No, it’s not that printer on your desk that has stopped working. This type of machine is specifically designed to have ‘no use’. It seems to me that a classic version of a useless machine is the one featured in Wednesday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. The original one was invented in the 1950s by artificial-intelligence expert Marvin Minsky at Bell Laboratories, no less. Check out a video of the machine in action at the website Frivolous Engineering at http://frivolousengineering.com/ .
P.S. If the machine provides its owner with titillation, I would argue it is not a useless machine!