Poor Mojo's Newswire

Now as we all know, technology may advance but that isn't always in our best interests. In this case, today's printers come with sensors that tell the prniter when it is out of ink. That shuts down the printer and it's not possible to print again until a new cartridge is installed. It's like being held hostage; "give me a new ink cartridge or I'm going on strike." Well, someone calling himself "oppressedprinteruser" was sick and tired of replacing the ink cartridges; not only that, he was highly suspicious that the cartridge was even close to empty. So, he cleverly put a small piece of black electrical tape over the sensor on the cartridge and inserted it back into his Brother printer. Bingo! The printer thought a new cartridge had been installed and he was able to print again. You would think this would give you some limited extra life, maybe 20-30 extra prints. But some users adopting "oppressedprinteruser's" technique have reported as many as 1800 extra printouts from the supposed dead cartridge. That's a lot of extra life, and it's not just Brother printers. HP, Canon, Lexmark and Epson are all vastly underestimating the life left in a cartridge. The BBC has reported that by ignoring warnings on Epson printers, overriding errors and using other such hacks, users were able to print 38% more pages even after the dead cartridge error; as a result, Epson agreed to an out-of-court settlement in 2006 and gave customers a $45 credit, although they admitted no wrong-doing. Ahem. Bottom line, don't trust your printer.

All this excitement is focused on a performer whose instrument is a laptop. Girl Talk songs are mash-ups: chunks of other people’s songs combined into new ones: the Rolling Stones and the rapper Wiz Khalifa, Ice Cube and Devo. The mash-ups sound ironic to the ironically inclined and like pure joy to the joyfully inclined, and for both camps they’re fun to dance to. These are not just a collection of other people’s hooks; Girl Talk has created a new kind of hook that encompasses 50 years of the revolving trends of pop music. Sometimes cynicism is a hook, sometimes the hook is humor, angst, irony, aggression, sex or sincerity. Girl Talk’s music asserts all these things at once. ... “We don’t realize how much the notion of creation has changed for people under the age of 25,” [remix/copyright expert Lawrence] Lessig says. He suggests that in 20 years the sampling issue will seem “completely bizarre.” Any Girl Talk show provides a vivid preview of what the future might look like. It will look like leaf blowers showering confetti on a crowd going crazy to an unlikely pairing of Soulja Boy, the hip-hop idol, with the avant-garde electronica of Aphex Twin.