it, yet MIT guys can't set fire to a boat?
Shows the quality of the US education system, doesn't it? Don't believe the G4 guys can outsmart MIT? Take a look at SolarDeathRay.com!

Anne Rice, author of dozens of novels about vampires, mummies, and other mythical creepy-crawlies, got Jesus. And now she wants to tell you about it in her new book. Sadly, since I don't really care, this plug on my page is all she gets out of me about it.

Ok, I admit I'm not avant-garde, but I think the HMMWV limosines are ass-ugly, and for that reason I can't imagine trying to car-jack one. But this guy did.
Sadly, in his infinite genius, he forgot to check if it was empty first. It wasn't, and the 15 people in the back gave him the beat-down of a lifetime.
*ahem* WAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAAHAHA!! *coughcough* That is all. Thank you.

Super-soldiers aren't just science fiction anymore! Now they're real!
Or, at least, they soon will be, according to these researchers.
No word, of course, on whether said researchers ever bothered to watch to the end of any of those hundreds of movies about super-soldiers to see what the inevitable results of "superior" humans will be.

In a move surprising no-one, more and more companies are banning blogs. Or that's what you'd think based on the title of this article on Wired News. Turns out if you read it, though that that's not entirely an accurate representation of the issue.
What's more, says Mason, such practices are becoming prevalent in corporate America, particularly in financial services. Mason sits on a roundtable privacy group of 20 of the country's largest banks. "My best understanding is that my company's anti-blog stance is the industry norm," he says.
But when you look at the article, you find out that what this actually is, is more and more companies demanding that instead of reading blogs at work, you ACTUALLY DO WTF THEY PAY YOU TO DO.
Oh, my God. How totally unreasonable and uptight of them.

I guess we were misinterpreting this guy's conduct: the man and woman in Cleveland who kept 11 retarded kids in cages in their house say they are tired of being "misrepresented." Um - if it has bars, it's a cage. I mean it. You bastard.

Speaking of bastards, ever read the End User License Agreement that you have to click "I Accept" on before installing any piece of computer software by any company anywhere ever? You should, indeed. It would make you cringe, all those perfectly legal things that you're agreeing to when you click that button.
This bit, for example: (with supporting editorializing from TGDaily)
Some EULA clauses allow software manufacturers to monitor your machine at will - DRM being a good example - and send data back and forth at will. They can even download new content onto your machine without having to notify you - anything from an innocuous patch to full blown spyware.

For example take Section 6 of the Pinnacle Studio 9 movie-making EULA:

You acknowledge and agree that in order to protect the integrity of certain third party content, Pinnacle and/or its licensors may provide for Software security related updates that will be automatically downloaded and installed on your computer. Such security related updates may impair the Software (and any other software on your computer which specifically depends on the Software) including disabling your ability to copy and/or play 'secure' content, i.e. content protected by digital rights management.

Amazing. So what you're saying is that you can, once we install your software, download stuff to our computers without our knowledge or permission, which can basically do anything to our computers that you want ti to and we can't say no?

Seti@home ought to try this approach.


And a final editorial tidbit just to finish out the day:

The Stupid.
A race all to themselves, transcending traditional ethnic, political, religious, or gender groupings, they breed much faster than everyone else, they produce less, consume more, and are in no way contributors to the advancement of humanity.
You know it's true; you've met them. They're everywhere.
They're also the solution to the global energy crisis.
See, most of the world uses petroleum, also known as crude oil in case any of them are among my three readers, to power their industries, both in the electrical sense and in the raw material sense. (Who doesn't use plastics these days?) Sadly, petroleum is a diminishing natural resource created by the process of plant decay, which means that someday we'll run out.
Unless...
If we can figure out a way to extract petrochemical precursors from The Stupid, we can produce crude oil in chemical plants. This would lead to the independence of the US from foreign oil, the end of Alaskan drilling and other oil-related things that make PETA twitch, and a vast supply of the raw materials to make plastic, which would cause the price of basically every product marketed in the US to drop drastically.
Oh, yes, it's possible: all the chemicals which make up crude oil exist in human beings, just in the wrong proportions.
And, since The Stupid breed faster than anyone else (they do, google it) they are not only renewable, but barring plague, it would be impossible for demand to exceed supply for the first time in the history of the world.
Amazing! A way for The Stupid to transcend their limitations and become, for the first time, a real, productive part of society, and that using only what they come equipped with naturally.
The problem, of course, becomes one of diplomacy: how do we convince The Stupid to donate their bodies to the Petrochemical Reclamation Organized National Guideline?(PRONG?) That part's easy, I'd say: give 1/3 the reclaimed value of their body, and 1/6th each per offspring, to The Stupid as a tax credit. Most of The Stupid are poor as well (though not all)
and therefore their tax impact would be minimal in any event, and this allows them to die naturally, with dignity, and merely be reclaimed for society, rather than using valuable farmland for cemetaries and polluting our atmosphere with cremation fumes and ash.


Of course, if you're offended by my idea, let me say that this is / was a satire, intended as a homage to Swift's essay about famine; (look up "A Modest Proposal.") It is not meant seriously, blah blah blah.

And if you're not one of The Stupid, doesn't it sound like a really great idea?

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