from the burn-baby-burn dept.
Is it just me, or would a huge fleet of flaming paper airplanes be a really cool thing to rain down upon your enemies?

from the resistance-is-floor-tile dept.
I just remembered part of a dream last night. In it, I told someone, "When an octopus becomes upset, it may eat itself."

I think I'm assimilated now.

from the great-!white-north dept.
It's the middle of December, five miles from Minnesota, and it's still warm enough that I can almost forget I've got a window open.

Either my system's running hot, or there's something seriously wrong with this picture.

from the normal-is-odd dept.
I was at Wal-Mart the other day, and some lady was there, getting her kid's ear pierced. The kid didn't seem too thrilled about the whole idea (which you could hear from across the store), but the lady made her go through with it anyway. I briefly considered making a comment along the lines of, "Yeah, lady, why don't we all poke holes in our children," but, due to a chronic case of I'm-not-George-Carlin-itis, decided against it. Instead, I started wondering:

Who the hell invented ear piercing?

I mean, think about it: At some point in history, some guy must have said, "Hey, I've got an idea! Why don't we all poke holes in ourselves and hang shit off 'em?"

Odd, eh?

from the merchandizing-merchandizing dept.
Just got an amusing piece of spam (all weird spacing is as seen in the original email):

Show your patriotism! Wipe with Osama bin Laden TP
and support a good cause!

Check it out! http://206.21.235.71/terrorists

p.s. Cool Patriotic T's too! Our server at

www.ihateterrorists.com was temporarily crashed by
cyber-terrorists! First they beat up the guy at the
7-11, and now this! We'll be back there soon!

If you would like to be removed please email: ILikeOsama@hotmail.com
Thank you.

The toilet paper looks (badly) Photoshopped, and they did spam me, so order at your own risk.

from the chocolate-covered-ants dept.
I was going to submit this as a real article, but I couldn't get past the formkeys bullshit. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go kill the Slashcode team with a giant stuffed Tux. Update: Added the link to stuffed tux, and what do I see?

"This form has been used already 3 hours, 9 minutes ago. You can not use a form and hit the back button to use it again.

[...]

* Please choose 'formkeys' as the category."

Since when is clicking Edit the same as using the back button?

from the and-he-puzzled-three-hours, until-his-puzzler-was-sore dept.
Ever get that feeling like the math coprocessor in your brain just burned out? That's how I feel right now. I never want to see another number again. I'm looking at the Edumacation icon in preview right now, and I'm thinking that 2 + 2 quite possibly could equal 5, because I don't have the mental energy to prove it wrong.

I need to work on something else for a while.

from the may-your-chains-set-lightly-upon-you dept.
I'd like to ask everyone not to sing along with the following until they are well out of my hearing range (Why any Slashdotters would be out here in the Land of the Cow anyway is beyond me. This isn't exactly Silicon Valley. But I digress.):

This is the war that never ends;
yes, it goes on and on, my friends.

Some morons started fighting it, not knowing what it was;
they're gonna keep on fighting it forever just because....

Repeat until either:

• The "War on Terrorism" ends,
• I smack you because you're still within earshot, or
• You are paid a visit by your friendly neighborhood jackboots, who remind you that "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

Thank you, and God Bless Amerik^Hca

from the department-of-redundancy dept.
It it just me, or is anybody else out there really sick of those morons who keep saying, "Isn't this a violation of the DMCA? It sounds like a violation of the DMCA! Don't you think it's a violation of the DMCA?" every time some act of reverse engineering that has nothing to do with the DMCA comes up? Don't you just feel like you want to see them torn limb from limb by a pack of rabid squirrels? I know I do.

from the so-easy-to-use-no-wonder-it's-number-one dept.
Somebody did a research paper on people who are too stupid to realize they're stupid.

I'd give an example here, but I'm more mature than that.

from the join-us-or-die dept.
According to Wired, the US government is planning to start recruiting "politically motivated" hackers in the weeks to come. Between this and Ashcroft, I'd say the whole thing looks like a giant good-cop bad-cop routine.

Ashcroft: "Hey, you! Yeah, you! Quit fucking with government websites, you little twerp! Do you want life in prison? Do you aspire to be a terrorist? Listen, you little bastard! If you think you can get away with this, you don't stand a snowball's chance in hell! I will find you, and I will bury you in the deepest hole–"
Cyberangels: "Please excuse him, he's having a bad day. See, we're having trouble getting intel on bin Laden and his pals. Maybe you can help us out here..."

I don't think they've thought this through very well, though. Hackers like to brag, we're not good with secrets. Even if we found bin Laden's Master Plan for World Domination, we'd probably post it somewhere to show off, and eventually al-Qaeda would notice and run back to their caves. Update: D'oh! Michael put up his article about 10 seconds after I started writing. Oh well.

from the comet-to-crash-into-earth dept.
Well, NASA's launching a new probe to study comets. Must be very interesting, because the BBC's got three different stories about it. Also worth noting is that the project is named Deep Impact. Yeah, just like the movie. Wonder how long before our not-so-little friends sue them. Update: Wired is getting into the act, too. Update2: Chalk up another one for the BBC.

from the hell-of-the-unfunny-comic dept.
Wired: Sklyarov Indictment 'Not Unusual'

[Insert Tom Jones here.]

—–—

[Insert humor here.]

—–—

Surgeon General's Warning: Do not operate journal.pl while drowsy. It will go down on your permanent record.

<B&W Evil Conscience>
"Extremely. Not. Good."
</B&W Evil Conscience>

All right, Slashdot's really pissing me off today. What the hell is going on? I can't search, parent links don't work, I'm seeing icons for articles that aren't there, and the only way to log in is to tick off users.pl with an invalid opcode.

Can we get 1.0 back already?

(Also, how come we have to preview before posting these, but Taco doesn't have to when he posts articles? Why, imagine if he forgot to close his italics tag! It could be horrible! Imagine how many not-so-subtle jabs would be aimed at him!) Update 10/19/01: OK, I'm ticked again. Today I got logged out in mid-post! At this point, I'm about ready to beat somebody to death with a stuffed Tux, though I can't decide whether I'd rather go after Tom "Every Anthrax other Anthrax word Anthrax is Anthrax" Brokaw or the Slashcode team...