Boffins' keyboard ELECTROCUTES Facebook addicts Cunning MIT student boffins have come up with something marvellous: a keyboard that sends a jolt of electricity into those who spend too much time on Facebook. The Pavlov Poke is the brainchild of MIT PhD candidates Robert R. Morris and Daniel McDuff, who are trying to complete their dissertations but find obsessive Facebook …
In 500 years aliens will land on his planet and find that the demise and extinction of the human race was due to the contribution Facebook made to human life.
Where the addiction to Facebook took people away from their daily lives, where they sat infront of computers and screens for hours forgetting the very basics of eating, washing and working.
Food ran out, shops closed, until finally power stations stopped running and batteries ran out.
Those few left, who hadn't died of starvation or stress then succumbed to diseases and depression, without Facebook they just lay down sighed and died.
The aliens, not understanding Facebook conducted a study and in 50 earth years their civilisation died out.
Facebook was then considered a plague and any planet unlucky enough to fall under its charms was quarantined and destroyed.
And the first alien anthropologist blew off the dust and fired up one of the old machines and noticed it had a funny photo of a cat, which he sent to an alien archeologist who liked it and discovered he could change his status to "laughing at a cat picture". He also decided he liked the alien who'd sent him the picture sooo much he wanted to be his "friend", so clicked that button and decided to tell another alien about it rather than do any boring Earth archeology work...
Before anyone gets upset at the headline, I must say our house dictionary and style guide defines electrocute as injure or kill (my emphasis).
C.
Clearly your house dictionary and/or style guide needs to be updated.
In this case, the shock is clearly intended to be of benefit to the keyboardist, so in any case no injury or death should be anticipated.
By the way, where can I buy one of these for my Wife and daughter?
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When did that happen? I was certain that they were all pink but my memory is a bit unreliable. You'll be telling me next that they don't all wear tutus and do ballerina dancing - just before the spiders start coming out of the walls.
PS a study actually shows that "using Facebook a lot lowers self esteem"???
Now that's what I call karma.
I once spent three days searching for elephants (in an area with lots of trees and bushes). I couldn't find them anywhere! The problem was that I was looking for large grey things. Eventually I found them, and they were red, which is why I'd missed them before. Turns out that elephants enjoy coating themselves in mud, and the mud there was red mud. Fail icon is for myself for being so bad at finding the world's largest terrestrial animal.
Not for those of us who loathe tobacco, find booze dulling and get bored quickly wasting time on unsocial sites attempting to find if there is intelligence in "cyberspace" (or cubespace if at work) ElReg excluded of course. Are some intelligences around there. What happened to self discipline ?
These idiots are young..... but the Farce is strong within them!
How wet are people that are unable to use a little self discipline, I say Birching is too good for the blighters.
Too bad a shock facility is not built into all PCs and their derivatives including all the smart phones being used for texting, Farcing and game playing while people are walking or driving.
One of my (New) pet hates are people using their phones while attempting (or not) to steer a supermarket trolley.
I swear I am going to kill someone with a bottle of Ariel liquid before too long.
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Unfortunately for those involved in this, the work of Pavlov and the behaviourists on the conditioned response showed that punishment did not extinguish the desire to make the targetted response, it merely inhibited it; thus eventually producing mentally screwed up experimental subjects.
The most efficient way to extinguish a response is to stop reinforcing it. Therefore a more effective answer would be to ensure that any attempt to access the undesirable url resulted in a 404, for example: or perhaps redirect to a really boring site. I'm sure you can think of one.
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How is it a brainchild? I seem to recall a certain BOFH article that involved electrical feeds through the keyboards - although ST has better ideas of using metal tracking on the keyboard keys themselves.
To be honest, though, this doesn't really seem like anything to 'wow' anyone. Two idiots with no self control showed how they like to punish themselves...if I want to watch that there are plenty of adult sites I could visit - and those guys know how to do it properly.
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