Exceeding the speed limit can be dangerous.
Perhaps almost as much interest was generated around the means as around the content
of the heavily publicized VP announcement. Numerous news sources, for instance,
reported an attempt to save time by preparing a "fill in the name" generic
announcement that was accidentally "sent" instead of "saved"
by a lower level staffer. Later
reports acknowledged that this was probably a hoax. It's worth asking, however,
just how much time could have been saved by preparing a "ready to be sent"
message. My guess is that it would have been a minute or two at the most. Are
we really that news-starved that we were impatiently waiting next to our cellulars
(that anyway were simply sitting in our pockets or on our desks) to ring that
we actually needed to get this news one or two minutes earlier? Somehow I get
the feeling that this hoax (that announced what in the end turned out to be the
"wrong" candidate) was prepared by someone who wanted to make a point
about our need for immediacy.
Go to: Actually, I could have waited.