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- Wizards cut 115 jobs
- … Cheapass Games cut 2 jobs (and hire a cardboard monkey)
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- 70,000 Jedi Knights annoy government
70,000 Jedi Knights
More than 70,000 Star Wars fans have upset Australia’s statistics agency by identifying their religion as Jedi during last year’s census.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics says 0.37% of the population wrote Jedi or a related response to an optional question about their faith.
Jedi is a mystical faith followed by some of the central characters in the Star Wars films.
The prank began early last year when Star Wars fans circulated an email saying the government would be forced to recognise Jedi as an official religion if at least 10,000 people named it on the census.
When made aware of the campaign, the statistics agency announced that respondents faced a fine of about £360 if they were found to have given false information.
In a statement on its website, the agency did not say if it will try to fine the Jedi faithful.
However, it says the Australian public will ultimately pay the price for census-related pranks.
The agency said: “The cost of wrong information is to the current and potential users of these services. If, for example, people of a particular religious affiliation do not provide the correct information, certain facilities might not be built that otherwise would be.”
The bureau says the Jedi response was categorised as “not defined” for census purposes.
It says the criteria for recognising a religion go “beyond the number of responses a particular answer receives in the census”.
This story is re-posted from Ananova news.
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