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So, as it happens, I was reading Bill Bryson's, "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" on the way to work this morning. His essay "Lost in Cyberland" was stunningly apropos. After trying to send a Fax from the US to the UK and having no luck: "Three weeks later -- this is true -- we received a phone bill with $68 in charges for calls to Algiers. Subsequent inquiries revealed that the people who had written the software for the fax program had not considered the possibility of overseas transmissions. The program was designed to read seven-digit phone numbers with three-digit area codes. Confronted with any other combination of numbers, it went into a sort of dial-a-bedouin default mode. "I also discovered that the electronic address book had a similar aversion to addresses without standard U.S. zip codes, rendering it all but useless for my purposes, and that the answering machine function had a habit of coming on in the middle of conversations. "For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a dangerously perfect match." Darrell
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