Several times. I've never really come away with that.

Well, i've never read the whole thing, just parts of it in class. But I was told that Voltaire wrote Candide as a satire on Optimisim.

Here's a few examples:

http://www.ericjonas.com/features/ca...sm/default.asp

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes....est.bien.html

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/hum_303/voltaire.html

Yeah, after thinking about the thread for a while I figured I was being too negative earlier. There are, indeed, some things that make me feel optimistic about "us all". And so, I swear without a moment of cynicism:

- The commercial success of Radiohead, largely on the basis of <i>OK Computer</i>. I could do a couple of paragraphs on this one, but basically, amidst all the crap going, if enough people could enjoy this to make Radiohead such a major act, well that is really something.

- President Bush addressed a group of school children a few weeks ago. On an easel they had a list. The children had completed the sentence "I love America because..." Bush saw this, and decided to add his own entry. "I love America because I love freedom." I was immediately taken aback, because I was considering what I would have written if it were me up there, and <i>I had the same answer</i>. It was a weird moment of connection - <i>political</i> connection. And it was a gut-level connection, and I never expected to have that kind of gut-level connection with Bush.

- While considering the matter for a <a href="http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=24660&cid=2679667">Slashdot post</a>, I realized that Microsoft Passport cannot possibly dominate the market. That it was able to spread its dominance over the OS to dominance over several other things, but it cannot use that same sort of leverage with Passport. And the funny part is... they don't seem to realize it yet!

This gives me great hope for us all, because it shows just how difficult it is for a company to translate monopoly in one industry into monopoly in another.

(The financial folks are going to ream MS; take a look at the <a href="http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2001-12/sunflash.20011219.4.html;$sessionid$U2OLONZ1O2BGDAMTA1LU5YQ">list of companies</a> that have already offered to support this MS competitor without seeing one line of code. These are the people who will never deal with Passport. Gee, you can't use Passport with your eBay. Gee, you can't use Passport with your Quicken. Gee, Passport won't ever work with your cell phone. And the only place you can use it to buy travel is Expedia.)