Russell Beattie

This could be a sign of the apocalypse, but today Slashdot actually has the first intelligent thread on mobile I've ever seen on the site. As someone who's been reading /. since god knows when (my user number is 43187 if that tells you anything) I am astounded by the fact that this day has finally arrived. At first, I clicked through the headline titled What's Keeping US Phones In the Stone Age? ready to be annoyed as usual, but it turns out the poster had just returned from Japan. Oh! Ahh, well okay... In that case, he has a point, as a check of the KDDI AU or DoCoMo sites will quickly show. The original post did troll a bit by expressing his "shock" at how much less powerful the iPhone is than his beloved Casio W41CA was in Japan, ignoring any of its innovations in usability and storage, etc. But that's okay, his larger point was true enough - the selection of phones and services here in the U.S. still pales in comparison to the mobile market in Japan.

I mean, I'm not sure we're in the "stone age" here in the U.S., but that's not what I'm writing about here. To me what was amazing to me is that for the first time none of the comments on the thread had a highly scored, yet completely asinine comment such as, "I don't want all those damn features, all I want is a phone!" Now, I browse at a threshold of 5, so I'm sure some moron luddite has posted that comment, but for the first time the rest of the community hasn't modded that sort of ignorance with a +4 Insightful. Not only that, but many of the comments were actually long and well thought out. I'll have to check it later today, as there's still time for bozo posters and moderators to show up, but as of now it's pretty amazing!

Truly a milestone event in American geekdom.

-Russ