This april fools' article possessed all the comedic subtlety of an episode of TOWIE.
Facebook buys Dummly from outernet prodigy Dick D'Miner
Your correspondent reports from 2023, via some kind of freak time continuum loop vortex in Google's soon-to-be-killed-dangerously-revolutionary Reader tool which has brought you tomorrow's news before it's even happened yet. Like, wow! That dying and completely irrelevant web advertising dinosaur Facebook, whose balding, …
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Tuesday 2nd April 2013 00:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: OK fine
In my experience, 2000 up votes no longer makes a silver badge. Maybe they've changed it to 2000 more up votes than down votes, or maybe there's a manual job somewhere that somebody hasn't bothered to run for a while, or maybe the whole shiny shiny badge system is generally being rethought?
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Monday 1st April 2013 10:12 GMT Cirdan
I rather liked it.
I knew what to expect from the title and sub, and I read it all the way through.
Kind of an IT echo of the stuff I used to read in Fantasy & Science Fiction mag way back in the dead tree days. Maybe not Isaac Asimov, but fun!
Thanks, Future Kelly!
P.S. There's a rogue surgeon at the edge of The Wastland (no net coverage) who'll do the implant removal... just don't think about it on the way there. Just tell him I sent you. I know he was practising as late as 2044, so you'll have time when you do decide. Bu my implant site still throbs in cold weather.
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Tuesday 2nd April 2013 13:06 GMT Robert Carnegie
This isn't it
The other one is about a company called SCO that claims to own every operating system whose name ends with "-ix", obscurely including Windows (Posix, or is that a kind ofi crewdriver?) No, not SCO. SCO was the real one.
This is an oblique parody of Summly, the software that reads for comprehension so you don't have to - allegedly; I'm expecting to see it fall flat on its face as it over-compresses valid news stories and converts them into accidental libels. We shall see, now that it's in the spotlight.
There also is prior art for Dummly - the parody - for instance, Charlie Brooker wrote a newspaper article in 2006 proposing a "Life GPS". It seems inconsequential to me, but I have read science fiction, so this sort of concept isn't astonishing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/sep/08/comment.charliebrooker
I also read a short story once where as far as I remember, everyone in the world, or at least everybody rich, spent their lives in a sort of robot suit that managed their physical comfort and social interaction. One day a young man felt that this wasn't satisfactory and he found a way to switch the thing off so that he could tell his girlfriend that he loved her without the message being robotically moderated. Then he switched it on again because unmoderated physical existence was a ghastly experience. Everybody thought this was wonderfully romantic, and from then on, most of these life suits came with an off switch, but no one ever actually used it, except for the original discoverers.
If you think that's bad, the same set of Charlie Brooker's articles has some discussions about looking for a wife himself, which I hope the charming Konnie Huq, whom he married subsequently in 2010, will never see. Ms. Huq, if you're reading this: be warned. You know what he's like and you took him on anyway, and we're not talking about a Blackbeard or a Rochester (I hope), but still... don't look.
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