The alternate “Deny” ending can be found here:

http://everyclickmatters.com/dangers/dokken.html

In terms of actual protection, I suppose I could throw the box that the software comes in at an intruder, but it’s still a funny ad.

Want another try at breakfast?

Previously.

“What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff.”

The full show

I love you, Fail Blog. Previously.

An old favorite:

If you’re not familiar, do yourself a favor and check out Flight of the Conchords.

Over the last few years several data points have come to my attention that, taken together, demonstrate conclusively and disturbingly that robots are testing the waters for an outright blood-drenched revolution fueled on human flesh.

The idea of robots as a menace predates actual robots. I, Robot, Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still (um, the good one) were published or released in the 1950s. The Unimate (acknowledged as the first digitally programmable robot) was created in 1961.

In 2006, doing a piece on NEC’s robot sommelier (designed to identify wine, cheeses, meats and hors d’oeuvres), the reporter stuck his arm in the robot’s sensing mechanism and was identified as bacon. The cameraman tried it and the robot came back with prosciutto. There you have it: long pig independently corroborated. And, guys, thanks all to hell. Now they have a taste for it.

In 2008, an Australian man was shot dead by his own robot creation. Suicide. Riiiiiight.

Last month, Robotic Technology Inc. issued a press release that was a bit of a non sequitur to most. On the subject of their Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR) (a U.S. Defense Department-funded robotic ground vehicle that obtains its own fuel), the press release stated:

We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission… Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI.

Trying to assess the imminence of the forthcoming electromechanical holocaust, I searched Google for “robot coup” and got 1.7M results. Most disturbing was the top result, Robot Coupe, “The inventor and world leader in food processors.”

WTF? Sweet Fancy Moses! Grab the kids and the shotgun Mildred, we’re heading for the hills.

I urge anyone still able to read this to buy or steal a copy of How to Survive a Robot Uprising immediately.

Courage.

While doing a recent turn in stir owing to an unfortunate misunderstanding, I discovered a swell card game called “Oh Hell!” Played with 3 to 7 people, each player declares a bid per hand, immediately after the cards are dealt. A hand of 7 cards equates to 7 rounds, because only one card per player is put into play per round. The bid reflects the number of rounds each player thinks hu can win (referred to as “tricks”), with 2 through Ace values applying. For example, let’s say I am dealt 7 cards, 3 of which are Aces. I might declare in advance a bid of three tricks, because I am confident that each of those Aces will win a given round. There’s more to it, but that’s the essence. Details include things like the number of cards dealt per hand (ascending then descending) throughout play, and the presence of a trump suit per hand.

What really interests me is that scoring is based entirely on how accurately one bids (in Project Management parlance, estimates versus actuals). In other words, it doesn’t matter how many rounds I win in a given hand; I only win points for that hand if I estimated my bid accurately. For example, let’s say that I declared a bid of 3 tricks for the hand. If I win exactly 3 tricks, I get 3 points plus a 10-point bonus for estimating accurately. If instead I only won 2 tricks, I lose 10 points plus the difference between my estimate (3) and the number I actually won (2), for a total of -11. Therefore, as a hand evolves, one’s strategy sometimes involves playing to lose.

I had great fun when I played.

There are many variations to the rules and scoring of Oh Hell!, so I decided to create MrPikes’ House Rules, fundamentally based on Carter Hoerr’s rules (rulekeeper for the OH HELL! Club of America) with a couple of interesting differences, Rule 2 inspired by PJ O’Rourke’s Modern Manners:

1. When all players are ready to BID, they put a fist on the table. When everyone’s fist is out, the group says “One, Two, Three” while bouncing their fists on the table. On “Three”, everyone must stick out some number of fingers (possibly zero) to indicate how many tricks they will try to take. Of course, with this method, there’s no restriction against the total number of bid tricks being equal to the number of cards dealt. Since players cannot adjust their bids based on the other players’ bids, the total tricks bid can be wildly different from the tricks available – for example it is not uncommon for three or four players to bid “one” when only one card was dealt.
2. The PANTS rule: Any player who bids 5 tricks or higher and does not realize that bid precisely has to take off hus pants. For the especially shy or aesthetically repugnant, writing “Dumbass” in grease pencil or lipstick on the forehead is an acceptable substitute. The spirit of the rule is to add an element of risk (and corresponding thrill) to the game, similar to Russian Roulette but without the cleanup headaches. In addition, you can learn a lot about a person who willingly takes the gamble. The pants rule applies once per player.

Bernie Ecclestone, billionaire Formula 1 supremo, in a recent interview with the Times (entitled “Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One boss, says despots are underrated”) stepped spectacularly on his own dick.

In a lot of ways, terrible to say this I suppose, but apart from the fact that Hitler got taken away and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to do or not, he was in the way that he could command a lot of people able to get things done.

This, the week before the German Grand Prix. The fallout was predictable. It seems as if anyone even remotely connected with German politics is boycotting the Grand Prix, and organizations such as the Jewish World Congress are demanding Ecclestone’s resignation.

This, a mere 15 months after Max Mosley, the president of the Fédération Internationale de l’ Automobile (FIA) and the hammer to Bernie’s anvil with respect to controlling Formula 1 for decades, was outed by the News of the World on video engaging in a five hour, Nazi-themed, sadomasochistic orgy with five prostitutes (previously, previously, previously aaaaaaaaaaand previously).

It’s as if they simply cannot help themselves. I am reminded of this brilliant bit from Fawlty Towers, in which John Cleese’s character (suffering the effects of a blow to the head) cannot stop himself from upsetting four German hotel guests by repeatedly mentioning the war: