Startling spam

[metageek]

"Everybody Needs An Oscilloscope".

It wasn't just a misleading Subject:, either; that's actually what the message was about.

Comments

[lauradi7]

Instead of regular year-round CRT etc collections, Lexington used to have one morning per quarter when people would come and drop off such stuff plus other electronics. As one of the volunteers checking people in, I grew to expect several oscilloscopes each time. Apparently not everybody needs one.

Non sequitur

[metageek]

Apparently not everybody needs one.

Maybe they were getting rid of their spare oscilloscopes. Or maybe they needed oscilloscopes, but had decided they didn't have the means to keep their oscilloscopes in the style to which they'd been accustomed.

[metageek]

Yeah, the microphone quality is the big question. It can probably output at 44kHz, but what about input?

[ckd]

I feel like that spam should talk about "increasing your wavelength" or something.

[metageek]

Ooh...too many NSFW meanings for that one...

[alexx_kay]

From Walter Jon Williams' _This is Not a Game_: The protagonist has just discovered that her office has been being surveilled by an uber-geeky fanboy. Having been caught, he gives her a tour of his spy van, full of off-the-shelf high tech equipment:
"I've even got some oscilloscopes," he said. They don't really have any function or anything, but I think they're cool." Green standing waves hummed in the displays.

"Nice mad-scientist decor," Dagmar said. "All you need is a Tesla coil."

"Thanks!"

No function?

[metageek]

No function? He should've fed his surveillance microphones into the oscilloscopes, to spot the difference between live speech and recordings.

(Might not work, but he should've tried it, at least. Insufficiently geeky. :-)