Just read a blog post over at Scientific American giving Adobe Acrobat and IBM's PureEdge (grant application software) a Minus fifty award. These are to recognize technology that "retards human progress", in somewhat of a fun way I guess. Kind of like a joke, though he does seem pretty steamed.

http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=introducing_the_sa_minus_50_awards_for_t&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1&ref=rss

Basically the lament is that the PureEdge and Acrobat are buggy, making it difficult to apply for grants. Ok I'm no fan of acrobat, but I'm not convinced that needing to retype a form in order to get free tax money is really retarding human progress. Actually come to think of it I paid tax in the US last year. Obviously any barrier for the grant applicant spending what once was 'my money' on 'his project' is retarding human progress. Man his project must be waaaay better than my project, to retard human progress by just delaying it a few minutes. There is that word again.

Anyway, the ironic part is the comments section there is new, and broken. It seems to let you register, but then never verifies, you can't reregister etc etc. So after the long lament about crappy software, low and behold more crappy software. Wait -- I shouldn't be so harsh. Maybe that was the problem the grant application was supposed to solve. Perhaps if I just wait a few more minutes...