Too Much Tech Makes End Users Blink

There's a strange, somewhat funny story in The Washington Post today about how technology is probably going to keep outstripping people's ability to deal with it for many decades to come. It's a long piece, but please bear with it to the end; that's where Jaron Lanier (who some credit with inventing the phrase "virtual reality"), whimsically suggests that, in exchange for being granted U.S. copyright protection, commercial software publishers should have to pay users $1 every time their product screws up. "Instead of hunting down people who smoke pot," Lanier says, "they'd be hunting down people who sell business software that crashes. They'd owe people a buck or go to jail. That's what Washington should be doing."