The Woo of Tech.

Man, I loves me some Star Trek technobabble as much as the next guy. But get a load of this:

Amazon.com Product Description
Get the purest digital audio you've ever experienced from multi-channel DVD and CD playback through your Denon home theater receiver with the AK-DL1 dedicated cable. Made of high-purity copper wire, it's designed to thoroughly eliminate adverse effects from vibration and helps stabilize the digital transmission from occurrences of jitter and ripple. A tin-bearing copper alloy is used for the cable's shield while the insulation is made of a fluoropolymer material with superior heat resistance, weather resistance, and anti-aging properties. The connector features a rounded plug lever to prevent bending or breaking and direction marks to indicate correct direction for connecting cable.

And it can be yours for the low, low price of $499.99.

Seriously. A $5 ethernet cable.

But what is even funnier than considering the fact that they probably sell these things to the gullible are the merciless reviews right there on Amazon. Here's one:

One of the unmentioned qualities of these cables is the reduced latency of the signal. Normal copper cables pass signals at about half the speed of light, but these puppies pass the signal at up to 3/4ths of lightspeed! This means that your data arrives faster, and since the Ethernet protocol involves collision detection, backoff, and retransmission this added speed means YOUR data is more likely to go ahead of competing data! Further, if there is no issue with other data sources, your data arrives 100s of picoseconds faster than with other cables. This can be important for gamers in multi-player situations! Or even for folks who just hate to wait for their data to arrive.

Marked down 1 star because it still won't let you do the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.

And:

I wish that I could give this product the full five stars. Based on its ability to enhance the musical, spatial, temporal and spiritual qualities of any recording, it is worth many multiples of the reasonable asking price. Unfortunately, Denon does not provide the necessary warning regarding the directionality of the cable. As I write this email, a small black hole is tearing through the space time fabric of my living room, consuming everything in its path (including my former pet Chihuahua, Wolfgang). A simple warning to prevent me from having reverse cabled my new joy for experimental reasons would have also spared me the horror of bidding adieu to 20 years woth of collecting (yes my cabbage patch dolls and hummel figurines are now faint memories of the past, for this dimension anyway). I bid you all adieu as I now see my walls dissolving... goodbye cruel worl

And:

You pretend tech-jokers, laugh all you want - this cable is the real deal. When I first received mine, I rushed to hook it up to my system. and was crestfallen; the edge of the music sounded as if it had been routed through an echo chamber. It only lasted for a fraction of a millisecond, but *I* could hear it. I immediately got on the phone to Denon, and as you can imagine, their support was superb. After asking me a few questions about my rig, the support person said "this is a question I am hating to be asking you, but did you follow the directional arrows when you plugged it in?" Well, I felt like he could see the face go beet red.

I regained my composure, and explained how embarassed I was, especially as a binary engineer. How could I have expected to get clean ones and zeroes through a backwards wire? The best way I can try to explain this to a neophyte is this: imagine grating cheese with the grater upside-down. Now, you might argue that if you push hard enough, cheese will still go through, and I will concede this point. But is the cheese the same? No, of course not. Instead of smooth strands worthy of a gourmet taco, you end up with a mushy facsimile better left to melting on a bowl of chili (no offense, chili fans).

None taken.

Anyway, there's like 16 pages of such hilarious mocking. Deservedly so, but it is nice to see it happen. Sort of restores my hope for humankind. For a few hours, anyway.

Jim Downey

(Via BoingBoing. Cross posted to Communion of Dreams..)