As The Register reports, a Plymouth child was kidnapped on Saturday by a public convenience. Go read the story.
Tag: fun
Dead Badger Linux
Anyone with a pair of pliers can install Red Hat on a toaster or a motorcycle… it takes a real (sick) geek to install Linux on a dead badger.
Chicken-Heated Atomic Weapons, And Quake [TM] For Those Who Miss Text-Based Adventures
[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]
[further fragments were recovered on 13 October 2018]
Two fantastic bits of funny news for you this April Fool’s morning:
1. A seven-ton atomic landmine, designed to prevent Soviet advance through West Germany, would have been kept warm while underground by being filled with live chickens (with enough food to keep them alive for a week). This (not an April Fool’s – really!) report brought to you by the BBC. Weird.
2. Do you remember a couple of years ago when somebody wrote ttyQuake, a front-end for iD‘s groundbreaking game, Quake, which replaced the graphics with live-generated ASCII-art [screenshot]? Well; somebody’s gone one step further: IF Quake. IF Quake is an Inform program that acts an an interface between your Z-Machine Interpreter and the Quake data files. What does this mean? It means that it’s a text-based-adventure version of Quake. So instead of wiggling your mouse and…
Plug ‘N’ Pray
Looking to change your religion using an easy, clean interface? Try Plug ‘n’ Pray from Holy Corporation.
A site well-worth reading.
Warning: Extreme Geek Humour
Sat in Burger King…
Bryn: So many nice things come in .deb packages…
Dan: Yeh. Except for some nice things which still come in nasty RPM-shaped packages.
Bryn: I’m not even sure I have an RPM package manager installed.
Dan: I’m sure you can ‘apt-get’ one.
Oh; how we laughed.
Pretend You’re A Traffic Police Officer
…and one day, on your beat, you catch a guy driving the wrong way down a residential one-way street. Well; that’s not very good, so you flag him down and investigate. Upon reaching the car, you discover that he is driving the wrong way down the road as a result of a lack of due care and attention – he was using his laptop. Moreover, his pants are round his ankles and he’s using his laptop to look at kiddie porn. As if this isn’t enough, he’d been downloading said illegal porn using an internet connection hijacked using wireless networking gear.
What do you charge him with?
Rage Against The Monkeys
I’ve been thinking about a popular mathematical document easily available on the web, More Monkey Business, which uses the maths behind the otherwise inconceivable “infinite monkey problem” (if a million monkeys at a million keyboardsetc.… also known as Usenet…) as a gateway to argue against molecular biology’s evolutionary theory, which states that life ‘came together’ out of primordial soup as a result of a ‘miraculous’ coincidence.
It states, for example: “From a strictly mathematical perspective, the idea that life arose out of a pre-biotic soup is about as reasonable as the idea that Hamlet could arise out of alphabet noodle soup.”
What the author, and many creationists in general, fail to realise, is that there is nothing fundamentally ‘special’ or ‘miraculous’ about life. Life is nothing more than a series of stable, perpetual (although not eternally-perpetual) chemical reactions, and the fact that we see it as anything more than this is an example of our failings as rational entities to realise the fundamental truth about our existance: that life, intelligence, and humanity are nothing more than basic chemical processes examined at a level of blindingly indefinate abstraction.
Or, at least, that’s what I believe.
Read the article. It’s good.
Thing Of The Day You Don’t Expect To Find In Dictionary.com
Go look up Bondage-and-Discipline Language in dictionary.com. I was surprised to find it in there, too.
Which NetHack Monster Are You?
This made my day:
If I were a NetHack monster, I would be a mimic. I can be whatever I think you need me to be – it might look like I’m here to help you, but really you’re here to help me.
Which NetHack Monster Are You?
I laughed until I mimicked a boulder.
(if by some strangeness you know me but don’t know what NetHack is, start here)
Growing Up
The older I get, the more I become like those people my parents used to warn me about when I was younger.
Stealing From A Police Officer… In A Police Station
What kind of idiot steals a police officer’s sandwich, in a police station, while taking part in an identity parade? BBC News reports.
VeriSign Kicking Up Yet More Of A Fuss
Still no word from BBC News on the bastards that VeriSign are being, but The Register are on to their second news report on the subject, and SlashDot have information about the technological “fight back”. What does a person have to do to keep their state news agency up to date these days?
Have you seen VeriSign’s web site at www.VeriSignSuckCocks.com (only works thanks to their own controversial configuraion changes)
In other news, I’ve worked out how to set up wildcard DNS of my own in BINDs configuration files. Now all I need to do is buy an interesting domain name, and I could run the next IsGay or YouAreLame site. Which would be cool. I have a few ideas… suggestions welcome…
UserFriendly And VeriSign
Today’s UserFriendly cartoon strip plays on the issue highlighted by yesterday’s entry about VeriSign trying to take over the Internet. Really – the geeks are up in arms.
Still no word from BBC News, but the following other agencies have picked up on the story:
“VeriSign redirects error pages” from C|Net News
“VeriSign slammed for helping spammers” from ZDNet Australia
“ICANN up in arms over Verisign DNS hijacking” from The Inquirer, UK
And tongue-in-cheek technical debate on morons.org.
Told you this would kick up a fuss. You read it here first.
Ding! Fries Are Done!
Here’s to Paul, who’s now working at Burger King Aberystwyth.
Especially for him, please click here and listen to “Ding! The Remix!”. [download removed]
I’m not getting enough work done today.