This is a pale substitute.

A pale substitute for real broadband.

The price of laptops?

And here's a response to jimbo:

-------------------------------------------------

We don't.

We subsidize broadband to the poor knowing they will mostly use it for music, porn, and gambling. Just add a 5 cents a minute surcharge when they are on music or adult content sites. It will pay for itself.
But before that, we should make it a top priority to have affordable broadband available to our most productive citizens, for the multiplier effect on the US economy.

Posted by Chris Ford | December 1, 2007 10:08 PM

And jimbo responds!

__________________________________

Dear Santa,

Can I have a new irony meter for Christmas?

Yours truly,

Chris Ford

Posted by jimbo | December 1, 2007 11:51 PM

I can't participate in this farce.

If that happened, even random people might have internet in their own homes and be searching the web and stuff.

4 is just great. It's delicious. He just completely missed the joke and thought he found a fellow-honky-in-arms.

Awesome.

Hey, where's the thread about that hot babe whats-his-name found?

Don't cause trouble, now.

Brotherband, is it better than Broadband? Go tell the Spartans.

We subsidize broadband to the poor knowing they will mostly use it for music, porn, and gambling.

I am reminded of two things:

- a passage in the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in which Quatermain (and, by extension, Moore) condemns the postwar (but it might be any) society that deadens the senses and desires of its poorest by providing them nothing finer than cheap drink and cheap pornography; and

- one of the final scenes in Bob Rafelson's Mountains of the Moon, in which Patrick Bergin as Richard F. Burton, making a speech to the Royal Geographical Society as part of the set-to between himself and Speke about the failed expedition to discover the source of the Nile, describes the British working class as laboring in deathly exhaustion, doctoring their pains with blinding gin and falling asleep at night, "not making love, not remembering how."

not remembering how
that's awful

Ogged is dead to me. Does he not understand that his unhappiness is for my amusement?

Wait, don't most of *us* only use the internet for music, porn, and gambling?

I don't gamble.

16: Only when we're feeling poorly.

I don't gamble.

Come on, you're a philosopher. Surely the online personals are a form of gambling.

And it's precisely the risk I run of meeting someone that has convinced me not to partake of that activity.

A clever lie.

A whimsical metaphysician might argue that, time being inextricable from human being, and gambling being embedded in time, to be in the world is to gamble but to slip the shackles of being in the world is to hurdle the distinction between wager and result. Or something like that.

Wait, don't most of *us* only use the internet for music, porn, and gambling?

Don't forget lolcats.