I don't think these guys are quite ready to go live just yet.

Today's examination of cultural fluff comes courtesy of YouTube.

Ask.com has decided it's tired of playing second fiddle to other, more successful search engines and has decided to start a campaign to let people know exactly how good their search engine is:

You wake up. It is dark.

::LOOK

It is very dark. You might get eaten by a Grue.

::GET UP

The pillow slides off your face as you force yourself to sit up in your bed. Sunlight streams in through the tiny window of your bedroom. Apparently it is not as dark as you originally thought.

From Bruno the Bandit, by Ian McDonald

One Laptop Per Child is, in my opinion, a laudible and worthy goal... to create low-cost laptops that are then distributed for free to children in developing countries.

This is a worthwhile effort. There are people who feel the project is a waste of time, and that people should be focusing on other, more basic problems, but I believe that focusing on any one problem to the exclusion of all others won't solve anything. OLPC won't save the world but that doesn't mean it won't do good things.

That said, sometimes I worry about what exactly people involved in the project expect the children are going to get out of it. Take, for example, the following quote:

"A child doesn't want to play the latest video games. He wants to be able to read a book."
-Michalis Bletsas, OLPC official, as quoted in Linux Today

This quote is offered as an explanation as to why the laptop isn't powerful enough to play the latest and greatest games available on the market today, and it makes me want to bang my head against the wall until I lose consciousness, just to give me a moment of sweet respite from the silliness of the idea.

General Protection Fault, by Jeff Darlington. Now that's when you'll know there's a bubble...

This will a gentle cut, a minor nick if you will -- both because of the approaching holiday, when my thoughts ought to be focused on Love, Joy, Peace and GoodWill Towards Man, and also because I think the transgressor in this particular instance is more guilty of being too close to the perceived problem than he is of any kind of egregious journalistic excess.

That said, this caught my attention because it made the lists on Slashdot, and even the briefest episodes innocuous hyperventilation can suck all the air out of a room if you stuff enough people in it and get them to start hyperventillating at the same time.