Day camp for Web junkies
This article doesn’t really go into what qualifies as an “Internet addict,” but by most people’s reckoning, a lot of them live in China. Be it porn or gaming, China’s youth are Web crazy and the nation is ready to put its foot down. Young Chinese folks age 14-22 are being sent to boot camp to cure them of their addiction. The camp will provide a mixture of treatment options for the depression, misanthropy and sullenness associated with excessive Web surfing. Those options aren’t mentioned here, but they seem to be preferable to the alternative, which is the military-style training regimen offered at the already-established Internet Addiction Treatment Centre near Beijing.
Luckily for me, I’ve turned my Internet addiction into gainful employment. Thus far, no one in my family has believed it necessary to turn me over to a Communist government and make me do push-ups four hours a day.
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Giving traffic the finger
According to this article, the majority of drivers believe it’s dangerous to send text messages when you’re on the road, yet a large percentage of them do it anyway. This is one of those head-slappingly obvious moments, like it’s probably not a good idea to take the temperature of your tea by dunking your fingers in it, or test the density of a 2×4 by whacking someone over the head with it. I suppose people do those two things occasionally so it’s none too surprising that people will text messages while driving. I think I’ll try catching up on my reading during my morning commute or strap a TV to the windshield to watch Flintstones re-runs. Couldn’t really be much worse.
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Patently evil
Sometimes you’ve got to hand it to those corporate types: they really know how to milk a cow. Or in this case, milk the cow then shoot it in the noggin. Qualcomm performed the legal equivalent by keeping some of its patented standards secret then suing companies after they started adopting them. That’s pretty clever stuff. Evil, but clever. I think I might write a book about the subject, hide it under my filing cabinet for a few years, then whip it out and sue the crap out of anyone who publishes books written in English. That’ll teach them to mess around with Insider.
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