Tag Archives: stupidity

Uh..Crack Kills, Dude

The Case for the Empire: Everything you think you know about Star Wars is wrong.

“STAR WARS RETURNS today with its fifth installment, “Attack of the Clones.” There will be talk of the Force and the Dark Side and the epic morality of George Lucas’s series. But the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good.”

Are Sharpies Illegal Now?

“Copy-proof” CDs cracked with 99-cent marker pen

Technology buffs have cracked music publishing giant Sony Music’s elaborate disc copy-protection technology with a decidedly low-tech method: scribbling around the rim of a disk with a felt-tip marker. Internet newsgroups have been circulating news of the discovery for the past week, and in typical newsgroup style, users have pilloried Sony for deploying “hi-tech” copy protection that can be defeated by paying a visit to a stationery store. “I wonder what type of copy protection will come next?” one posting on alt.music.prince read. “Maybe they’ll ban markers.”

Face It, Gov’t Rushing Biometrics

Machines at an airport fail face-recognition test

Random tests of facial-recognition technology at a Florida airport this spring show that it failed to identify even half of the employees who went through screening. The American Civil Liberties Union released the results of the first four weeks of an eight-week study at Palm Beach International Airport. According to the group, the system made a match only 455 out of 958 times that volunteers who had their faces recorded digitally in the computer system went through it.