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Greg Costikyan: Death to "videogames"! (The word, that is.) "In the industry itself, you almost never hear anyone talk about 'videogames.' They aren't videogames, after all; except for the occasional cut scene, we almost never use video."
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That old broadband song
"Broadband" is in the news again, sigh. The word has a huge capacity for mischief, since it means so many different things to different people. Today broadband means high-speed, always-on Internet connectivity, usually delivered via cable or DSL. Broadband is, we're told, the axe that will break AOL and the torch that will fire up the tech economy once more.
I've been a broadband skeptic for years based on my own experience and my observations of my friends. I don't think broadband "transforms the Web experience"; it just fixes it. Broadband makes the Web work the way it's supposed to.
What broadband does not do, and will not do, is turn the Web back into a TV-style broadcast medium -- which, I'm afraid, is what Hollywood and the media industry keep crossing their fingers and hoping will come to pass. Sorry, guys.
To be sure, broadband does enable all sorts of interesting peer-to-peer and Web services-style applications. Wonderful. Only Hollywood and the media companies, far from investing in new ways to use this broadband potential, are actually terrified of these tools.
Truth is, right now broadband is just a good, reliable way to get your e-mail, read your Web sites and maybe download some music files. And that's what it will remain until someone comes along to show us the next great thing.
I like the way Mitch Ratcliffe put it in a recent post:
| | The unexpected will decide this market. That is, someone is going to come up with an engaging client that turns broadband into a symphony of excitement people will flock to. And, frankly, that game is still wide open to all the players, dial-up laggards included. |
Actually, Napster was that "engaging client." Look what happened to it.
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The Bush budget: Passing the buck to our kids
I was going to rant about the Bush budget, and how full of misrepresentations and bad assumptions and failures to make tough choices it is. Then I realized that there isn't enough time in the day for me to cover all that ground. So let me just point out that we all have extremely rotten luck to have such a merrily profligate president at this moment in history -- one whose fixation on a lopsided tax-cutting agenda has rendered him entirely indifferent to the way he is mortgaging the nation's future.
"We will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations," Bush told us in his State of the Union. Sounded good. Only that's precisely what his budget does. In simultaneously boosting spending and cutting taxes, Bush is putting our economy into the same train-wreck mode that we last experienced in the wake of Lyndon Johnson's "We can fight Vietnam and have a Great Society" spending spree. It took two decades to clean up that mess.
For the past 20 years or so, observers who've taken the long view have pointed out that we are sitting on two demographic time bombs. When the baby-boom generation retires, we will face a federal budget crisis like we've never seen before. Bush's father ("Bush 41") and Bill Clinton both put the government on a course to begin to deal with that problem by raising taxes, and sure enough by the end of Clinton's term we had a growing budget surplus. The Social Security problem hadn't been solved, but it looked like the government would have some of the tools it needs to handle it. Health care costs are the other time bomb; Clinton's good-faith effort to deal with that crashed and burned, and Bush seems unwilling to open the necessary discussion on how to fix the broken system we're left with.
So now we have deficits as far as the eye can see, and a president who thinks it's more important to eliminate the taxes the rich pay on stock dividends than to keep the government in the black. When Social Security and Medicare start to founder -- right about when people currently in their 40s start to retire -- we'll know who to thank. Unless, of course, someone who follows Bush in the White House has the backbone to raise taxes and undo Bush's current mayhem -- just as Bush's father and Clinton had to undo Reagan's.
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