Friday, April 2nd, 2010   COMPUTING!You people have lost your
minds over the iPad: "Your grandma will embrace it. Your aunt
will embrace. Your cousins. Your kids. Everyone who doesn't have
a fucking clue about computers and don't want to learn and don't
care. Everyone will jump into this new era of computing.
Everyone." I can happily admit it is gorgeous. And yet. We are
gaga for a thing with an application that delivers a New York
Times front page that only displays four whole stories? A thing
that's just like reading a book, a book with DRM encoding, so
you don't actually own it, and also book that weighs 1.5 pounds.
(The average "actual" book weighs 12 ounces.) A thing that's
just like reading a magazine, so you can get Time magazine for
$4.99, which is about 14 times the cost of a delivery
subscription to the paper magazine. But those are all just
quibbles, probably personal preferences. A real problem (apart
from the "palpable contempt for the owner," manifested in many
ways) is that the iPad is a device