News of the News

REAL VIRTUALITY, Seattle, Thursday 2099 (NNN) — Microsoft Corporation has announced a limited one-off extension of availability of its Windows XP operating system to April 2101 after criticism from large customers and analysts. This is the fifty-sixth extension of XP’s availability since 2008.

Through successive releases of Microsoft’s flagship Windows operating system, demand for XP has remained an important factor for businesses relying on stable XP-specific software and installations, who have pushed back strongly against the software company’s attempts to move them to later versions. Windows administration skills have become rare in recent years and consultants have demanded high fees. Reviving Windows administrators from cryogenic freezing has proven insufficient to fill the market gap, as almost all begged to work on COBOL instead.

“Windows XP is currently in the extremely very prolonged super-extended support phase and Microsoft encourages customers to migrate to Windows for Neurons 2097 as soon as feasible,” said William Gates V, CEO and great-grandson of the company founder. “Spare change?”

Microsoft Corporation, along with Monsanto Corporation and the RIAA, exists as a protected species in the Seattle Memorial Glass Crater Bad Ideas And Warnings To The Future National Park in north-west Washington on the radioactive remains of what was once the planet Earth, under the protection of our Linux-based superintelligent robot artificial intelligence overlords. Company revenues for 2098 were over $15.

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WIKICITIES, Helmand, Monday (NNN) — The kidnapping of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist David Rohde in Afghanistan was suppressed not only by almost all press syndicates but also by Wikipedia, on the direct command-and-control orders of Jimbo Wales, who is personally responsible for every word in the popular web-based encyclopedia.

Conservative commentators were appalled at the suppression. “Would they have protected HITLER like this?” thundered Michelle Malkin. Wales pointed out that the encyclopedia’s biography of Hitler had already been appropriately edited and cited per the Biographies of Living Persons policy:

Adolf Hitler is the Chancellor of Germany^{[citation needed]}. He is noted^{[citation needed]} for his work on the moral fibre of German society^{[citation needed]} and stimulating the economy^{[citation needed]}, notably through the Autobahn construction programme^{[citation needed]}. Some^[who?] have criticized aspects of his policies^{[citation needed]}.

The Wikipedia Review message board exploded in outrage at the revelations. “And they called us conspiracy theorists!” said ardent Wikipedia critic, businessman and banned editor Gregory Kohs. “It’s not clear yet how this will make money for Wales’ private company Wikia, but I know that’s why he did it.” The message board was further outraged at being scooped on the news. “This makes David Rohde part of the ‘hive mind,’ so the only way to remedy Wikipedia’s revelations of not revealing someone’s personal details in this particular case will be for me to put up David Rohde’s home address, names of his entire family and his bank account details on my website,” said public interest stalker Daniel Brandt. “I bet Google’s in on it too. They put a radio in my head, you know.”

“This raises many deep questions,” said free speech crusader Seth Finkelstein, “and it is important that many people keep at Wikimedia to get the truth, since they censoriously killfiled my email and viciously claimed to my editor at the Guardian that printing the stuff I write in blogs and letters to people’s employers in a mainstream British newspaper would constitute ‘deliberate malicious libel.’ I shall, of course, continue to pursue them to the end of time. Particularly that Godwin asshole.”

Many Wikipedia editors were also concerned. “Keeping details out of a Wikipedia article on a living person just because there aren’t any reliable sources because of a censorious conspiracy to keep him from getting killed is a slippery slope to the destruction of the trustworthiness and usefulness of every article in the encyclopedia,” said administrator WikiFiddler451. “People are seriously suggesting that our rules should be applied using common sense and a clue. I just don’t see how that could possibly work. Next they’ll suggest we ‘assume good faith’ or something.”

The Wikipedia Vandalism Patrol, who Wales ordered to suppress the information, deals with bad Wikipedia edits by determining if it is easier to fix the vandalism or adjust reality to the claimed facts. Wikipedia resets reality to match its contents using “wikiality,” discovered by conservative commentator Stephen Colbert. “Stephen’s one of our great successes,” said Wales. “We wrote that he was only parodying actual conservative commentators, and the liberals believed it! Of course, conservatives weren’t fooled by anything in Wikipedia.” Wikiality uses a “reality distortion field” similar to that used by Steve Jobs in his MacWorld keynote addresses, which is why all Wikimedia Foundation employees use MacBooks.

All information in Wikipedia must be verifiable in reliable sources. The “No Original Research” policy was first instituted to deal with “physics cranks. After the first few times the universe collapsed into a black hole when one of them squared the circle and we had to revert to the previous revision of reality. Way too much work. Brion was still a volunteer then, too.”

The death of Michael Jackson proved particularly problematic, with the article quickly becoming both the most read and most edited of the past week. “It took a while to decide what should have happened. ‘Heart failure’ covers a lot of stuff. The real story — the original real story, before we got in there and fixed things … no, you really don’t want to know. David Icke doesn’t want to know either, though he thinks he does. Really. No. Things are much better now. Trust us.”

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A344, Gateway To The West, Sunday (NNN) — Thirty-six thousand revellers, hippies, wiccans and general space cadets have gathered at Stonehenge for the summer solstice, throwing astronomical megalith calculations into chaos.

Wiltshire riot police, fresh from the hugely successful G20 operation, kept the fuzzy-brained masses at bay with horses, drug sniffer dogs, an unmanned flying drone and a battalion of level thirty-one family tradition Dawkinsian sceptics, admitting only essential maintenance druids into the fence around Stonehenge itself to handle the load on the ley lines powered by the henge.

“Whooo,” inhaled druid Leatherman Travaglia through his teeth, “yir big-end’s lost cosmic dimensionality and yir astral cabling cannae handle the power. ’S gonna cost ye. I’d try the homeopathic positronium, but the wee glass bottles cannae take it, Captain. Ye cannae change the laws of metaphysics!”

As the druids began their incantations, Wiccan priestesses drew their cowls tight against the damp morning air and half-naked dancers waved their hands in the air and went: “Woo, woo, woo.” “Lookit the fiminine energies on that one!” said Travaglia.

Restrictions were placed on the amount of alcohol revellers could bring in and police said they would not tolerate illegal drug taking or unlawful raves. However, it turned out the most apparently off-their-heads were just like that normally.

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HEY HEY 16K, What Does That Get You Today, Thursday (NNGadget) — As well as attempting to give the major record and television companies whatever they want until the end of time, Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report includes tax breaks for “culturally British” computer game development.

Planned games include Lard Warrior (“the goal is to sit playing a game. The graphics are truly horrifying and needed us to go to 3.5-dimensional to fit the player’s avatar on the screen. Rated 18+ for explicit neck beards”), CCTV Panopticon (“take pictures of the CCTV cameras in your high street until arrested under the Terrorism Act for having your own camera in public, defeat final boss with Doctorow Attack”), Bottled Tan Snorter (“get into celebrity magazines and shag footballers, lose points for any sign of intelligence, insufficient nipple slips or words of two syllables”) and Cynical Apathist (“write outraged blog posts and comments with amusing satires of events of the day while working a job directly keeping the hideous machinery alive and running, avoid removal by the Guardian moderator”). A committee will also form a group to do a study concerning a team to write a ZX Spectrum emulator for the iPhone, with a cassette interface emulator that sends Apple 99p every time you get an “R: Tape Loading Error.”

The games industry has warned in the past that developers are being lured away to other countries by the prospect of being paid more than shit. Conservative Shadow Arts Minister Ed Vaizey has leapt upon the opportunity, with promises of incentives for talented developers to stay in Britain and not be lured away by better pay in America. “We’ll keep their passports from them until they reach ‘Achievement Unlocked.’”

Having finally released Digital Britain, Lord Carter has resigned from the government and is returning to private industry. “Of course, Digital Britain remains a completely objective assessment of the way forward for the nation in the twenty-first century, and should in no way be thought of as my CV for a series of lucrative consultancies with the large media companies I’ve just given everything they’ve ever asked for. And a pony.”

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BIG BONE LICK, Kentucky, Wednesday (NNGadget) — Microsoft today heeded the lessons of technological history, taking the popular “preview porn videos in the search engine” feature and turning its Bob Hope “decision engine” into a porn finder at the address explicit.bobhope.microsoft.com.

“It worked for VHS over Beta, porn sites were leading innovators in online payments. It’s a natural synergy,” said Steve Ballmer, looking somewhat sweaty and flushed.

Porn sites are some of the keenest users of Microsoft technologies, using the undocumented interfaces in Internet Explorer to install helpful toolbars and bulk email tools on users’ systems. “It’s all about tools. Our tools have amazed people for decades. Microsoft are famous for the biggest and best tools ever. Developers! Developers! Developers! DEVELOPEEERS!”

Internet Explorer 8 is also part of the promotion. After a competition that advertises IE8’s superior standards compliance with a site that deliberately breaks all other browsers, a programme to donate eight free meals for the poor for every IE8 download (with the cost of the meals being 10% of the spend on promoting them) and a string of free porn sites requiring a Silverlight download to watch the smut, IE8 Service Pack 1 will include a “boot straight into porn” mode. “We found that was what users really wanted in an operating system. I mean, browser.” It will include the Storm, Conficker and FBI botnets as standard. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” The system will also set up automatic deductions from your bank account and credit card.

Mr Ballmer promised that Microsoft will, as always, deliver. “Unlike porn sites, we don’t just tease — we really will fuck you. Now bend over.”

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WAGGENER EDSTROM, Portland, Sunday (NNGadget) — Sergey Brin of Google is “deeply rattled” by the launch of Microsoft’s Bob Hope search engine, according to a scoop printed in the New York Post, courtesy Microsoft public relations.

“New search engines have come and gone in the past ten years, but Bob Hope really has Sergey just crapping himself,” said one anonymous insider, “Steve B.”

“It’s clear that Google is headed down, down, down,” said another anonymous source, “Rupert M.” “Particularly the news operation. Print that or I fire you.”

Bob Hope has been warmly greeted by analysts, critics, tech journalists and others on Microsoft and News Corporation’s payrolls. Early statistics show Bob Hope increasing Microsoft’s market share by two percentage points, to about 11 percent! Before dropping back to statistical noise a few hours after the launch was over.

Google’s credibility was shot to pieces by its blatant pro-Obama bias, noted by Fox News analysts when they couldn’t find evidence of Obama’s French citizenship and gay marriage on the search engine in the days before the 2008 Presidential election. “Their far-left liberal search algorithms will lead to their utter defeat by the business-friendly Microsoft Bob Hope,” said swivel_eyed_loon_643 in the New York Post comments section. In addition, a hilariously pathetic PR placement of a story in the New York Post to hype Bob Hope sealed Google’s fate, conclusively and utterly.

A spokesman for Google, asked about the threat of Microsoft Bob Hope, said “what??”, put the phone down and laughed for five minutes before the line cut out, obviously overcome with hysterical horror.

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T3.COM, Tellyhouse, Thursday (NNGadget) — Controversy surrounds Connectivity’s new mobile phone directory service “Stalkertivity,” with privacy campaigners denouncing it as invasive.

Connectivity gets the numbers from market research companies, any online business you ever gave your number to, a hacked copy of the Telephone Preference Service anti-telemarketer database and scraps of paper retrieved from the streets outside nightclubs on Sunday mornings. “We are passionate about making the way we all stay in touch even easier,” said Connectivity CEO Raj Raithatha. “Particularly the quid per touch, we’re very passionate about that.”

The service has been ascertained not to be a data protection violation by the Information Commissioner’s Office. “Our official opinion was completely uninfluenced by any prospects of lucrative consultancies with Mr Raithatha’s companies when, in the fullness of time, any of us retire from civil service employment in, say, the next three months.”

The company approached the four mobile network operators for full directory information, but opted not to pursue legal action to obtain it after being told to “bog off.” “They said their customers would far prefer an ‘opt-in’ approach,” said Mr Raithatha. “Quite apart from the implausible and frankly unnatural spectacle of a mobile phone company appearing to give a shit about its customers, we simply couldn’t operate this business on an opt-in basis. Opt-out is far more market-friendly. Just look at the helpful promotional email everyone gets so much of, and how opting-out works so well to staunch the flow!

“We would never, of course sell off the opted-out numbers on in the unlikely event our brilliant business plan hits the rocks, or if we feel like cashing out or anything. Promise.”

Privacy campaigners are also concerned at children being stalkable through the service. “But don’t worry, you can join our 0800 phone queue for two hours or pay a quid to text us an opt-out. We’ll take your child out of the database in only four weeks, promise! How many calls can they get in that time? Really!”

Mobile users hailed the initiative and its opt-out nature, with thousands of people organising to call the 0800 138 6263 opt-out number and the curiously unlisted mobile, office and home numbers of Mr Raithatha and his financial backers at investment firms 3i and DJF Esprit at thirty-second intervals in shifts around the clock. Each individual caller offered an opt-out facility covering calls from that one person, however, and also one for the many pizza, takeaway and marital aid deliveries to Mr Raithatha and his relatives, friends and business associates.

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BAGHDAD, Seattle, Wednesday (NNGadget) — Microsoft is discontinuing its Microsoft Money personal finance management product.

In a press release touting the third annual MSN Money “Customer Service Hall of Shame and Hall of Fame,” Microsoft was first place for shame, followed by XBox at number two and Windows Live Search at number three.

“It’s a mix of what’s going on in the market,” said marketing marketer Adam Sohn, “what makes sense for long-term for us and a little bit on consumer behavior. We have of course notified both customers.”

Other Microsoft products discontinued this year include OneNote, MSN Groups, Office Accounting, Office Live, PerformancePoint Server, the Origami netbook, the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference, the company picnic and five thousand employees. Though they’re still spending $100 million to advertise the Microsoft Bob Hope search engine.

The associated MSN MoneyCentral site provides Web content to help users manage their personal finances. “The site will continue,” said Mr Sohn, “as a resource for customers looking to manage their finances. We’ll be including lots of tie-in information from our Encarta encyclopedia.” A staffer frantically tried to get Mr Sohn’s attention at this point.

In keeping with the Great Recession and Microsoft’s financial prospects in the last year, the software will be rebranded and reissued as Microsoft Debt.

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UNLIMITED SUPPLY, There Is No Reason Why, Friday (NNN) — More than seven million Britons use illegal downloading sites that keep billions of pounds circulating inside the British economy rather than being sent overseas to US media companies or obscure tax havens, despite almost everything on offer being appalling rubbish no sane person would pay a penny for, according to unnamed researchers copying a passing number found in a 2004 press release from music industry lawyers trying to drum up business.

Intellectual Property Minister David Lammy said the report brought home the impact illegal downloads had on the UK economy as a whole. “If we take as read the music industry’s assumption that every download is a lost sale, then billions of pounds are freed up for ordinary people to spend on things of actual economic substance to keep local businesses healthy, rather than chasing phantom pseudo-value from things that have an inherent cost of reproduction of zero. This makes the whole economy more efficient and lets money go where it is actually useful, rather than to Bono’s numbered account in the Virgin Islands.”

The government says it will be hard to change attitudes to free downloading, particularly from the entrenched old media parasites. “Studies consistently show that downloaders buy more music. We have to stop this and get them downloading dodgy rips from BitTorrent, rather than official high-quality versions from iTunes.”

The report also noted that new, faster broadband services could increase file-sharing, which was already more than half of net traffic in the UK. The ISPs modestly declined credit for their part in helping Britain’s financial future, noting that it was their customers, the great British public, who had voted with their browsers to do the hard work of keeping the country afloat.

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GRASS MUD HORSE, Tiananmen, Tuesday (NNN) — BT, Britain’s biggest broadband supplier, has thoughtfully averted complete congestion of the Internet by throttling all use of the Internet on its cheapest broadband package.

Customers on the I Can’t Believe It’s Eight Megabits package have all Internet data flow cut off entirely under its “fair use” clause during “peak periods,” defined as being between the hours of 12:00 midnight and 11:59pm. “However,” said a customer service telephone voice menu, “the connection itself runs at the full eight megabits the entire time. That we guarantee absolutely.”

BT has recently sold the technology to China, where it was put into operation today, blocking Twitter, Blogger, Microsoft Bob Hope and the live webcam of the coffee pot at Cambridge University. “We will not put up with the drop in productivity social networking sites cause,” said a spokesrivercrab. “After the terrible onslaught of blue screens at the Olympics, we will stop at nothing to protect patriotic citizens from the influence of Microsoft. And they love us for it. Just find one who doesn’t!”

“Besides,” said the BT phone menu, “we’re still better than Virgin. A high bar to aim for, I know. But you get such better fail whales over a phone line than a cable.”

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This morning, our dear leader Steve Ballmer is unveiling our completely new search service, unrelated to anything we at Microsoft have ever done before: Bob Hope.

We spent lots of time listening to you, except when you told us how much MSN Search Live Search Kumo sucked ’cause you’re just wrong about that, to learn which buzzwordy Web 2.0 thingies you use search for today. Finding a webpage that has anything to do with the search terms you entered is so passé, dahling.

So today we’re introducing a new kind of search, that goes beyond traditional search engines that do tedious things like find stuff, to instead help you make faster, more informed decisions. (Windows 7 is peachy keen, by the way.) We think of Bob Hope as a Decision Engine. We’ve sued Stephen Wolfram into atomic dust using our patents on FAT and Mono, co-opted the Wolfram Alpha engine and swapped Mathematica for Visual Basic and Wolfram’s brain for the exhumed corpse of Bob Hope.

So why did we pick Bob Hope as the new core of our search? We needed a brand that was as fresh and new as our approach. It needed to be like the product: optimized for the Internet. A name that was memorable, short, easy to spell, and that would function well as a URL around the world.

And just look at these results!

What do we want?
Braaains.
When do we want them?
Braaains.
What do I need to run Windows 7?
Braaains.
What’s Bill Gates got that means you should buy everything you can from the company he founded?
Braaains.
What’s the final proof of Steve Ballmer’s equal genius to Steve Jobs?
Vistaaa.

This is something new, something improved! You need to try it! It’ll give so much more betterer results than that other search engine we can’t name because Steve will wedge another chair up our butts! Please, come and try our new and improved service! FOR GOD’S SAKE TRY THE DAMN SERVICE. OR THE PUPPY GETS IT. We’re Microsoft. We’re serious as a heart attack on this one.

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ZDNET, Mediocre Grauniad, Saturday (NNGadget) — I’ve been using Wolfram Alpha, the new web encyclopedia social search networking mathematics engine, for almost ten minutes now.

And I can tell you — despite fears it would create a black hole when switched on, ending all life on earth, it’s no iPhone killer.

It’s good, to be sure, and “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that” is the appropriate answer for so many queries (and “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input” is for pretty much all the others), but I can’t see Wolfram Alpha successfully vanquishing any such titans as iPhones, Twitter, Windows 7 or Zune.

Stephen Wolfram is less than amused. “Your petty queries miss the point. The queries Wolfram Alpha cannot answer are not worth answering. Until you foolish Internet users realise the value of my brilliant creation, you will merely continue to stumble about, blind and helpless, as your pitiful ‘human’ civilisation has done for so long. I knew I should have charged for it. You don’t deserve it free.”

But can it replace Facebook? Are we worthy of blurry drunk photos of girls we vaguely know from a knowledgeable, curated source? Will Wolfram Alpha add a third answer, “REPLY HAZY TRY AGAIN LATER”? I’ll be sure to be here all month, filling space with the finest analytical prognostication on the subject. It sure beats working.

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SNOW CRASH, The Metaverse, Wednesday (NNGadget) — US Air Force General Kevin Chilton, head of US Strategic Command, has said that attacks on the United States via the Internet could merit a conventional military response.

“I don’t think you take anything off the table. We’re particularly looking toward one group in Seattle.”

The Seattle-based insurgent group is thought to have seeded American government and military computers with millions of copies of malware that allows attackers easy access to any data stored on the computer, or indeed to take complete control of the computer and use it for their own ends as part of a massive “botnet” to mount further attacks. The malware, “Windows,” makes securing a computer running it almost impossible.

“Turning Seattle into a glass crater would only be undertaken strictly as the minimum required surgical military action,” emphasised Chilton, “and not in any way out of twenty-five years’ bitter resentment and frustration at computing machinery.”

Chilton stressed that members of the US military must begin to think of their computers as the front lines. “Do you realize that in addition to adding Windows to computers, why, there are studies underway to Windowsize salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk … ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children’s ice cream! I can no longer sit back and allow Windows infiltration, Windows indoctrination, Windows subversion and the international enterprise licensing conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!”

The Obama administration is currently reviewing the United State’s cyberspace defense policy. “We’re considering all options thoroughly,” said the President, closing his MacBook and looking lingeringly at the red button on his desk.

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CYBERSPICE, Brass Eye, Saturday (NNN) — Children’s charities are backing a private member’s bill proposed by Baroness Massey to make Internet-based retailers run age verification checks.

A check on twelve sites found that thorough checks were not being done. “You can buy a case of vintage Burgundy online from France without supplying fingerprints, driver’s license and a DNA sample!” said Baroness Massey. “This sort of thing is clearly responsible for juvenile delinquency and teenage knife crime, as heated discussions over the best pinot noir of the last decade come to blows.”

The move is expected to boost the economy. “It is too easy for children to buy alcohol, knives and violent video games online. If we make it harder, this will make it enticing.”

In a supervised test, a 16-year-old boy bought pre-paid credit cards and then went online to see if he could buy knives, drink, age-restricted DVDs, games and pornographic website subscriptions. The youth cautioned that insufficient data had been gathered and they definitely needed to do another six to twelve months’ testing before he could give any reliable conclusions as to what he had managed to obtain. And a two-terabyte USB hard drive. And a faster Internet connection.

“Our efforts to keep children safe are being seriously undermined by these ‘internet’ arseholes,” said Zoe fucking Hilton, publicity-with-menaces advisor for the NSPCfuckingC, weighing in as usual. “Any retailer we don’t like is a pack of fucking paedos and I hope they fucking die horribly. Cunts. But they can reassure us of their bona fides by giving the NSPCC money. Usual bank account, thanks. That’ll do nicely.”

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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.

The 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.”

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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.

“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.”

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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.

Fifty 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_

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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.

Outrage 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.”

“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.”

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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.

Twitter “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.”

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W 40th STREET, New York 10018, Tuesday (NNN) — Beleaguered Internet advertising phirm Phorm is hitting back at critics with StopPhoulPlay.com, in an attempt to lure Internet activists into herniating from laughter.

“It is clear that the campaign against Phorm originates in the sinister manipulations of Alex Hanff and Marcus Williamson,” said Kent Ertegun, CEO of Phorm, “who have used mind control lasers and the killer robot armies of the Open Rights Group and FIPR to deceive millions of Britons into a Communistic fervor of hatred against the engines of the free market and customer demand, the salesmen and marketers, the true creators and enablers of objective value.”

The website, designed in Microsoft Word, uses the infallible public relations format so successfully put into play by the ReligiousFreedomWatch.org site of the Church of Scientology, an upstanding community institution of similarly flawless repute. StopPhoulPlay.com reveals how:

• At the age of five, Hanff REFUSED to share his crayons with the little girl next to him, saying she was “poopy” and would only draw a picture to be used against him.

• At age twelve, Williamson accepted MONEY from his mother to buy sweets, but not to tell schoolmates in case they wanted some.
• Hanff and Williamson may have attempted to access POTENTIALLY ILLEGAL images blocked by the Internet Watch Foundation.
• Hanff and Williamson have used WIKIPEDIA at least once in their lives.
• Hanff and Williamson INVADED POLAND in 1939.

“Given the persistence with which they propagate incorrect information, we cannot rule out the possibility that a competitor is involved,” he said. “The competitor goes under the name ‘reality.’ Needless to say, we have no tolerance for an entity of such limited possibilities.

“These people are privacy pirates — people who steal privacy online, off the coast of Somalia. With Internet guns! And drugs! And child pornography!”

Mr Hanff and Mr Williamson said they were unsure whether to sue Phorm into atomic dust for gross defamation or just to let them continue with their infallible public relations work. Phorm shares have dropped from 405p to being rated a “serious infection risk” by the World Health Organization.

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