Slashdot Mirror

Is there some sort of contest for the most hated corporation going on between Microsoft, SCO, and Verisign?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the new and improved Axis of Evil.

No, this is not Great Britain, this is Slashdot, which is internal... internatina... intranationa... oh fuck, it's all-American anyway. (See also here for how to filter out uninformed comments like the one you replied to.)

Life imitates satire...

Greece is an island off the coast of North Latvoania.

It beacme an island after we bombed it during the Olympics to keep the Columbian drug lords from taking the Israelis hostage again.

Damn Columbians. We should never have put our capital there.

Too bad they didn't try this a few years ago. If they had, the Europeans could have paid them in Monopoly Euros.

I'm sure that some people would pay 699 units of Monopoly currency to see McBride shut up. Oh, wait... but then, where would our daily /. entertainment come from?

Alright. So... um... who maintains New Zealand's defense?

Maybe they have an agreement with Canada?

Amazon.com is definetly the business model to follow. In the past 5 years they have been experiencing true booms in business.

I'll agree that Amazon.com is a business model to follow, if you don't mind a model like this:

1. Get open-ended financing
2. Sell everything at a loss
3. ???
4. Profit!

Now, I'm obviously not an expert, but my Googling only finds a couple of quarters where Amazon turned a profit, and the latest news is that the company's losses were almost $40 million over the last 9 months -- and that was considered a Good Thing because it was a 75% drop in losses.

When I was in Junior Achievement, they told us that successful companies made "larger profits," not "smaller losses." Amazon may not be going anywhere anytime soon, but treading water (even if you're the size of a battleship) hardly seems like a "success".

So personally I'm relaxed about West European countries (and I include Canada, Australia and New Zealand in that group as culturally they are) having nukes

Canada has nukes? Shit, most people are surprised someone even gave them a warship.

They don't really have much choice in obeying the law. Bullshit. When they go public and have twenty billion, they can ignore the law like the rest of the big corporations do. Or rather, they can use a time-tested strategy which calls for squads of lawyers to engage the regulatory menace from the most favorable venue.

I fear that if Google heads down this path, they will become sucky. Make that more sucky -- Google bombing has become de rigeur for every wanna-be huckster out there. Google is great for ferreting out information (nobody google bombs their links for "p3b-f bios") but not so good when I'm looking for an online drug store or a porn site. And that's fine with me. In fact it's better than fine, it's wonderful. I can find what I need on Google, unless it's something some idiot thinks they can make money on, which unfortunately is a lot of stuff.

Let's say Google has their IPO. Everybody here knows that suddenly facing the need to keep that stock price up will lead to stupid decisions in search of new "revenue streams." Which will lead to banner ads, pop-ups, spam, and all the crap we see all over the portal sites.

The damn Fortune article predicts as much: "AOL, eBay, and Amazon--are also drawing battle plans. All are aiming for what they see as Google's weak spot: lack of customer lock-in." You've got to be kidding me. Google is the de facto go-to guy for Internet searches, google bombing notwithstanding. They achieve "lock-in" by... lemme think... HAVING THE BEST SEARCH ENGINE. But I guess simply having a superior product isn't enough. So let's get users to subscribe, then sell their email addresses, and provide them with valuable messages from our partners. Yeah that'll work.

To the brains behind Google: Get rich off your IPO, pull the golden ripcord, sail the world for a year, then get back to technology. Money ruins everything, and it will surely ruin Google.

He must have gone to college with this consultant.

Canada has a warship?

(Sorry, had to be done. I love our neighbors to the north!)

In other news:

The American air force has developed a new stealth recon helicopter. Surprisingly it has been one of the cheapest innovations ever to come out of the US military which not too long ago was under fire for its mismanagement of funds, and loss of a multi million dollar jet.

"We never even realized we had it until a few days ago." Stated Cornel Smith, "But what's most surprising is that it came from our Delta force. They have no R&D budget, do they... this is like that time we discovered Canada has battle ship."

This technology has not yet been perfected insiders say; they are still having trouble finding some software which will make the damb thing run. No one seems to understand how the Delta force has created something so technically perfect, and yet has no idea about how to make some compatible software.

The Air Forces initial position was surprisingly "no comment", however after the initial posting of this article they responded that "The Delta force doesn't exist... you can't prove anything".

Are at Satirewire.

I hear it's very laid back there.

Damn, the last browser with good VTP support.

Americans Annoyed

They tried: House sends spam bill to Senate; Senate spam filter deletes it

The Canadians have a military?

Canada has a warship?

It's pretty funny, read it.

Canadian Warship Seizes Tanker In... Wait... Canada Has a Warship?

And guess what our primary source of hydrogen is right now: natural gas

Well, at least the largest supplier of natural gas is Canada, not Middle East tyrants - that's a bonus, don't you think?

I refer worst support cases to Silicon Pines ACF.

Reminds me of an old satire wire article:

VIAGRA SPILL REVIVES LAKE MICHIGAN

One of the funniest things I've ever seen!

Reminds me of an old satire wire article:

VIAGRA SPILL REVIVES LAKE MICHIGAN

One of the funniest things I've ever seen!

Either you read* SatireWire or you should go through their archives, specifically looking at http://satirewire.com/news/0011/nader_wins.shtml

*That's past tense BTW... why does english use the same word for both?

Americans outraged that corporations cheat just like they do

TRANSCRIPT

This old SatireWire article has a similar joke. If you want a mild laugh, Google for "initial pubic offering" and marvel at the number of hits.

An Axis of Evil or similar things need three members. So what is the next company?

AT&T TO CUT WORKFORCE 120 PERCENT

Funny and brutally honest. Too bad they stopped putting out new stuff.

I'm sorry, but that joke's been done here.

ObSatireWire: Canadian warship seizes tanker in... wait... Canada has a warship?

"Strangely enow, this SatireWire story lately has been zipping around the 'Net attributed to John Cleese. That's flattering and funny and all, but now I'm getting so many emails asking who "really" wrote it that it will make my life easier to nip it here. I apologize for any disappoinment, but the story was written by Andrew Marlatt. It first appeared on SatireWire on Feb. 1, 2002, and was subsequently published in several major newspapers, including this version still available at The Washington Post. So that's the deal. All the best -- Andrew"

I does sound like something Cleese would write, but it was written by Andrew Marlatt.

It's times like this that I miss Satirewire dearly. I liked their stuff much better than the Onion and BBSpot.

Well, if this can happen, Australia could also bump into Asia, couldn't it ?

If people keep pointing it out, it is only a matter of time befor Jupiter starts developing a negative self-image. It is then only a matter of time before Jupiter stomps off sulking and slamming doors, taking it's vast gravitational field with it and leaving us to collect our own space junk.

No offense, but I don't think you really understand the "adult" industry on the web.

Not all of us want to spam you with our website.
Not all of us want to trick you into visiting, or deluge you with popups should you ever commit the horror of trying to leave the site.
Not all of us have a blatant disregard for wanting to keep kids out of our sites.

Personally, I'd love to transfer EVERY domain we have over to a ".xxx" or ".adult" or ".sex" or whatever TLD. Existing *.com domains we'd setup to redirect to the *.xxx version.

Yes, something like this would be voulentary, and yes there would be people out there who wouldn't do it. However, I'd love there to be a way that we could easily segregate our adult sites away from the rest of the internet, so that those who DO want to block such things can do with a reasonable accuracy.

It really could go either way. With a *.xxx policy, you'd have very few false positives (who would register and use their .xxx domain, knowing that many people would block it?), but a decent number of false negatives until it caught on.

With a *.kids policy, you knot only have to have someone very STRICTLY controlling its use (or it becomes useless), you'd be forced to limit browsers use to just *.kids if you wanted to play it safe. That's not going to leave much of the internet left until it had a real critical mass going.

You'd also have to deal with the sticky subject of what exactly IS .kids material? What's okay for 15 year olds isn't okay for 7 year olds. Whose idea of what's acceptable do you use?

99.99% of the adult webmasters out there would LOVE a way to keep kids out of the sites. We would love a simple check box that every ultra-conservative letter-writing crusader could check that would make sure they never saw our sites. Yes, we use ICRA style tags that are meant as content advisories to browsers, but every attempt at making THOSE known to users have failed.

I can understand some of the reasons people have for not wanting an "adult only" tld, but I think its use would have a much greater public good than... oh, say... .aero?

Anyone have any links to a really funny Windows lambasting? I'd enjoy being proven wrong.

Yeah, plenty on Satirewire

I agree - seems that these people only want the support of US citizens. The whole site seems to be US biassed even though it claims to be international.

I'm not going to support it... Neither should anyone else.
Why is that site so incredibly biassed towards US? It's supposed to be international.

> Ever bought a foreign DVD only to discover it
> won't play on your American DVD player?

I leave you with this classic article:

http://www.satirewire.com/news/0010/international. shtml

Yes, well, perhaps you haven't quite yet worked out that the INTERNET is an INTERNATIONAL medium, and that what with AUSTRALIA being a COUNTRY in the WORLD then you are very likely to have stories concerning it.

Particularly more so than the somewhat less "developed" countries such as Khazakstan, Guatemala, and Bangladesh where little tech news/discoveries/events are happening..

I'm guessing you are an american right? Too bad, but I have no axe to grind. I aint an Aussie either, but it's people like you who make this Americans annoyed by all this international shit on the internet report all the funnier.

Anyone noticed the amount of american stories appearing on /. recently? Give me a break son.

Oh, and the relevancy of the story to readers is inherent to the competition to discover the PM of Australia's email addre....ahh...forget it

Yes, but can you have a conversation with Google?

Reminds me of this

This is a very funny piece of investigative journalism people.
Americans annoyed by "all this international shit" on the internet
This is the article that I thing the original poster meant to link to.

But disbanding the army is a canard. Almost no one recommends that. The issue is how much, of $350 billion+ (the link is joking, but the figure is about right) is appropriate, or could be diverted to other projects. I assumed the original poster was referring to military waste. How much will the Iraq war cost? Is it necessary? The so-so peace has been maintained for many reasosns economic and diplomatic, in addition to military. There are many options, I don't think it can be said we have the best ones.

Yes, think of the servers!

Yo Grark ranted ...
Committee Meeting, Day 1 9:00am

MS: OpenSource Bad
OS: Microsoft Bad
Japan: Why?

MS&OS: Shit good question.

..... Post commission decision ....

This separation should be extended further.

Pity satirewire is gone...

No, acctually it is "not a goddamn scooter": "Inventor Unveils Machine That's Not A Goddamn Scooter, OK?"

There are programs that can encrypt plaintext to plaintext, usually converting things like normal email conversations into Shakpearean sonnets. I'm wondering if it weren't possible to build one that used hate speach or terrorist-manifesto keywords to confound 'the man.'

Starving, Dying Poor to Get Much-Needed Net Access

Okinawa, Japan (SatireWire.com) The world's poorest nations reacted with elation yesterday after learning the G-8 economic powers have pledged to bring them into the digital economy by wiring their countries. "With access to stock quotes, entertainment news, and streaming video pornography, I will finally be able to feed my family," said Jamil Jurawa, who lives near a contaminated well in a small east Gambian village. "This is a great day and I hope not to die of dysentery before it ends."

In late July, the Group of 8 authorized a Digital Opportunity Taskforce, or "Dot Force,'' to investigate how to wire the Third World and help bridge the rich-poor technology gap. Relief agencies denounced the plan as absurd, insisting that food and medicine are needed first. But the Dot Force argued that information is also critical, and to prove its point, it provided computers and Internet access to Jamil Jurawa and his brother Tamar, who lives in a neighboring Gambian village. The two exchanged instant messages that, said Dot Force members, exemplify the knowledge-sharing power of the Internet:

"Tamar, I have no food. Do you have food?"

"Jamil, I also have no food. But tonight Britney is to chat at E-Online!"

"Good one! I am ROFLDM (Rolling On The Floor Laughing and Dying of Malnutrition)."

"OK! CTFN! (Contracting Typhoid Fever Now)."