Dell snags a new/old chief; Turner Media promo causes grief

If being out of touch with reality is a requirement for holding high office, Bill Gates must be running for president. In a recent interview with Newsweek, Gates said, “Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. … I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.” According to US-CERT, some 812 Windows vulnerabilities were discovered in 2005 alone — an average of one per month … for 67 years. (Figures for 2006 aren’t available yet.) However, there’s no truth to the rumor that Microsoft employees have been instructed to speak in whispers, so they don’t accidentally hack Vista via its speech recognition technology.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss: Dell has a new CEO — and I gotta say, he’s an intriguing choice. Bright, energetic, quasi-youthful, and as incorruptible as anyone with a net worth of $17 billion can be. As for his qualifications, I understand he started a computer company out of his dorm room back in his college days. I wonder whatever happened to it.

Bombs away: Those Aqua Teen Hunger Force LED signs may look like Hasbro Lite-Brites, but to the city of Boston, they were scary enough to close bridges, tunnels, and highways. Hours after the promotional gimmicks put Beantown in a terrorism tizzy, they were being hawked on eBay for more than $5,000 apiece. eBay has been shutting down the auctions, citing orders from the Massachusetts Attorney General and Cartoon Network’s owner, Turner Media. I understand Boston police are now on the lookout for suspicious characters wielding Etch A Sketches and Glo Sticks.

Here come da judge: Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia any fool can edit, has factored in more than 100 court rulings, according to the TheNew York Times. Jurists say the wiki is useful for researching weighty topics such as “jungle juice” and “booty music” (two great tastes that taste great together) or, if you’re Microsoft, for paying people to rewrite entries so they’re more to your liking. More proof that justice is not merely blind, but often deaf and dumb as well.

Send hot tips or really dumb promotional ideas to cringe@infoworld.com and you may receive a bag that really is da bomb.