Funny, and 100% in line with my experience.

From Top Ten Internet Fads:

4. WAP
WAP is the sound a clunky Internet-enabled cellphone makes when you throw it at a brick wall in frustration.

It also sounds for Wireless Access Protocol, and was an early attempt to squeeze big web pages into a teeny-tiny little screen. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that billions (with a "B") of dollars were spent on this idea, despite several subtle problems:

1. Viewing even a small web page on a screen with 12 lines of text is almost completely useless.

2. The per-kilobyte charges some cellphone companies were imposing were the equivalent of something like $100/hour for dialup Internet access.

3. Very few people actually wanted to surf the web from their cellphones in the first place.

In the last year, we've come full circle: the cellphone companies are once again selling gigantic Internet-enabled cellphones and expensive data plans with the hope of getting us to surf the web by the minute. Of course, everything is different now. Now we have better displays (in color even), and instead of WAP, we've got something called 3G.

3G is approximately the acceleration required to crush a clunky Internet-enabled cellphone in frustration

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Weekend Roundup! ( Now with Lj-cut for your not caring! )

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We're switching to a new system at work: a new program, a new way of doing things.

And as expected, those in charge are trying to figure out how to do things the way they always have in a program not designed for it instead of learning new ways to do things.

Frelling typical. And, of course, they didn't bother to figure all this out before they spent thousands of dollars to finance the switch.

Dim bulbs. All of them.

Silly consumer musing.

I finally had to admit that, for now at least, a cellphone is just too much money. So I've dropped the thing. If you don't have my home number, you'll just have to ask for it. In a pinch, Elli can usually get hold of me if you can't find me otherwise.

Projecting expenses over the next few months, things look odd. But, as previously stated, they'll even out soon enough.

Hmm. After mucking about in the Apple store for a few minutes, I've been forced to consider dropping my sights down a bit from Powerbook 15" to Powerbook 12" in order to meet my goal of getting the bloody thing by next August. The 15" is nifty keen, but the 12" will do fine so long as I add an AirPort card.

Actually, I think September is more likely. *shrug* I'll live.

I feel a rant coming on ...

Merrill> to : Ronald D. Moore says in almost every interview that Battlestar Galactica is not traditional science fiction. Do you feel the same?

JB: Yes It is ...Battlestar is more interested in presenting human characters confronting the starkest human situations than it is with gadgets, aliens and theoretical physics. It's a story that just happens to be in [another] universe and [another] humanity. As I said earlier the central pillar of the piece is to make everything as real and familiar to us as it can be.

Edit: It's occurred to me I ranted on this very topic less than two weeks ago. Oops. What can I say, it's a hot-button topic with me.

OK, I get that most people seem to think "Science Fiction" means gadgets, aliens, blah blah blah ... but that hasn't been true since the beginning of the New Wave, back in the sixties.

The entire point of Science Fiction is to act as a mirror to our own time -- to present human characters in a setting removed -- either a little or a lot -- from our reality, in which we can explore concepts of what it means to be "human". The point is not the spaceships, the lasers, or the aliens; the point is the way the characters deal with their situation. Everything else is just setting.

Now, ok, some stories probably work best in SF, but the fact is that almost any story worth telling can be told either in ANY literary genre. Take away the spaceships and aliens in Space: Above and Beyond and you have a story about a miltary unit and the trials and tribulations they face in a war. Sounds like a lot of movies and series set in WWII or Korea or Vietnam, doesn't it? But add in the spaceships, and it's now a tale of a war against the Chig Empire.

Take replicants out of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?/Blade Runner and you have a story of racism and identity in a world grown too complicated to deal with -- sounds like a lot of post-WWI novels to me.

Take the spaceships and the Cylons out of Battlestar Galactica and you've got a story about a culture struggling to find their home after being nearly annihilated as a people -- Jewish Exodus, anyone?

YES, in the first, early days of Science Fiction, technology was key. But honestly, much early SF is utter drek, filled with busty women who have to be rescued from the Bug Eyed Monsters by the stalwart hero. Asimove, Heinlein, and their contemporaries were the minority, not the majority, in the pulps. But that was 60 years ago. Time and the genre have, for the most part, moved on. Why can't the perception of the public?

Ellison has the right of it -- we ought to retire "Science Fiction" and "fantasy" as labels and start calling it "Speculative Fiction" which could include all sub-genres: fantasy, hard-sf, space opera, cyberpunk, etc. etc. Barring that, I'll just have to learn to cope with the fact that most of our society views "Science Fiction" as bad movies with spaceships, never taken seriously as a genre outside its own fanbase because "it could never happen."

Further reading:

Ellison on Heaven's Gate