"No, the luxurious Borgata Hotel, Casino and Spa isn't located in a central New Jersey wildlife preserve," reports a local news team in New York. But an ad for the casino in Waze was apparently tagged with the wrong geographical coordinates, CNN reports, and.... The Jackson township Police Department's public information officer Lt. Christopher Parise said the police department found out about the error when one his officers was out assisting a stranded car. The driver told the officer they were headed for the Borgata but wound up at the 12,000 acre wildlife area through unpaved roads after using Waze for directions...

"My department towed 10 cars in 5 days that were stuck," Parise said. "A Waze response to the error report stated 249 others reported the same location error in the past couple days, so hundreds have been misled back there."
Police complained of a "tremendous increase" in disabled motor vehicles -- one driver found themselves at least 10 minutes away from any paved roads. Long-time Slashdot reader Newer Guy tipped us off to the story, though Waze told CNN that after being made aware of it, they'd fixed the issue "within hours".

But the casino is still urging future visitors "to check the route before they begin driving" to make sure they're actually being routed to Atlantic City. And the folks in Jackson Township (population 54,856) had a real good laugh, posting over 100 comments on the police department's Facebook page.

• "You can take the people out of the city but you can't take the city out of the people..."

• "who the hell is going on unpaved roads thinking it'll lead them to a casino?"

• "You would think when they go down a dirt road common sense would kick in..."

• "This must be a short cut to Atlantic City, just keep going. Ha ha ha..."

• "This is why you need to learn how to read a map!"

• "I keep picturing in my head these people driving into the woods thinking its Atlantic City..."

• "We could just put a couple of slot machines and poker tables out there.... "

• "I knew people were stupid but this is ridiculous."

• "Don't blame the app, Blame the morons driving."

• "How stupid do you have to be to not realize that you are nowhere near the ocean??!!"

• "So natural selection is going high tech?"

• "I was wondering how this lovely couple ended up way back by the lake when I was hunting there last week. They flagged me down and pleaded with me to show them the way out.
  
  "They must've thought they were in the middle of Deliverance."

USA Today wondered how this decade's new construction would look from space. "With the help of Maxar, a provider of advanced, space-based technology solutions, Google and NASA, we've taken many more steps back -- more than 300 miles above Earth to be exact." As Apple stormed toward becoming one of the most valuable companies on the planet, its campus in Cupertino, California, took the shape of a dial on the original iPods -- the product that marked Apple's reemergence as tech leader at the turn of the century.

Apple's 175-acre, space-age architectural marvel stands out as a monument to tech. The same might be said for tourism, trade and energy about the ostentatious structures and engineering feats that emerged from the sands of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Thirteen of the largest buildings in the world were completed in Dubai -- the most in any city -- during the past decade, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
Their article also includes before-and-after pictures of disaster sites like Japan's Fukushima nuclear reactors and the California regions devasated by 2018's Camp Fire.

"A Michigan woman got the Secret Santa gift of a lifetime this Christmas -- an 81-pound package from Bill Gates," reports CNN: The gifts included an original manuscript of "The Great Gatsby," signed by Gates; books; toys for her cat and Harry Potter and "Twin Peaks" memorabilia, according to her post on RedditGifts.com. It arrived in a box lit up inside by Christmas lights...

"It's well documented that Bill Gates has been participating for years, but I never, ever thought he would be my Secret Santa," Shelby said. "It's really surprising." A spokesperson for Reddit confirmed that Gates sent the package. The billionaire has participated in the exchange since 2013...

When she showed up at the FedEx office the next day to pick up the package, she said the employees were excited, shouting "You're the Bill Gates package!" according to her post.

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: A North Carolina couple was watching a movie in their bedroom when they suddenly heard loud noises coming from downstairs. Worried that it was an intruder, the two called 911.

The couple waited for police to arrive, hoping their 2-year-old daughter sleeping in her room wouldn't get up to check on the noise, said Thomas Milam, the husband, in his Facebook post shared to Forsyth County Sheriff's Office's page... Minutes after they called 911, police entered the home and began to search for an intruder. When the 911 operator told Milam to go downstairs to talk to the police, he said, the officers just had one question.

"Is this Roomba yours?"

Police had apprehended the suspect: the couple's brand new robotic vacuum. Milam said in the Facebook post that the vacuum had turned itself on in the night and gotten stuck in the hallway, where it had been repeatedly banging against the walls and making the sounds the Milams feared was an intruder.

An anonymous reader shares a remarkable story from Fortune's Data Sheet newsletter: The story begins on Dec. 3, when an artist going by @Hannahdouken on Twitter posted an image of hand-drawn text reading, "This site sells STOLEN Artwork, do NOT buy from them!" And asked followers to reply that they wanted the image on a shirt.

They were testing a theory. For years, artists posting their work online have found the art turned into t-shirts and other merch without permission or compensation. The theory was that this was being done by automated bots that combed Twitter for images with such enthusiastic replies, and then automatically created merch on sites such as Gearbubble, copthistee, and Teeshirtpublic...

Sure enough, automated bots picked up @Hannahdouken's image and placed it on t-shirts...
They report that other Twitter users then took the stunt even further, including one who "had a theory: See if he could bait the bots into copyright infringement, and just maybe, a pricey lawsuit." So they produced a drawing of a particularly sassy Mickey Mouse with the caption "This is NOT a parody. We committed copyright infringement and want to be sued by Disney."

His version of the stunt succeeded spectacularly. First, the bots came out of the woodwork, drawn by hundreds of tweets from people saying they wanted the image on a t-shirt. Then other artists repeated the trick with infringing images including Pikachu, Mario, and the Coca-Cola logo....

The nonprofit Open Source Technology Improvement Fund connects open-source security projects with funding and logistical support. (Launched in 2015, the Illinois-based group includes on its advisory council representatives from DuckDuckGo and the OpenVPN Project.)

To raise more money, they're now planning to offer "hacker-themed swag" and apparel created with a state-of-the art direct-to-garment printer -- and they're using Kickstarter to help pay for that printer: With the equipment fully paid for, we will add a crucial revenue stream to our project so that we can get more of our crucial work funded. OSTIF is kicking-in half of the funding for the new equipment from our own donated funds from previous projects, and we are raising the other half through this KickStarter. We have carefully selected commercial-grade equipment, high quality materials, and gathered volunteers to work on the production of the shirts and wallets.
Pledges of $15 or more will be rewarded with an RFID-blocking wallet that blocks "drive-by" readers from scanning cards in your pocket, engraved with the message of your choice. And donors pledging $18 or more get to choose from their "excellent gallery" of t-shirts. Dozens of artists have contributed more than 40 specially-commissioned "hacker-themed" designs, including "Resist Surveillance" and "Linux is Communism" (riffing on a 2000 remark by Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer).

There's also shirts commemorating Edward Snowden (including one with an actual NSA document leaked by Edward Snowden) as well as a mock concert t-shirt for the "world tour" of the EternalBlue exploit listing locations struck after it was weaponized by the NSA. One t-shirt even riffs on the new millennial catchphrase "OK boomer" -- replacing it with the phrase "OK Facebook" using fake Cyrillic text.

And one t-shirt design shows an actual critical flaw found by the OSTIF while reviewing OpenVPN 2.4.0.

So far they have 11 backers, earning $790 of their $45,000 goal.

"1983 had seen an explosion of home computer models of varying capabilities and at various price-points," remembers the vintage computing site Paleotronic, looking back at the historic tech battle between Commodore, Texas Instruments, and eventually Coleco.

Slashdot reader beaverdownunder shares the site's fond remembrance of the days when "The question on everyone's minds was not who was going to win, but who would survive." Commodore's Jack Tramiel saw an emerging market for low-cost home computers, releasing the VIC-20 in 1980. At a US$299 price point sales were initially modest, but rival Texas Instruments, making a play for the bottom of the market, would heavily discount its TI99/4A, and start a price war with Commodore that culminated with both computers selling as low as $US99. Only one company was going to walk away... [W]hile TI spokesperson Bill Cosby joked about how easy it was to sell a computer when you gave people US$100 to buy one, Jack Tramiel wasn't going to take this lying down, and he dropped the price of the VIC-20 to US$200 in order to match TI. However, unlike TI, who was selling the 4A at a loss in order to gain market share, Commodore wasn't losing any money at all, since it owned MOS Technology, the maker of many of the chips inside of the VIC-20, and as a result got all of those components at cost. Meanwhile TI was paying full price and haemorrhaging cash on every model sold.

You would think TI might have realised they were playing a fool's game and back off but instead after Tramiel dropped the wholesale price of the VIC-20 to US$130 they went all-in, dropping the 4A's retail price to $150. Commodore went to $100, and TI matched it, with many retailers selling both machines for $99. Inside TI, Cosby's joke stopped being funny, and many wondered whether management had dug them into a hole they could never climb out of...

After all the dust had settled, the only real winner was Commodore. It fended off all of its competitors and cemented the Commodore 64 as the low-budget 8-bit computer everyone wanted their parents to buy.

"They have done biohacking, clean sleeping and the keto diet, but now Silicon Valley types have coined a new health trend -- dopamine fasting," reports the Guardian: It is thought that depriving yourself of the neurotransmitter, a chemical messenger that motivates us to do things, can help to reboot or rebalance the brain. Fasting might entail abstinence from technology, artificial light, food, drink, conversation, eye contact -- essentially anything that an individual finds stimulating.

But is there any sense to the fad? "Retreating from life probably makes life more interesting when you come back to it," says David Nutt, director of the neuropsychopharmacology unit in the division of brain sciences at Imperial College London. "Monks have been doing it for thousands of years. Whether that has anything to do with dopamine is unclear."
A professor at UCSF Medical School tells the New York Times that the name is a misnomer, since it's more of a stimulation fast. The Times writes that "A dopamine fast is simple because it is basically a fast of everything... The number of things to not do is potentially endless." Silicon Valley is not the first group to discover that moderating emotions or spending periods trying to feel less can lead to happiness. In their quest, they are moving toward two very old groups: those in silent meditation and the Amish.... Karen Donovan, who is developing a new Vipassana silent meditation center in Silicon Valley, said she sees this trend as moving closer to the ultimate dopamine fast: sitting on a dark floor with eyes closed for 10 days.

"There's a growing self-awareness of what in Vipassana terms we would call suffering," she said.

Gizmodo reports that Sony "will happily sell you make-believe virtual meals" for their robotic Aibo dog to unlock tricks, one of several new features added since its re-launch in 2017: The new feature that will appeal to most owners, however, is Aibo Food, which allows the robot to be virtually fed using augmented reality through the Aibo smartphone app. Meals can be purchased using coins, which are awarded to users through random actions like repeatedly using the Aibo app, or during special events. But once users runs out of coins, which is bound to quickly happen as they try out the new Aibo Food feature, they can either wait for more Sony handouts or purchase additional coins for a fee.

Sony points out that Aibo's performance and features aren't dependent on whether the dog is regularly fed -- it is, after all, just a robot. So hopefully the company won't change its mind down the line, making your pup act sluggish and distracted when you're not forking out for pretend food.... Of course, other complications arrive once you start feeding an animal, and the new software update also allows users to finally potty train their Aibos using a new mapping feature so the robot doesn't pretend-shit all over your house.

This appears to be a free feature, until Sony realises it can sell owners virtual poop bags.
There's also a new web-based API/developer program that lets you program the robot dog to perform custom actions -- and Aibo dogs now come equipped with some new patrol/security functionality.

"Using its facial recognition and room-mapping capabilities, Aibo will be able to patrol homes and locate various family members, providing reports on where everyone is, and helping owners track down specific people, according to Sony."

An anonymous reader quotes a Yahoo News 360 report on Americans who hate Daylight Saving Time: A push to end the semiannual clock shift, which has been shown to correlate with negative health and productivity outcomes, is gaining steam throughout the country. Most of the momentum is behind a movement to make daylight saving time permanent so the "spring forward" lasts all year long. A number of states including California, Florida, Washington and Oregon have taken legislative steps to do just that, but an act of Congress would be needed for any of those changes to go into effect.
Meanwhile, CBS News reports: Most people across the country will see their clocks roll back an hour this weekend as nearly eight months of daylight saving time come to an end. It is part of a twice-a-year ritual that most want to stop. Seven in 10 Americans prefer not to switch back and forth to mark daylight saving time, a new poll shows.
The poll also shows that 33% of Americans younger than 45 prefer the current system of switching clocks twice a year -- compared to just 24% of Americans 45 or older.

haaz (Slashdot reader #3,346) tells us that history has just been made as part of the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals annual online game-playing fundraiser, Extra Life:
A man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin is trying to play pinball long enough to break the standing Guinness World Record for Longest Marathon Pinball Play of 30 hours 10 minutes.

He's using Extra Life's gaming/DIY fundraising site to webcast his attempt and raise money for Children's Hospital of Wisconsin. He gets a five minute break every hour, and yes, he's wearing an adult diaper.
Just minutes ago on Twitter, the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin announced he'd beaten the record. And lots of other fundraising game-playing marathons are happening around the world today, including one in Canada -- and many of them are being streamed online.

The event began in 2008, and over the last four years has raised close to $10 million each year. As one gaming site put it, "Let's help the future programmers of our cyborg overlords fulfill their mission by streaming some video games for the kids this weekend!"

CNBC reports that a popular Twitch poker star has been accused of cheating: Stones Gambling Hall in Sacramento, California says it will not livestream poker games pending an investigation into cheating allegations made against one of the game's players, Mike Postle... The original accusations were made by Veronica Brill, another poker player who has played with Postle on "Stones Live." Since then, others have come forward with similar complaints. Brill has no specific accusation of what Postle is doing and even admits that she can't be sure he is cheating. So why does she think he is cheating? His results are too good, according to Brill. She said (and several professional pokers players who talked to CNBC, agreed) no one could do as well as he has, for as long as he has, on these livestreamed games...

It's not just that Postle is winning, it's how he's winning, that is drawing suspicion. Poker commentator Joey Ingram, poker pro Matt Berkey, and others have spent hours reviewing hands Postle played and found several times where Postle made a fold or a call that wouldn't seem "right" but happened to work out in his favor. Berkey said Postle made plays no pro would ever make, and he did them often, and they worked. Poker is a game of incomplete information. Berkey said Postle played "as if he had perfect information."

Stones Gambling Hall said it has hired an independent investigator to look into the accusations. In a statement Stones Gambling Hall said: "We temporarily halted all broadcasts from Stones. We have also, as a result, halted the use of RFID playing cards." The RFID cards contain chips, that combined with readers in the poker table, transmit information about each player's hole cards, so that viewers can see the cards on the broadcast (which is on a 30-minute delay to protect game integrity). At this point, there is no specific allegation, no "smoking gun" as Berkey said. But many pros are pointing to those RFID cards and the hole card information, saying it's just not possible for Postle to play the way he does and win the way he does.

"The US military has been forced to apologise for tweeting that it would use stealth-bombers on 'millenials' who try to storm Area 51," reports Yahoo News UK: More than two million people signed up to a Facebook event recently which encouraged atendees to visit the top secret base in Nevada. But only a few thousand UFO enthusiasts turned up on Friday to the facility, which is rumoured to contain secrets about aliens. As hordes of enthusiasts turned up the PR arm of the US military, called the Defence Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS), tweeted: "The last thing #Millennials will see if they attempt the #area51raid today" with a picture of military officers in front of a stealth bomber.

Shortly afterwards the tweet was deleted and the unit apologised saying it "in no way" reflects their stance... "It was inappropriate and we apologize for this mistake."

Around 1,000 people visited the facility's gates on Friday and at least six were arrested by police.

The Storm Area 51 invitation spawned festivals in the tiny nearby towns of Rachel and Hiko, more than two hours' drive from Las Vegas. Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee estimated late on Thursday that about 1,500 people had gathered at the festival sites, and more than 150 made the trip several additional miles on bone-rattling dirt roads to get within selfie distance of the gates.... "It's public land," the sheriff said. "They're allowed to go to the gate as long as they don't cross the boundary."
Most of the arrests were for "misdemeanor trespassing on base property," which carries a $1,000 fine, according to the article. "In the end, no one actually 'stormed' Area 51, although deputies in rural Nye County resorted to 'heated warnings' to disperse as many as 200 people," reports the Associated Press.

In another article the news service also quotes Lincoln County emergency services chief Eric Holt as saying resources had been mustered to handle up to 30,000 people and calling the low turnout a "best-case" scenario... Although there were two car crashes involving cows. "The cows died, but motorists weren't hurt."

The main festival apparently drew 3,000 attendees, while the rival "Area 51 Basecamp" festival sold just 500 tickets for their Friday concert, prompting them to cancel their Saturday concert altogether. Its promoter told the Associated Press, "It was a gamble financially. We lost."

Here's an interesting thought exercise from Slashdot reader dryriver : What is likely to be so different about living in 2039 that it makes our current present in 2019 feel badly dated in many ways? And can we learn lessons about what we are not doing particularly well today in 2019 -- in the technology field for example -- by imagining ourselves looking back at a long bygone 2019 from 20 years in the future...?

Will everything from our current clothing, 4K 2D TVs and film VFX to our computer games, Internet, cars, medical care options and tech gadgets look "terribly dated" to them? Will people in 2039 look at us from their present and think "why couldn't they do X, Y, Z better in 2019?", just as we tend to look 20 years back and wonder "why couldn't they do X, Y, Z better in 1999?"
The original submission argues that "If we could understand today how we look 'from 20 years in the future', including the mistakes we are making compared to how things are (possibly) done in 2039, we might get a better understanding of how we should be doing things today."

So leave your own thoughts in the comments. How will 2019 look to people 20 years from now?

A reporter for SFGate describes what happened when he tried out for the quidditch team at the University of California at Berkeley: The person throwing me what's called a "quaffle" (actually a slightly deflated volleyball) looked at me to make sure I'm ready. I gave them a head nod and grip my "broom" (a PVC pipe), ready to run. "GO!" I run 20 feet and turn back to catch the ball. Success!

But as I take my next step, I get decked by team captain Dara Gaeuman, fall to the ground, drop the quaffle, re-grab the quaffle, get back up, run over to the hoop and score. It's a triumphant moment for my post-healthy, 33-year-old self, regardless of the fact that this a drill. On the first day of practice. Of a sport I'm playing for the first time. With people who likely weren't born when the first Harry Potter book came out....

[I]n 2005, a pair of students at Middlebury College -- Xander Manshel and Alex Benepe -- translated quidditch into a non-flying sport. The game used to be played on wooden brooms until a few years ago when the game got too rough. There are still chasers (offensive players), beaters (defenders), seekers, keepers (like a goalie in hockey or soccer) and quaffles (again the balls, stay with me here) and bludgers (slightly deflated dodgeballs). But here the snitch is actually a person with sock-like pouch attached to their lower back that has to be snatched by the seekers, while the snitch tries to evade them... Almost 15 years after its inception, real-world quidditch has grown into a global phenomenon, with an International Quidditch Association (IQA) that has a World Cup every two years, a couple of semi-pro leagues, several regional and national leagues and more than 150 colleges and universities with club teams.

During practice, Chanun Ong, a sophomore returning for his second year on the team, tells a freshman, "I wasn't a big Harry Potter fan, but this sport is pretty legit."
There's a short video of the quidditch practice, and the the article's author remembers some crucial advice he received from one of the players. "Scrunch your body down if someone is about to throw a bludger at you, so you're a harder target to hit."

Although he also acknowledges that most of the people watching the two-hour practice "were passersby trying to figure out what the hell is going on."

H&âOEouml;vding spent four years developing their next-generation bicycle helmet, the Metro reports: Easier to use, adjustable and enabled with Bluetooth technology, the helmet, according to H&âOEouml;vding 's CEO Frederik Carling, is the world's safest. Donning advanced airbag tech and functions such as the ability to contact next-of-kin in the event of an accident, Frederik and the team spent years surveying people to make the kit as bespoke, safe and desirable as possible. Fredrik says: "Our surveys of cyclists in seven major European cities show that 70% would cycle more if they felt safer. We have focused on this and want to contribute to greater safety."

New features include the new patented airbag, along with an upgraded battery that can last for up to 15 hours. An iOS and Android compatible app allows the company to gather data relating to where urban cyclists experience the most accidents. The result? Data that can be used to argue for more cycling infrastructure and, of course, tech that saves more lives...

When the design-savvy headgear is activated, it registers movements 200 times a second and in the event of an accident, is inflated in 0.1 seconds to enclose the head and hold the cyclist's neck in place. 185,000 cyclists currently use it, with over 4,000 saying that it had made a significant difference during close calls.

In addition to all its safety features, Carling hopes that his helmet can be used to help the environment in the long run. "Cycling may be the answer to many of the challenges relating to the environment, congestion in cities and health, and we want to take cyclist protection to the next level," he says.

CNN reports: Pizza might protect against cancer, why wombats poop in cubes and a diaper changing machine that can be used on human babies -- these are just some of the research and inventions awarded at this year's Ig Nobel Prizes, a spoof of the actual Nobel Prize awards. The Ig Nobels are "intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology," according to its website.

Even if the science does sound, well, hilarious.

Organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, the awards have been going on for 29 years, always celebrated in September with a gala held at Harvard University. Winners accept their prizes from "genuinely bemused genuine Nobel Laureates," the website reads.
Long-time Slashdot reader LifesABeach shared a link to that wacky two-hour prize ceremony on YouTube. You can also read the list of 2019's winners on the official web site.

And today, most of this year's Ig Nobel winners also gave free public talks at MIT.

Somewhere along the North Raccoon River in Adel, Iowa -- population 3,682 -- two men were arrested for trying to break into the county courthouse.

And then things got weird, the Des Moines Register reports: The men, outfitted with numerous burglary tools, told authorities they were on contract to test out the courthouse alarm system's viability and to gauge law enforcement's response time, an alleged contract that Dallas County officials said they had no knowledge of, according to a criminal complaint.

Authorities later found out the state court administration did, in fact, hire the men to attempt "unauthorized access" to court records "through various means" in order to check for potential security vulnerabilities of Iowa's electronic court records, according to Iowa Judicial Branch officials. But, the state court administration "did not intend, or anticipate, those efforts to include the forced entry into a building," a Wednesday news release from the Iowa Judicial Branch read.

Evidently, the courthouse's security system did its job. The alarm system was triggered by the two men whom law enforcement found walking around the courthouse's third floor at about 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, court records show. Justin Wynn, of Naples, Florida, and Gary Demercurio, 43, of Seattle, Washington, were both charged with third-degree burglary and possession of burglary tools. Their bond has been set at $50,000.
"Our employees work diligently to ensure our engagements are conducted with utmost integrity and in alignment with the objectives of our client," their employer, the cybersecurity company Coalfire, told the Inquirer.

When they contacted county sheriff Chad Leonard, he would only say that "It's a strange case. We're still investigating this thing."

An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: An ambitious project that purported to turn anyone into a farmer with a single tool is scraping by with smoke-and-mirror tactics, employees told Business Insider. The "personal food computer," a device that MIT Media Lab senior researcher Caleb Harper presented as helping thousands of people across the globe grow custom, local food, simply doesn't work, according to two employees and multiple internal documents that Business Insider viewed. One person asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation...

Ahead of big demonstrations with MIT Media Lab funders, staff were told to place plants grown elsewhere into the devices, the insiders said. In other instances, devices delivered to local schools simply didn't work. "It's fair to say that of the 30-ish food computers we sent out, at most two grew a plant," one person said...
One worker told the site that at one school the students "would joke that the plants they were growing in plastic cups were growing better than the ones in the personal food computers."

That pilot program "ended shortly thereafter."

Microsoft's 2019 summer interns have created Microsoft: the Musical, an 8-minute video whose director describes it as "a Tony Awards-style musical theater opening number."

Long-time Slashdot reader Your Average Joe shared the Verge's article about the video: 150 full-time employees and interns at Microsoft have volunteered their mornings, weekends, and nights to create a Microsoft musical video. The video was shot in various buildings at Microsoft's corporate campus in Redmond, Washington and it features interns and staff members singing and dancing about how it's "all happening here."

It starts off with a section about co-founder Bill Gates, before some classic lines like "all around the world our products are well known, except for when we tried to make a phone!" The musical even briefly acknowledges the company missing a beat with Vista, and features former CEO Steve Ballmer's famous "developers, developers, developers" chant.
The video's description on YouTube says the music is "coming soon" to Apple's iTunes store as well as Spotify.

Directed by one of Microsoft's data science interns, it opens with a narrator remembering that "There once was a lad whose eyesight was bad, but his vision was crystal clear. He looked a line that was clearly defined and declined to align by its rigid design." (Was that a reference to the antitrust case Microsoft settled in 2001?) A later lyric emphasizes that "more than plain old gadgets is the gall that makes the magic..."

The narrator then introduces a woman with a book as Bill Gates, explaining to her that "These days, Bill Gates is more of an idea."

I think it's appalling that there's absolutely no mention of recently-deceased Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. (Although they found room for a tongue-in-cheek reference to "Clippy's strength of will.") But among other things, this whole video project really begs the question: what else did they leave out about Microsoft?