This is how he would have wanted it to be

[...]  Last night, it emerged that, true to Yoni Jesner’s wishes, his Scots family had instructed doctors to donate their son’s kidney to a Palestinian refugee. None who attended the young Glaswegian’s funeral in the hills above Jerusalem was surprised by the humanity of the gesture. Even in death, his compassion had set him apart.  [...]

I tend to be more than just a little cynical at times, and I don't have a lot of faith in the goodness of humanity.  Every now and again, though, I hear about a story that reminds me that there's no need to give up on us entirely.

The man referred to in the story above, Yoni Jesner, was killed in a suicide bombing perpetrated by a Palestinian. Yet, in spite of that, his family agreed to donate his kidney to a young Palestinian girl.  I don't want to go and get all sappy about stuff, but that just really touched me -- especially coming in this week when we've all (or mostly all) seen that tape of the mother beating her child because she couldn't get a cash refund at a store. So this is just a note to say thinks to Mr. Jesner and his family for being more concerned about the life of another human being than revenge or anger.

Time for an Instant Fix

[...]  THE UNKEPT VOW involves the company’s stated intent to make its wildly popular AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) software work with other instant-messaging programs. AOL has about 150 million registered users of its program. The company boasts more than 2 billion instant messages (IMs) sent daily. Yet AOL users can’t zip off their how-de-dos to those using Microsoft’s MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger, or even ICQ, AOL’s less ubiquitous, “edgy” IM service. Can you imagine a telephone system where you can’t call your mother because she’s on AT&T and you’re on Sprint?   [...]

[Newsweek]

Way back when, before Time Warner and AOL merged, there was a great deal of talk about making IMs interoperable. The FCC felt it was important and even made it something of a condition for the merger between AOL and Time Warner.  So far, though, the only way to be able to keep in touch with all your friends through IMs is to either have one of every kind out there on your system, which, face it, would make it just a bit crowded and do who knows what to your available memory; or you could do what I did and use Trillian, a nifty little IM client that can connect to each of the major systems, and to IRC.

One of the things pointed out in the Newsweek article, though, is that there no longer seems to be as much of a push for interoperability from AOL's competitors as there used to be.  Both Yahoo! and MSN seemed to have found out that there are benefits to a closed system -- your product doesn't necessarily have to be the best one out there, it can be pretty piss-poor, in fact, if you have enough users who like it well enough.  As it stands right now, most people have several friends on each of the various systems, so they all get more users, just so that second tier or users can contact the first through their client.

This seems to be a situation where users are going to have to take the lead.  Switching to something like Trillian (or Jabber, which also allows for some interoperability, though it doesn't cover as much cyberspace as Trillian does) is a good start - but it still gives the companies the idea that there is support for all of the competing networks.  Users need to make it known that they want to be able to use whichever client they prefer and still be able to contact whomever they want.  Right now, if all the systems were to become interoperable, some users might move from one system to another, but most people who go ahead and stick with what they're already familiar with, so its unlikely any client would experience a huge drop off in business.  As for gaining new users, there they'd have to provide the kinds of services that customers want - but isn't that the point of competition anyway?