Category Archives: United States

Republicans expel infidels and traitors

APPLE PIE, Texas, Friday (NNN) — Facing increased marginalisation, the Republican Party is concentrating on its core audience and values.

Republican cheerleading squad“We are completely against the Obama stimulus spending,” said Rush Limbaugh, speaking through Party chair Michael Steel. “We favour subsidies for no-one and nothing, and feel the Great Recession can best be repaired by moving to a laissez-faire system of primitive hunting and gathering.”

Economic policies are a sideline, however, for the most important Republican stances. “We are firmly in favor of personal responsibility, except to do with sex. It’s necessary to the health and security of America to enforce sex only once a month for procreation, and putting gays or suspected gays in the stocks in the public square. Just Say No!”

Colin Powell, the traitorous Obama-voter, told a GOP audience last week that “the Republican Party is in deep trouble.” Mr Powell also claimed that the Earth goes around the Sun and is not flat. He was burned at the stake later in the evening. “Powell was never a real Republican,” said Limbaugh. “Nor was Arlen Specter. I’ve got my doubts about Lincoln too.”

As a GOP discussion continues, the probability of one participant calling another a “Democrat” approaches one. However, the party will respect the national mood and advance moderates it feels are in tune with its core. “Ideally we’re looking for a creationist Pentecostal abstinence-touting book-banning Alaskan separatist gun nut MILF with crossed eyes like Dan Quayle’s and the conversational powers of George Bush, who’s black. That’d be a candidate with real crossover potential.”

Banks fail Scientology “stress test”

REHABILITATION PROJECT FORCE, Hemet Gold Base, Friday (NNN) — Ten of America’s largest 19 banks have failed the stringent economic “stress tests” based on the teachings of Dianetics.

Tomato auditing L. Ron HubbardSenior investigators from the Office of the Treasury (“Big OTs”) found that, considered as thetans, the banks were too weighed down with engrams, from this and past lives, and the engrams of the many “sub-prime thetans” still attached to them.

The test involves financial executives holding the “cans” in a firm grip while answering questions such as:

2. When others are getting rattled, do you remain fairly composed?
8. Are your actions considered unpredictable by other people?
23. Do you resent the efforts of others to tell you what to do?
24. Is it normally hard for you to “own up and take the blame”?
30. Do you enjoy telling people the latest scandal about your associates?
59. Do you consider the modern prisons without bars system “doomed to failure”?
76. Do you sometimes give away articles which strictly speaking do not belong to you?
124. Do you often make tactless blunders?
125. Are you suspicious of people who ask to borrow money from you?

“The economy’s been like a volcano that’s about to blow,” said US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. “Our hope is that banks can get back to the business of banking, staying upstat and producing Valuable Final Product, to lift the cloud of uncertainty.”

Analysts broadly welcomed the results of the stress tests. “The IQ test seems to have been very accurate,” said Eric Kuby of North Star Investment Management. “The fears of entheta and the influence of suppressive persons have more or less disappeared.”

The current Federal Reserve system was set up in the 1950s as the result of a bet between Alan Greenspan and L. Ron Hubbard.

Disks full of porn “sold to military”

MELLIE, Newcastle, Thursday (NNN) — Gigabytes and gigabytes of pornography and highly sensitive login details for gentleman’s art sites were bought by a US military missile air defence base second-hand on eBay.

Blue Tit in helmetThe collected fine artworks of young women in a state of natural aesthetic presentation were found on a hard disk for the SPLORT (Super-Powered Less Obviously Retronymed Thing) ground to air missile defence system, used to shoot down Scud Mag missiles in Iraq.

Dr Andy Jones, a researcher at the base, said “This is the fourth time we have carried out this research and it is clear that records left on hard disks are the twenty-first century equivalent of random pornographic magazines found in bushes and parks by masturbation-crazed eleven year old boys. PHWOAR, LOOK AT THE TITS ON THAT ONE! I’m sorry, I’m just reviewing a birdwatching site. Fabulous display of Cyanistes cæruleus.

“Of significant concern is the number of large organisations that are still not disposing of confidential information in a secure manner. Thank fuck.”

The disk also contained site passwords, credit card numbers and 18 USC 2257 information on … “prospective military contractors,” Dr Jones quickly interjected. “Really. Prospective contractors. We’re getting in touch with them right away.”

Debian forks GlibC over Drepper

RALEIGH, North Carolina, Wednesday (NNGadget) — The Debian project has dropped the use of the GNU project’s glibc C library, substituting the eglibc fork, as glibc maintainer Ulrich Drepper refused patches or bug reports for several architectures Debian relied on.

Computer bum“Any change will negatively impact well designed architectures for the sole benefit of this embedded crap,” said Drepper. “Famously good architectures like x86. Can you believe, these people wanted their C library to work in systems with shells other than bash! They must think they’re signing my paycheck.”

Drepper has, in retaliation, announced his own fork of Debian. It will be created in cooperation with Joerg Schilling and Tuomo Valkonen and be based on the Schilix variant of OpenSolaris, with Ion running on XFree86 as the standard graphical interface. “Keith Packard ruined X,” said Valkonen. “Also, time is actually cubical in nature.” The standard file system will be ext4, given its proven ability to cause data loss in user software that ext4’s maintainers consider ill-written. “Hans Reiser didn’t get back to us. Pity, we always got along with him really well.”

The project will apparently be licensed under both the intersection and union, and probably various algebraic transformations, of the GPL, LGPL, CDDL, MIT License and the thing Valkonen wrote for Ion3. This is not anticipated to be a problem in practice with real-life users, at least not until one exists.

“YOU!” said David Dawes of XFree86. “YOU’VE BEEN TALKING TO THEM, HAVEN’T YOU! YOU’RE CONSPIRING WITH THEM! THOSE GUYS! THEY STOLE IT ALL! THEY PUT A RADIO IN MY HEAD! LINUX/BSD WEENIES! EDUCATED EVIL AND STUPID! I’LL SHOW ’EM! HELL YES! I’LL SHOW ’EM ALL!” “That means he’s onside with us,” said Valkonen. “Dave’s been a bit terse since he finally lost it trying to fix a broken modeline.”

Wolfram Alpha: A new kind of search engine

Guest post by Stephen Wolfram

Some might say that Mathematica, the source of my fortune, and A New Kind Of Science: A Brief History Of My Stupendous Intellect were ambitious projects. But in recent years I’ve been hard at work on a still more ambitious project: Wolfram Alpha.

Stephen Wolfram and his Superior BrainFifty years ago, people assumed that computers would quickly be able to handle all kinds of question. It didn’t work out that way. But a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to do it myself. As I’d always expected I’d have to, of course.

I had the crucial ingredients: Mathematica and A New Kind Of Science. And my truly massive intellect. With these, I had a language to compute anything and a paradigm for complexity from simple rules. And my spectacular brain, which is much more spectacular than anyone else’s, as proven by me being rich as well as smart. Which is smarter: to be a professor, or to be the professor all the other professors pay tribute to? I think my net worth makes the answer clear.

But what about all the actual knowledge that we as humans have accumulated? I realized we needed to make all data computable as knowledge. Of course, natural language is incredibly difficult for computers. So we added the secret ingredient: my jaw-droppingly spectacular brain, undoubtedly the largest on Earth.

I’m happy to say that with a mixture of clever algorithms and heuristics, linguistic discovery and curation, and some casual Nobel-worthy theoretical breakthroughs in my spare moments, we’ve made it work. It’s going to be a website with one simple input field that gives direct access to my superlative brain, in its planet-sized glory.

Our pre-launch testers have been at work as well, and I’m dealing with all manner of queries in spare thought cycles while I jetset around the world, wowing the pitiful minds of gorgeous international supermodels before impregnating them with my superior genetic material. Let’s just have a look at the query stream: "tits" "goatse" "mary whitehouse naked" "4chan" "tubgirl" "2girls1cup" "ITS OVER 9000 LOL" "desu desu desu desu"
ERROR ERROR ERROR
&&#("^^(856"^*#**"#&*##&##^^^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
NO CARRIER_

“Save Vista” campaign gathers momentum

LONGHORN RANCH, Glue Factory, Monday (NNGadget) — With the release of Windows 7 set for October 23rd, Microsoft marketing marketer Richard Francis has said computer manufacturers may not be able to ship Vista once Windows 7 is available.

BTI Explosive Breaching Free-Standing DoorOutrage at the news was rapid. Microsoft quickly backtracked, claiming Vista would remain available until at least 2011 (“we kept 98 support up for 18 months when XP was out”), but customers were not mollified by promises that Windows 7 buyers would be allowed to downgrade (“we call it an upgrade”) to Vista.

A “Save Vista” campaign has been organised by InfoWorld. “We detected a deep anxiety over Vista among technologists and consumers alike,” said editor Galen Gruman. “We decided to do something about it, launching a petition drive to ask Microsoft to keep selling Vista after the planned October 23 end-of-sales date.” The petition has already gathered over ten signatures. “‘Seven’ is just sucking up to latté sippers. Like Hummer, like Chrysler, like Edsel, Vista is a great American name that shows the might of full-sized American industrial production. It’s a monument to everything that makes us the country we are.”

“Save Vista” latest signatories
• L. Torvalds Portland
• S. Jobs Cupertino
• M. Shuttleworth London
SIGN UP IN COMMENTS TO SAVE VISTA!

“My computer business employs 200 people,” said M. Shuttleworth of London. “The best possible thing for it is to make sure Vista continues and goes forward.”

“Just how long was extended support for Microsoft’s greatest success ever, Windows ME?” said Gruman. “Microsoft talks about Windows 98 as being succeeded by XP — just as if ME never existed! ME’s many, many fans will be outraged at such an omission, and we’re afraid they’ll treat Vista, Microsoft’s second-greatest success ever, the same way.

“And how about extended support for Microsoft’s third-greatest success ever, Microsoft Bob? By the wife of the founder, no less! I think we should be told.”

Newspapers to go behind paywall

HOLD THE PRESSES, Daily Asteroid, After The News (NNN) — Hearst newspapers will be holding back content from their papers’ free websites, instead charging for some digital news and information. “We are fully confident that both readers and Google will come to the party and give us money,” said Hearst president Steven Swartz, “and not just laugh and ignore us henceforth.”

Dewey defeats TrumanNewspapers plan to fight back against the avaricious parasitism of Google in telling people where to find content the newspapers had put up on the Web for free with a new e-book reader, a variant on the Amazon Kindle. “For only $300, readers can read DRM-locked down versions of our content that they’re paying a subscription for on top. We can’t see how this could possibly fail to work.”

Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has been notably successful in selling valuable original financial reporting that cannot be obtained anywhere else. “So there’s no reason people won’t pay for recycled Associated Press feeds, the latest on Britney and Paris, corporate-backed op-eds, funny cat stories and pretence at holding the government’s feet to the fire.”

Hearst also advocates new advertising and revenue models. “The technical press on the Web shows the way forward: blatant and obvious gutter-slut crack-whoredom. Subtlety doesn’t pay the bills any more — we must enthusiastically welcome the corporate cock into our throats and rectums. Also, I’d like to mention that everyone should use the Windows 7 beta. HLAGH HLAGH HLAGH,” added Mr Swartz, wiping off his chin.

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Twitter twavels twemendous twaumas to “twubs”

666 FOLLOWING, 0 Followers, Thursday (NNGadget) — Users of the inane antisocial networking, bodily function documentation and terrorist tool Twitter can now index their spurious 140-character babbling with “twubs,” Wikipedia-style “hub” pages for Twitter “hashtags.” The “hashtags” are made from a Class C controlled substance and induce lethargy, overeating and carpentry.

Osama bin MobyTwitter “hacktivist” Ravenwoo Granola commended the advent of “twubs.” “Hash in tags is a fantastically effective way to keep track of swine flu, airport demonstrations and police brutality. I can get activists, or ‘tweeple,’ into action at a moment’s notice. In an hour or two,” she said, picking up a bong made from an at-sign. “I’m pretty mellow here.”

Users can exchange cool Twitter user names on “Twee Exchange.” I wish I were making this up.

“Trapped in a lift again,” said Stephen Fry. “Scottish ‘food’ vendors find way to deep-fry swine flu snot, Scots expected to be extinct in six weeks,” said Warren Ellis.

Other popular indexing tools for Twitter posts are “twonks,” “twats” and “turds.” The Twitter posting software includes “Tweep,” “Twinkle,” “Twiddle,” “Twidiocy,” “Twurgid” and “Twasturbator.” Twitter users now gather in “twibes.” Regular Twitter users are known as “twunts.”

Microsoft snatches publicity crown from Ubuntu Linux

BOLGIA 10, Redmond, Thursday (NNN) — In a stunning public relations coup, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MNPLY) has successfully overshadowed today’s release of Ubuntu Linux 9.04 “Jaunty Jubblies” by announcing its failed financials for a fourth quarter in a row and laying even more people off.

Microsoft announced new and expanded roles for remaining key executives as another several lesser, losing quitters deserted upper management. “It shows the fantastic opportunity available to everyone at Microsoft to climb seven or eight reporting levels up the org chart,” said marketing marketer Steve Ballmer to pitchfork-wielding Wall Street analysts today. “If we haven’t laid them off for making too much money or not kissing enough ass.”

The Ubuntu GNOME desktop in useThe Yahoo! deal is expected to go ahead. “We figure they’ll go broke before we do. Probably.” Mr Ballmer also plans to run the Yahoo! servers on Windows NT rather than FreeBSD after a similar change worked so well at Hotmail. “Some say synergy’s another word for two plus two equals one, but you just have to make the value of one work for you.”

Windows 7 betas have been greeted with remarkable positive press. “Of course, the betas preview the ‘champagne and hookers’ edition, which would be way too much for netbooks and explode users’ brains. Imagine thinking those little things are computers! So we’re releasing what we call Windows 7 Dumbass Edition™. It lets you log in and look at the shiny. Even Spider Solitaire has the ribbon toolbar! And you can buy an upgrade to the version that runs programs! It lets you do that!”

Dumbass Edition™ comes with pre-installed viruses to make the computer part of the Storm, Conficker and FBI botnets. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

However, Microsoft has indicated to its press corps, Microsoft Completely Enderlependent Analysts, to ixnay on the evensay and highlight the job openings for work on Windows 8, firmly penciled in for a 2012 release. Windows 8 will be optimised for low-end 32-core systems with a mere 16 gigabytes of memory — 28 cores for the interface, 3 cores for the DRM and one core for everything else. “Seven is just so this year. I hear they’ll get $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM done next release for sure!” said ZDNet marketing marketer Mary-Jo Enderle. “It’ll be awesome™!”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine, fine,” said Bill Gates, upping his hours at his charitable foundation and scheduling the sale of several more packages of Microsoft stock.

Larry Ellison of Oracle, who recently purchased Sun Microsystems, merely snickered, muttered “Java. OpenOffice.” and let out a long and resounding laugh.

Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical, speaking from his castle on a crag high on a mountaintop in west London, was sanguine at Ubuntu’s news being overshadowed. “I lost ten million dollars on Ubuntu last year. I’m losing ten million dollars on Ubuntu this year. I expect to lose ten million dollars on Ubuntu next year. At this rate, I’ll be broke in … sixty years.”

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Disabled post to Twitter using the power of the body

TWATTER, Arsebook, Tuesday (NotScientist) — A direct neural interface to post on Twitter has been created by Adam Wilson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Fat Naked Internet Guy“We originally hooked it to the brain,” said Wilson, “but only a very limited selection of messages came out, that appeared to be coming from somewhere else. So we’ve just gone directly to the penis without the middleman.”

Male humans suffer from having functional bodies trapped with almost completely paralysed minds. The penis is an organ used by male humans primarily for thinking and making important decisions. It is also used as an outlet for unwanted poisonous bodily excreta, such as sperm.

The messages — or “twats” — cover the full gamut of human experience and emotion in 140 characters, from “ANOTHER PINT WHAT AN EXCELLENT IDEA” to “DYING FOR A SLASH” to “GDAY LUV NICE TITS” to “WOOHOO GOT A GOER HERE” to “WOKE UP DEAD PIG SHAT IN SKULL OH DEAR GOD WTF IS THAT MUST CHEW ARM OFF.”

“The next stage is a feedback loop for at-replies,” said Wilson. “We’re hoping to create the dream of every Internet user: a response system that will send five hundred volts through someone’s nether regions when they say something unbelievably stupid.”