I'll just go right ahead and piss directly in the eye of my fellow nerds.

You're wrong, and you're too stubborn to admit it.

We are living in a different time now. That old, creaky 386 has been replaced with a whizzy new Pentium IV. The $1,200 I paid for 32MB of RAM (and was happy to do it at that time) is now the minimum allowable in a Casio watch. That pokey old 20MB drive has been replaced with 60 gig speed demons.

We are no longer slaves to hardware limitations!

But we are still held in bondage to our old ideas of how a computer should work, based on our old assumptions of how fragile and limited they are. We toil under the delusion that we are some kind of vaulted priesthood; an Order of Nerds from whom all blessings should flow. We have the same secret handshakes of the Masons and a Bill Gates (or Richard Stallman, if you prefer) Secret Decoder Ring. We look down on our fellow humans as lesser beings because they have not attained the priestly learning that we have.

And it's killing that which we love so much.

Thank goodness for boobies and blood! Without those two, the pervasive Internet would probably never exist. If people couldn't get nudie pictures and news, Playboy and Peter Jennings from the Internet, they'd probably chuck the computer out the window like a failed hobby.

The computer, its acceptance and its power, is lessened because of this complexity. There are untapped sources of new ideas out there, but the twin handicaps of difficulty and dickheads prevent these new sources of knowledge from ever being tapped: difficulty in using the computer, and dickheads who refuse to admit there's a problem.

"But," I hear you cry, "a computer is a complex machine! It must require a certain level of knowledge to operate!" I'm not so sure that's the case. Surely the ability to read is a prerequisite! Well, since I've seen pre-literate kids play with a computer, I'm not conviced that's neccessary. The ability to see? Well, there are quite a few blind computer users.

The difference here is that the machine is molded to serve the user in both of those cases. For the general public, however, the machine is immutable, and the users must mold to suit it. This is the fundamental brokenness of the computer. The old belief that the computer is limited and the user must conform to its rules is still in effect.

Until we face this problem and accept that it is in our hands to fix it, the computer will forever be an Infernal Machine rather than a human advancement.

Ye gods and little fishes, how much longer do we have to wait for the Web to return to the way God and Tim Berners-Lee intended it? When TBL created the Web, it was a way for people to collaborate on documents while separated through space and time:

Abby and Bill work on similar projects. Abby is in Portugal and Bill is in Mexico. They can collaborate on a document during their respective work hours, and it's fairly seamless.

What we have, though, is a bastard child of hypertext newspapers and sanitized prole-feed. A document is created by a single individual and served to thousands. To edit the document, the creator must either type in control codes (<I>), or use a swell "HTMLeditor"like FrontPage.

I've tried Amaya, and I like the concept -- an HTMLis a legal, editable document, you just need the access control to change it. Neater would be the ability to add your own notes to a document (like Post-Its) with the ability to hide/show/share them.

Icing would be the ability to allow a TEXTAREA to have basic HTML editing features. This ought to be a feature added to Mozilla right now.

Browse around to any "news" site -- I include the wanna-bes in with the "real" sites -- and you'll see a particularly atrocious addition to the Web experience, inflicted upon us by the lame and clueless: the "Print This Article" link, whose sole purpose is to format the page in the style we would prefer to see in the first place.

It must be an American affectation to be so resolutely obtuse: take what we want and like, intentionally munge it up into some steaming turd, then offer the option to convert it to the way we preferred in the first place, and then call it a "feature". This abortion of an idea is usually corralled with a few other future glue sticks, the "Email this article to a friend" and "Respond in our '$COMMENT_SECTION_NAME_FROM_MARKETING'". While these two have some arguable merit, the "Print This Article" is pure bozoness.

Oh, I understand the reasoning well enough: divide an article into sections and make them separate pages so they can fling more banner ads at our eyeballs. The reasoning -- while it sounds good to crack-addled bean counters -- ends up running about in a tight circle, like a wino in an Italian alley. "Banner ads don't work, people ignore them, so let's architect our site to feed MORE ADS to our users, so the ads can be worth LESS THAN BEFORE, so we can re-architect in 6-8 months to have banner ads display BETWEEN EVERY OTHER WORD..." and so forth, ad infiniteum.

If marketing majors actually cared about their jobs (instead of falling into the major when they flunked out of business school, after blowing off a final with a Dionysian Orgy of Excess at the frathouse the night before), they'd operate a web site on the principle that the ads can be sold on stories, but should never be visible until a story has been selected to view. At that point you know at least something about your viewer (they're interested in "X", since the article is about "X in our schools"), and a decent sized article has at least three good places to sell an ad -- the beginning, middle and end.

The dolts that come to a site's home page are the unwashed vermin: they could be Warren Buffet, but are more likely to be Wilber Beauchamp, lube monkey from West Undershirt, Idaho and secret teen porn afficianado. The best you can sell them are Visa cards from unheard of banks in suspicious countries. But that untapped genius who clicks through to an in-depth article on sewer drains? If you can't sell a ballcock to this guy, you should probably go back to Ball Peen State (Home of the 'Fighting Cantalopes') and ask for your money back.