Heard this on NPR's All Things Considered today... Get busy people! :-) http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98694231 Poet on Call by Andrei Codrescu The Machines Haven't Taken Over All Things Considered, December 24, 2008 With one pull of a switch, the ocean of junk that spilled out of my mailbox every day, was swooshed back into the speechless abyss. If you had asked me before this news, what hand human or divine could stop spam, I'd have answered like Heraclitus, "Who can stop the sea from rising?" It turns out that somebody before a keyboard can, thank you. There is hope. Machines haven't yet taken over. If it's that easy to stop what seemed like unstoppable, why can't other seemingly unstoppable human-generated and computer-driven phenomena be switched off the same way? Why isn't somebody pulling the switch on the collapsing world trade going on in the cracks between time zones? What's going on while I sleep and my retirement money slips down some unfathomable hole? Why don't the providers capable of such cosmic gestures as making the spam-ocean vanish, not exercise their benevolent force against other oceans that threaten us: the automatic unfair trades, the silent streams of world capital vanishing into invisible dead zones, the globe-circling panics? -- Steve Equal bytes for women.