A Couple Of Technology Articles

I am about to go to bed, but I just wanted to quickly post these two hilarious stories. Well, one's hilarious and one's kind of scary, but scary can be funny too (at times).

The first one speaks for itself. Or rather the headline speaks for itself:

Half Of UK Men Would Swap Sex For 50 Inch TV

What I find funny is not the fact that a full 47% of British males will give up getting busy for six months for a goddamn electronic appliance, but that when asked, a quarter of respondents said they would give up smoking, and a quarter said they would give up chocolate.

Now let's be absolutely clear here. Essentially, these are the percentages of people willing to give up a particular thing for a 50 inch TV:
Give up sex: 50%
Give up smoking: 25%

Do you see what's going on here? By the transitivity of preferences, British people like smoking better than sex. Now, this could be because their cigarettes are God's gift to mankind (oh, how I miss you, Benson & Hedges). Or, alternatively, it could be because British people are so ugly, they actually prefer the post-sex act of lighting up to the act of sex itself. I'm leaning toward the latter explanation.

Anyway, the second story that caught my eye is this one on Facebook. This is some truly 1984 type shit. Apparently once you're on Facebook, you can never escape. They can pretty much keep your information forever, even if you deactivate your account. Check out the first few paragraphs of the article:

Some users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.

While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

It took Mr. Das about two months and several e-mail exchanges with Facebook’s customer service representatives to erase most of his information from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das’s empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message through the network.

In addition to my fear of endlessly wasting time, having awkward electronic interactions with people I haven't met in a long time, trying unsuccessfuly to compartmentalize my social life, and having future employers discover, uh, some things about me, I now have another reason to never join Facebook. To all those people, including my brother and my friends, who think there's something seriously wrong with me for not having a Facebook account: wait and see. This is going to be one of those rare occasions when, all said and done, I'm going to come out looking real smart. That's all I'm saying. Just wait and see. Facebook is evil, and all of you will find out the hard way.