I don't see what Google Buzz has to do with any of this.

You might be pleased to know that there's a contribution in the pipeline that will argue along these lines.

The mention in the NYT is a reporter reporting on the talk that Clynes and Kline gave. So yeah, I figured the one where they actually publicly define the term would be the better anniversary.

By your hilarious logic, keyboards should come completely unlabelled, because any labelling is just a crutch for people who are too lazy to learn to touch-type.

There are tonnes of applications for a self documenting input device, the least of which is preventing needless staring at a manual while you learn a new program's interface.

The important point though is that this is an innovation contest. Thousands of students will spend more time thinking about this than you did before dismissing it and it's highly likely that some of them will come up with something really cool.

But yes, it probably won't help you to get better at using the software to which you are already zenly attuned.

However to suggest it was "designed" for creating, rather than consuming (within their walled garden), seems quite a stretch. I don't even recall Apple pitching that

Really? Because I do. The announcement of the device featured longish demos of a painting program (Brushes) and the 3 office apps (Pages, Numbers, Keynote). The iOS4 announcement included a video editing program. I'll be extremely surprised if that doesn't end up on the iPad too.

Let them have their moment. This is basically the only time that "dog bites man" will be news.

I've got another one for you: PC gaming vs Console gaming

PCs have been around longer, have more options re: hardware & software, not to mention complete freedom for developers to charge and distribute however they wish, along with extreme modability. Meanwhile consoles are hampered by incredibly restrictive walled gardens, developer-hostile revenue splits and licensing and they only release new hardware every few years.

Given the obvious openness and freedom of PC gaming compared to console gaming it may come as a surprise that console games outsell PC games at ratios around 5:1.

(Source: http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=15831)

So now your job is to show that Android vs Apple is more like Internet vs AOL than it is like PCs vs Consoles.

Wait back up to the part where the organisers can detect wrongdoing before the contest starts because "we will be monitoring this." How?

Pompei is an instructive example and I'm glad you used it. Archaeologists learned an ENORMOUS amount about how people lived in that era because the lava essentially flash-froze a city. The arbitrariness of Pompei was enormously beneficial to posterity because as it turns out the people between us and them had no idea what the future would want to know about the past or didn't care.

Humanity has a long history of burning, tossing, losing, and destroying its cultural history only to have scholars hundreds or thousands of years later lamenting that loss. It's unknowable what we lost when the Library of Alexandria got burned down. We nearly lost the ability to read hieroglyphs, but for the partially shattered Rosetta stone. The BBC Domesday laserdiscs were created and lost within living memory and there's no question that it would have been valuable to have kept them.

Accurate, robust, valuable archives do not work well with the stochastic market- and whim-driven collective approach that you recommend. Over and over again, the things that are uninteresting NOW become things that are extremely interesting in the future.

What you're describing is patents on software.

1. Juries are unpredictable and its often better for all sides to get a predictable result. See also the difference between the settlements around the RIAA vs the cases that went to trial.

2. Poor people settle all the time. They settle, they plea bargain, etc. This happens at all scales of income.

3. The courts are over burdened. Settlements reduce the need for judges (not cheap) juries (significant hardship on jurors) court space/services etc. You could say that "well just have more courts" but there is a balance of priorities. There are piles of things clamouring for our attention and tax dollars. Every case going to trial leads to a ballooning court system. Not good.

4. If both sides in a settlement can agree about here the trial is most likely to go, it makes more sense to just go there yourself and skip the formalities.

5. If it's trial or nothing and you think that the only cases that should go to trial are the ones where the prosecutor is sure of conviction, that reduces the amount of justice, not increases it. It means that more companies get away with more crimes.

I hope that when they hear the news about the political cartoon apps being blocked they also hear the news about how Apple reversed course and unblocked them.

The point is that we don't know what's worth preserving. I mean, we probably have a few ideas here and there but we are also almost certainly wrong about what future historians will want us to have preserved.

Don't believe me?

Then why are people so bent out of shape by the burning of Sapho's works? Why do we get so excited when we discover an ancient manuscript hidden under a more recent one? Why are we so enthusiastic about the Dead Sea Scrolls? How come we keep digging through the old letters and notebooks of scientists and inventors? Why are we so sad about having lost all those early films?

History isn't just about keeping track of the stuff that the people at the time thought was important. It's often about digging through the ephemera and refuse of the past to find the stuff that gives us far more information than their disposers knew or intended. If you want to have any kind of archival program at all, then it's best to just box up the whole thing and let the archaeologists sort it out.