{"id":3162,"date":"2011-08-12T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2011-08-12T17:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcitement.com\/?p=3162"},"modified":"2015-01-05T15:11:01","modified_gmt":"2015-01-05T21:11:01","slug":"segues-night-of-the-living-tech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/column\/segues\/segues-night-of-the-living-tech\/","title":{"rendered":"Segues: Night Of The Living Tech"},"content":{"rendered":"

Each Segues\u00a0 column starts with something tech-related before quickly branching out from there into a tangentially related thread. These articles are born from my thought and speech patterns that regularly contain quickfire transitions. For one of my birthdays, a friend made me a crown that said \u201cKing of the Segues\u201d. Actually, it said \u201cKing of the Segways\u201d and that was the day we learned how to spell segue correctly.<\/em><\/p>\n

“Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.” — Abraham Lincoln<\/p>\n

Whoa, hold on there, Mr. Sixteenth President. Immortality? That’s kind of a tall order. Sure, you may have been off hunting vampires<\/a>, so the idea of immortality wasn’t that far of a leap for you. And you achieved an immortality of sorts through your deeds as one of the most revered figures in American history, but not all of us can lay claim to acting as president during one of our country’s most tumultuous times or killing supernatural beings. No, we have to try to find our immortality through different, more attainable ways. Thankfully, technology looks like it might be catching up to this long sought-after goal of not kicking on to the afterlife (or absence of one).\u00a0 Our priorities might be a bit skewed though as we go about processing how to talk to loved ones from the beyond, if there is a beyond (there’s that doubt rearing its scientific head again). However and first, whether through malice or for no other reason than just because, a few pranksters have taken to shuffling some more well-known faces off this mortal coil in digital ways even though they’re still clearly alive.<\/p>\n

Tweets from beyond<\/strong>
\nThere are enough false reports of famous people’s deaths out there to choke a horse. To death. Bill Cosby recently had to refute his tweeted death for the fourth time<\/a> and managed to plug the Bill Cosby App while he was at it. Cosby joins other falsely reported celebrity deaths such as Hugh Hefner and Jackie Chan. While Hugh Hefner’s death didn’t make it much farther than Twitter, which he then dismissed<\/a> in his own Playboy way of claiming to tweet from the bedside of his 27-year-old girlfriend Shera Bechard, Jackie Chan didn’t end up so lucky. Thanks to a fake CNN article, the news of Chan’s early demise spread to celebrity news sites with a sense of legitimacy that Twitter simply doesn’t have. The site with the fake CNN article has been since taken down, but you can see the story about Chan’s fake death on this similarly fake site<\/a> made to look like an Australian Yahoo News page that still exists for some baffling reason. So far, this has been little more than a nuisance to a minor few, but not along ago, these false death rumors spread to the realm of national security and the idea of media bias.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Back on the Fourth of July, Fox News’s Twitter account was hacked by a group calling itself The ScriptKiddies<\/a> who tweeted that President Barack Obama had been assassinated while at a restaurant in Iowa. This news didn’t even have the chance to turn into a small ember, let alone spread like wildfire, before the tweets were removed, Fox News suspended their own account, and the Secret Service got involved. It’s one thing to mess with an aging nudie magazine publisher hopped up on Viagra and a martial arts movie legend, but it’s a bad idea to start screwing around with the Commander in Chief. No word yet on how deep the hole is The ScriptKiddies now reside in.<\/p>\n

Scan the QR code for love<\/strong>
\nSix feet down isn’t far enough to hide away from technology thanks to the Living Headstone from Quiring Monuments<\/a>. Straight from the creepy site:<\/p>\n

Quiring has created a new type of headstone which connects people regardless of where they reside.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Our \u201cLiving Headstone\u201d memorial\u00a0blends the timeless traditional value of granite headstones with the newest technology available, to provide an interactive \u201cliving\u201d memorial legacy for future generations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This “living” memorial is accessed by scanning a QR code placed directly on the tombstone or\u00a0 entering a unique URL that then sends you to a website that has family information, photos, and anecdotes about the deceased loved one in “a virtual archive that will remain accessible for future generations.”<\/p>\n