Slashdot Mirror
Following April Fool's Day Around The World?
Here are some other questions that were submitted along the same vein:
David the Drunk asks: "Well this year, with people being much more comftable with the internet, the bogus stories were thick and heavy. I suspect my favorite is from The Age newspaper in Australia, citing The UK Guardian in an article of some humor claiming that Superman is communist and Batman should be a terrorist. Apart from the Slashdot postings (they don't count) what else was good. Pity the Age article is dated on the 2nd, but the Guardian article is from the 1st."
...and this one from mcdade: "Being Sunday and all it wasn't a good day to pull pranks on coworkers, but i'm sure some people have some good stories out there. Mine goes something like this:
A few years back I worked at a University for a small spin-off IT group put together to implement Lotus Notes across campus. So for april fools day, the developers wrote an email with a button to "optimize" your computer, telling people to click it. It would give a bunch of random terms and junk, run a percent meter then report to the user that the computer was optimize anywhere from 1 to 1000 percent (based on random number). It did absolutely nothing, besides report back to our db who had clicked it (and how many times, yes, people were clicking it multiple times to see if they could get bet optimization). Well those that figured out that this was a joke found it refreshing, those that didn't, well they complained to IT, who inturn went to the VP.
So we were all summoned to the VP's office, figuring we were on a death march, and it turned out that he found it funny and figured that people on campus should lighten up. He even told us a story about how his daughter and her friends really got him one year.
Time for everyone else to share."
For the record, all of the Ask Slashdot's that were posted during April Fool's stretch were all actually submitted to the bin, with the names changed to protect the victi-..er...guilt...I mean, innocent parties.
I saw that ad after the 'Files last night and even while it was running, I was going "HUH???" Then I looked at the website (thetruth.com) and I was stricken by the way that our attention can be grabbed like that - and then to point all that attention to a "dirty little secret." Katz, take note: the Internet IS making this a very different world. It's not all Shatner and sock puppets.
The worst April Fool's joke by far was on e2, mentioned a while back in slashdot.
The e2 gods write a Perl script to convert write-ups in to l33t-speak, or backwards, and that was funny.
Then they started playing with the buttons and the XP, and that was funny.
Then they created troll accounts, and turned the chatterbox in to an AOL chat-room which was funny. For about three minutes.
Then they pretended e2 had been rooted, and while it was a little funny, people started getting seriously panicked.
Then they started flaming/impersonating users' who had left the system(respected noders in one case), which wasn't funny.
And their trolling continued for fourteen hours. Which was not funny.
As a result, at least one furious noder has left, and the reputation of the e2 Gods has become, well, a little tarnished.
Granted, it's their database, etc., but it relys on noders, and it relys on noders respecting the power structure of e2. To quote a node on the subject: "Ack! You've lost the trust of the noders!"
Posted as AC because I have an acct. with the same nick on e2, and and the e2 Gods have already displayed more than a little bad judgement when nuking write-ups.
This year was weak; Slashdot's attempts fell flat because, well, most were way too obvious (eg the Dalnet being bought by X has been done *every* year somewhere on the net). The online cartoonists didn't appear to band together this year to do much as they did in the prior two. Usenet posts that were in the 4/1 flavor were also too obvious.
I think that like how USENET and other parts of the web have suffered from the masses being introduced to it, so has the internet tradition of 4/1's. It's not some jokes were well planned, but the majority of what I saw was certainly not in the flavor of how it was done years ago.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The Observer (the UK Guardian's sister Sunday paper) had a story about a project to print harcopy versions of all the classic literature available on the Web, bind them into volumes, and lend them out from "Cyber-Libraries"...
On TV, "On The Record" had a topical pre-election piece about proposals to increase voter turnout by giving voters lottery tickets and free sherry just for turning up... also advertising on voting slips (Coca Cola ads were okayed, but a Wonderbra "Hello Voters" ad was supposedly vetoed)....
--
As I remember, that was paid for by the folks doing it, not by Sun.
This is either the most elaborate, professional-looking prank Web site I've seen yet, or it's rather disquieting, to say the least. It gives new meaning to the name "Internet gag."
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Same in Canada, except that the division is more supposedly along the lines of "essentials of living" versus "convienence food." It applies to a *lot* of things, beyond food.
What's most perturbing, though, is that it'd so damn illogical. Toilet paper: deemed essential and therefor not taxed. Tampons/pads: deemed *non*-essential, and taxed!!
It's fucking stupid.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
He is already writing Ultimate X-Men, IIRC. However, as you state it seems like part of a Grant revamp of the X Continuity, which is convoluted to say the least.
I think Millar was picked up for the X gig on the strength of a 'Marvel Elseworlds' about a year ago, which was an alternate take on this and various other Marvel characters. This isn't Millar's first Marvel work though, you need to go back to Skrull Kill Krew co-written by Grant Morrison.
With Earth2, I think it was Frank Quitely's artwork that rounds it all off, it looks wonderful. I might be biased though, I used to live with a stone's throw of all of the aforementioned. That Grant Morrison is a weird looking guy...
Currently Millar is working on the ultraviolent Authority & Ultimate X-Men. That's a pretty elaborate April Fool.
Forcing comedy is like the government issuing an edict: "This material is intended to be funny. Under section 314(d) of the Lighthearted Material Act, under penalty of imprisonment, you are now required to laugh."
I will say, though, I enjoyed the Python/Perl merger. I still think it would be a good idea!!!
Whoa, flashback to reading Schroedinger's Cat...
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Ok, One April Fools joke was funny, but then we started getting a bit out of hand, in my opinion, when like every story on slashdot was an A.F. joke *sigh* hehehe
Yes, the Concorde is perhaps a case of regional one-up-manship subsidized by oppressive British and French governments. If all the common people ever gain power back within Britain and France, there'll surely be serious hell to pay: new gibbets and new guillotines, that's the order of that year! How long can people put up with such high taxes, poor services, declining economies? When will all you poor sods have had enough of it? Class system, my fuckin ass! Obsolete! When's _your_ revolution, suckahs?
Okay, maybe that was a bit over the top, but you get my drift. Socialism doesn't work! It devolves into statism. Read Hegel, pay attention! Try real democratic capitalism.
Reaching beyond the bounds of Earth, however, is a worthy endeavor, not at all to be confused with subsidizing a couple dozen people with more money than sense per trip across the Atlantic supersonic, mainly for the glamour / cachet of merely having done it, a few thousand times (less the unfortunate losses). Bunch of self-important rich assholes, that's all. Exploring space is a very worthwhile endeavor, though. We can have no higher ambition than to get off this little rock eventually, if we're really going to survive long term. Explore and grow, or die. That's the imperative for intelligent species, which we may be approaching. The jury's still out, but I have to hope we're worthy.
And the Moon missions were the highlight of our many thousands of years of evolution. It is tawdry and tragic that they were cut short by a stupid little losing war (Vietnam costs killed NASA's funding). That a space program still exists at all is simply a reflection that scientists still have some voice in politics, and that some politicians are not the dolts we assume (and are right about, mostly). It is an imperative that we continue to expolore, and to question. The alternative is stagnation and a host of concomitant evils you can barely imagine. You won't want to live on an Earth that gave up on exploring science, and space. That's the threatened Armageddon, last days, everyone dies!
I reject your major views, in the strongest terms. If we have no surplus for science, for space exploration, then we are just animals, and we will die and fade away, forever.
"Mmm hmm..."
"Well, I sort of stopped taking the pill a few weeks ago."
"<Stammer>"
Unfortunately the train arrived at my stop and I couldn't stay to hear whether she was messing with him or not.
I woke up sunday morning and someone had set all my clocks 1 hour back.
---
--
I then walked out of the bathroom yelling, "Heather, I think it went in too far!"
She was not amused...
Rader
This BBC article lists some april fools from around the world.
It includes a excellent Russioan one where a news program reported that the government was to make April the 1st a National holiday to reduce inefficiences resulting from dealing with April Fools jokes. The story was, of course, a Joke.
EZ
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
We pulled a good on my boss there. Me and the other Linux admin in our office spent the last few months cooking this one up.
.procmailrc that would redirect all of his incoming email through redneck.pl (and keep originals copied safely elsewhere) A root cron job was setup to swap this with his real .procmailrc at midnight april 1, and move them back at midnight april 3 (we wanted to make sure we got him on a workday too ;-> ) It worked wonderfully, I got a call this morning from the boss laughing hysterically asking me to please turn it off now.
We filtered all of his incoming email through a redneck filter we wrote in Perl. That is we translated all of his incoming mail from english to redneck english (ie 'computer' becomes 'new-fangled-computatin device' etc...)
What we did was write a little perl script that contained about 30 substitutions from english to redneck. We then wrote a
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
The official Star Wars site has news on the upcoming Episode V, tentatively titled "The Empire Strikes Back". There's a still of the new movie, but these things are just so gosh darn hard to make out on these monochrome monitors.
Oh, also, Lucas announced that he WILL make episodes 7, 8, and 9. CNN has the story. Like a friend of mine found out, you should probably read ALL of this article before you start celebrating.
+-- (Score:-1, Moderator on Power Trip)
Here in Florida prepared foods are taxed, others are not. If you buy a pre-made burrito (Taco Belch, grocer deli) - taxed, buy the makings and do it yourself - not taxed.
---
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
Especially ironic is the fact that the ad was paid for with Tobacco industry money (TheTruth is funded by the Americain Heritage Foundation, that was set up as part of the settlement between the Tobacco industry and the States in 98).
Teeheehee Oops!
--
Remove the rocks to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
That was why I believed it at first. I was just sorta thinking they had given it an official name.
There was a cute message sent out about the computer club (YUCC) at my former university being shut down:
m eatloaf.html) and have embezzled all of our funds to support their addiction.
Dear YUCC members,
It is my sad duty to tell you that after the 2000-2001 academic year YUCC will cease to exist.
During the past year we have had our share of problems. The venture that the YUCC executives had invested heavily in, spatulaXchange.com, has died a gruesome death at the hand of current economic conditions. Not only that, but several of our executives have become addicted to caffinated meatloaf (http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/things/looflirpa/
Likewise, discussions with the computer science department for funding ended when department chair Prof. Jenkins said "You have no chance to survive make your time. Ha ha ha" and faded from our view screen.
What is left of YUCC will be sold to AOL, since they own everything else and we will be auctioning off the patents that we received on hamster-powered computers that is so desperately needed in second world countries such as Elbonia.
On a personal note, I would like to thank everyone for their continued support - especially my agent Brian Eno and the good folks at RedMeat. YUCC will surely live on in each any every one of our hearts.
Sincerely,
Alex Anglin
YUCC President.
...I announced that I was closing down my site. It is a pretty popular tropical fish discussion board, and at midnight I put up a completely serious announcement that replaced the main page with this page. People started panicking at once. Some good information on how they felt can be seen on this BBS thread.
I had planeed this out since mid-February and only a few other people (most not associated with the site) knew about it. I think it's pretty funny given the current dot-com climate.
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
here is our AF article. I got plenty of emails from people saying how good it was and a few from people wanting more info on it. :)
------
James Hromadka
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
There was a good one a few years back on PlanetQuake, where they'd redirected the site to a mirror on geocities, with a news item that they couldn't pay the hosting bills any more. It was very funny, especially with all the popups etc. Geocites must have taken an extra hammering that day :P.
Forgive me for asking, but being an American and educated in my American public school system, I must ask:
What in the hell is west of Alaska???
Sadly, this thinking is so true to some here in the US...
Rich
Rich
Rich
Rich
As the above poster said, there is already a ubiquitous global time, UTC which is pretty much the same as GMT. Why would you need anything else? The French tried to introduce metric time after their revolution and it failed.
Two things I would like to see change in the time systems we use though. 1)Daylight Savings. If you want an extra hour of sunlight in the evenings, just get up an hour earlier and 2)Lose the AM/PM thing. military time makes much more sense.
Rich
Rich
Rich
I am 99% sure this is an April Fools joke, and if it isn't, well, life if going to start sucking:0 401.lunar.html
http://www.npr.org/programs/watc/features/2001/01
Basically, Weekend All Things Considered ran this story about a company called LunarCorp projecting ads on the moon with a laser. Except LunarCorp is the former name of a GE bone density company, and *no one* else had the story.
_sig_ is away
It's clever, because people think of claims, not denials, as being the usual April Fools day fodder.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
The newspaper I work for, ran a story about taxation on food services. Basically, if you eat at the restaurant, the tax is 24% if you decide to take it with you, its' 12%. This has the funne effect that when you order a latte grande mocca etc. etc. with a lid, it's 12% tax. Without a lid it's 24% tax. 79% of the people taking the poll on sunday voted "April fool?" in a web poll...
It wasn't!
I did this one last year.
I was working at a large company in their web development group. They had a small server farm that the web group used for testing new stuff and for new development. I was not really in charge of the farm, but people would always come and bug me when they needed help with it. The servers were almost entirely NT.
SysInternals has this really spiffy NT screensaver that looks like the WinNT BSOD, along with a fake reboot, which will then go into a fake disk check, which finds fake errors, and repeats. So, the night before, I wrote a little script that made the BSOD screensaver the default on all of the servers.
The next morning, people kept coming to my cube and...
PERSON: All the servers crashed!!!!
ME: Really? (clickity clickity) I can still ping them. Are you sure they're dead?
PERSON: They look dead. I'll go look again.
Minutes later...
PERSON: Really! All of them! BSOD!
ME: ROFL
I caught 3 different people that morning.
Sig? What sig? Do I have to have a sig!?!?
April Fool's is not on April 1st everywhere in the world. It many countries it is called "innocent's day" which is on December 28th. And I am sure that other countries celebrate it on different days. So for some of these people, reading these odd news on April 1st makes absolutely no sense and it may take them a while to realize that they are not for real.
Thank you! I'm so glad it's over. Ever time I came to slashdot on 4/1 I felt like I was in 5th grade again - horrible corney jokes that not even the dumbest readers could completely believe.
User Friendly, a hilarious internet comic strip, had a practical joke played on the cartoonist by the techies who run the site. They had uploaded photographs showing one of his main characters being abducted while requesting a ransom from his recent IPO funds.
Basically the banks web site was going to have an online ATM that printed money, so that really lazy people didn't have to go to the hole in the wall.
Money coming out of your printer .... I wonder how many people would have tried it - I know I would have :-)
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
god knows it's expensive to make this wreck fly nowadays
Because one Concorde had a fatal accident (because a part fell of a crappy old DC-10 onto the runway), does not make it a wreck!
We Brits are proud to have a hand in the only Supersonic passenger airline, and the day they stop Concorde we may as well shut up the Commonwealth and elect a president!
Anyway: what was the Pilot wearing when Concorde crashed?
Blazer and flares
It many countries it is called "innocent's day"
The definition of "innocent's day" on slashdot should be updated to read:
Innocent's Day: the first time a newcomer clicks on the g0atse link from behind his corporate websweeper proxy"
Doh!!
Or if you're really good, you hide NO April Fools pranks among a list of *true* news items that all look like they aren't.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"So is it a joke or not?!?
"Well, your story seems very compelling, Mr. Jackass, I mean, uh, Simpson. So I'll just type it up on my invisible typewriter. Dum dee dum dum." -- Chief Wiggum
It goes on to say that people will pay $.25 for each download and will only be available on your hard drive for 48 hours, at which point you pay again. I especially like the part where it says that when you sign up, you'll be sent a "coin recognition box" that connects to your USB port, thus requiring you to pay cash: "It even takes Canadian coins."
I had a pretty good chuckle.
They carried a story which said that there was a new box, which can be put onto your telephone, and which will download all the webpages onto your hard drive, so that you can browse offline. and then it went ahead to say that it uses some kind of latest wireless technology that there is no telephone bill for you ;-)
sadly, the link is gone with time...
This morning as Senators assembled in the chamber, somebody yelled out "April Fools!" and John McCain burst into tears. He knew at once what had happened. A vast conspiracy of 100 senators and 400+ house members worked dilligently to keep him in the dark, all the while adding amendments to ensure the bill's unconstitutionality (i.e. harmlessness).
The full story can be found here.
A company called "truth" (no joke) ran an ad on several major networks (quicktime movie here) with a "tobacco industry spokesperson" on it, saying that every cigarette had been recalled due to "health concerns" and that cigarettes would not be back on the shelves until there were absolutely no health risks..."because if there's two things the tobacco industry cares about, it's your health, and your trust. Thank you." The ad then flashed "april fool's" and the URL.
-- NOTICE TO BULK E-MAILERS: Pursuant to US Code, Title 47, Chapter 5, Subchapter II, 227, spam me and die.
http://www.cnn.com@sci-tech@3630071112/new_010401/ alert/breaking_news.html
OK, yes, I'm related to this one ...
- Jodiamonds
I've actually caught many people aside from the typical April fools pranks. Using obfuscated URL's I've spoofed everything from Slashdot, ABCnews, Napster, CNET, Republican National Committe, and others.
Aside from the typical Slashdotter, or other geek for that matter, I've managed to fool many people into thinking these some of the things were real.
So slashdot went a little overboard for one day... So what?! Its one day out of the year where anyone can be silly just as you were when you were a kid telling someone his shoe was untied then yelling APRIL FOOLS! Get a grip and stop bitching if April fools pranks offended you, its one day out of the year, and no one was hurt by it. (well maybe someone precious ego)
360 degrees of Karma
FuckedCompany.com getting hacked by idealab! employees angry at the beating and ridicule their company has taken on Fucked Company's news and message boards.
Classic!
The whole idea of an April fool's prank is to hide it among other *true* news items and make it so *nearly* credible that people will get caught out. The Slashdot "editors" couldn't have shown what a childish bunch of idiots they are any better if they'd *tried*. So, to show how funny you guys are and what a wonderful sense of humour you have you decide that you're gonna give us a special gift : on April 1st *every* *single* article on /. for the last 48 hrs has been utter tripe.
And now here you are just rubbing it in : "Haha ! by playing on the time zones we can extend April 1st to a 48 hours day, haha ! We rule !"
Now you've got a year to go away and figure what makes an April fool's joke *good*. It's gonna be hard but 364 days may just be enough.
Get clue or grow up.
ircII EPIC4-1.0 was released on april fools day. Teh fact that it was april fools day and the release number is 1.0... well I assume it's a real release, and am using it now. If it's a joke, well I guess I am a person who fell for it. Just feeling very paranoid at the moment :-)
And it seems Sun has a sense of humour (and the budget) to pull stuff like "This year the wall between Scott and Bernie's office was removed to make a lovely 15 yard dog leg right golf hole. Complete with elevated tee and green. The green is protected by two sand traps and yes there is a small pond. It is completely turfed and a golf cart sits out front with a bumper sticker reading. "Honk if you are a Sun VP". (More here.)