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Conqured by Tatars?

First of all, I'm not going to get into an esoteric debate about whether or not M$ has designed a good desktop (I happen to be using redhat 9 myself, and I was irked that they put a litle folder saying /home/cyranoVR on my desktop - I quickly renamed it...and why is there a little hat in the bottom left corner of my screen??? but I digress).

My point is this: on the GNOME RH9 desktop, there is a little icon that says "START HERE." Most home users (and a lot of corp users) would look at this icon and go "whaaaaaa? My computer is already started!" or somesuch. They are either lazy or dumb or both.

See, in my personal, Real World experience, I've found that people who don't grasp the "My Computer == THIS COMPUTER" paradigm also tend to think that that their computer works due to a little process known as "magic," gets "cranky" in the afternoons and only starts working properly when I walk into the room.

This group of people is so dense that the only way they are able to interact with their computer is through full screen prompts. God forbid that a dialog box appears in the middle of the screen saying "click OK to continue." I've seen users who, when presented with such boxes, ask befuddledly "what do I do now?"

(I would imagine that the above difficulty with dialog boxes is probably the origin of the Blue Screen of Death phenomenon)

Anyway, I am sincerely interested in hearing your suggestions on how we could improve the PC user interface? Perhaps we should do away with screens entirely and go back to giant levers, whistles and lamps? In all seriousness, I'm thinking some users would be better off with such a setup.

Maybe keyboards and mice should be replaced with oversized buttons that read "GET EMAIL" "PRINT DOCUMENT." Meanwhile, an oversized flashing light would indicate new email. Users could type their documents on a typewriter and then insert into a scanner to be digitized via OCR. Basically, the whole setup would look like a PlaySkool toy.

We have arrived at the desktop paradigm becaues these companies have whole R & D centers (like XEROX Parq for starters) that spent (combined) millions of dollars trying to dumb-down computers. But it is all for naught: you can't go less than zero on the IQ scale.

Insightful: wrong
Informative: wrong
Interesting: Maybe if you have a very small mind
Funny: Sure, I get a chuckle out of it
Underrated/Overrated: not really
Offtopic: yes
Flamebait: yes
Troll: possibley

Now, lets review, are you saying that it is accurate to claim that:

This is embarrassing actually. We're not even sure Bush can read without some help sounding-out the big words...

Is Insightful? What insight does this lend to your life? You are obviously already slanted against the president. Has it let you think of him in a new way that will enrich your life? If you answer yes to that you are a very shallow person. Here's a website more up your alley.

The RIAA is on fairly solid legal ground when they try to stop people from passing around MP3s of copyrighted songs when they represent the copyright holder. Lyrics and tabs are another story entirely.

95% of the time, lyrics aren't supplied with the original song, and instead someone takes the time to listen to the song and try to guess what was said. Sometimes it's just a guess. Take the famous "Scuse me while I kiss the sky / kiss this guy" lyric by Jimi Hendrix. I remember hearing an interview where somebody who knew him said he intentionally said it so that it could be interpreted both ways. Writing down lyrics or tabs based on listening to the song and trying to figure out what was said or what was played is essentially reverse-engineering the song. Having said that, it has to be the easiest reverse-engineering task there could ever be. The output you're attempting to duplicate is a 1:1 mapping of the process used to create it. In other words, to get the words you hear, all you have to do is recreate the words that the artist was singing.

Now if this exceedingly simple "reverse-engineering" is illegal when there is absolutely no form of encryption or copy-protection, then no form of reverse-engineering can be legal. The MPA might have a case if someone were releasing lyrics for unreleased songs, where the "copy protection" is the lock and key under which the unreleased songs are kept, but once something is played on the radio, how can they pretend it's not ok to try to transcribe the song?

So sure, go after the people who copy lyrics out of jacket liners. Go after the people who release lyrics for unreleased songs. But if a judge decides that it's ok to go after someone who just tries to transcribe a song he/she heard, it means the end of "trying to figure out how something works". Say that bed you bought at Ikea, the one you lost the instructions for. If you figure out how to put it together and put up the instructions on the Internet in case someone else loses their instructions... you'll get busted. If you figure out how the levers work in the Hungry Hungry Hippos game and post an explanation, you're going to prison. If you figure out how the magician managed to saw his assistant in half by watching carefully, remember not to bend over in the prison shower.

The maker of Transformers has bought the Go Bots line. How ironic can it get?

Given that you can only realistically expect about twenty unique designs per monkey, you really need 200,000,000 monkeys (for a 16x16 black and white canvas). Given that there are only a 12 monkeys to the barrel, that's a quite a lot of fun!

From the article:
"It is very effective, and it appears that there are no side effects."
Except that some of the test subjects later reported being able to replace their noses with their ears. http://www.hasbropreschool.com/mrpotatohead/

The same would appear to go for Hungry Hungry Hippos...but Hasbro is still marketing that.

Or... we're not from the US and therefore didn't share the same sort of childhood experiences as you... would you mind explaining to those of us who don't understand you, exactly what you're talking about?

Sorry, I figured "Cootie" must already have been in every country in every language since it was so ubiquitous when I was five years old... or at least it seemed that way when I was five.

Try these:
YesterdayLand Toys, with pictures
Instructions for the game
and Milton Bradley's product page.