Update!
As if to illustrate the point about The Wankers Edge, here is a Slashdot story about a twat who is disappointed to find that his brand new $500 iPhone doesn’t work with 64-bit Windows!
QED
I wonder if it’s this guy ?
A while ago I blogged about so-called early adopters, how mind-meltingly dim they are and how grateful I am for their dedication to lowering the price and helping fix faults in new technologies.
A colleague and I were discussing this the other day and came up with an expression to describe the area of technological developments in which they reside. We already have “The Cutting Edge” and “The Bleeding Edge”, but this is where the developers and engineers live; people who are actually working on the technology. Just behind them is the zone where new technologies are made available to the public on day zero, for vast amounts of money, together with badly thought out designs, bugs and flimsy cases that take several revisions to fix: this is The Wanker’s Edge.
The Wankers Edge is where you’ll find products like:
It’s also the area where all of the ‘extreme’ twats hang out with their gigawatt solid-gold car stereos, sub-woofers that need munitions-licences before they can be operated in public, and overclocked PCs that need industrial refrigeration units.
SpyBlog is rightly questioning the purpose of the MI5 Terrorist Threat Level. How are we supposed to react exactly ? According to every trite government statement the answer is for us all to be “extra vigilant” but of course that advice is as hollow and meaningless as the government ministers that spout it.
Also, and I may be wrong about this, the increase in threat levels seem to follow explosions and bomb discoveries rather than precede them – wouldn’t that be more helpful ? As it stands, anyone with access to the news could have the job of setting the threat level. If a bomb gets discovered raise it. If nothing happens after a few weeks, drop it again. It’s almost as if the security services have as little idea about the actual threat as the public.
In the 70s and 80s, especially in London, the terrorist threat was almost exactly the same as now, with the possible exception of deliberate suicide bombers. Bomb scares regularly helped mask the crapness of London Transport and occasionally something would blow up. The idea of being scared about it is utterly ridiculous to me and always will be. It’s like worrying about being hit by a meteorite.
Regardless we will all be forced to endure many more government spokespeople banging on about “defiance”, “vigilance” and “serious threats” for the next million weeks.
Meanwhile in my personal life many significant, and in some cases tragic, events have coincided that have forced me to start making some serious life decisions. I don’t want to blog about them yet…sorry I mentioned it really.