Is anyone else amused by the fact that icons or symbols on computers often depict the outdated real-world counterpart of the electronic program or task? An e-mail program doesn’t use envelopes, or a metal mailbox with a red flag, but you’d never know it by looking at the icons for popular e-mail programs. Word processing programs don’t use pens or pencils, but many of their icons would have you think so. The Windows desktop is a place for files and shortcuts, not for papers that you write on with a pencil, and hold in plastic cornerfolds like the Windows desktop icon shows. Sun Microsystems produces a (crappy) product called Java. The icon is a steaming cup of coffee. Now not all icons are this backwards. An icon for a wireless link will show radio waves emulating from a laptop, not ET causing juvenile telepathic inebriation. An instant message program will feature a little person, representing the people you are talking to, and will not usually show Paul Revere making his midnight ride, shouting to some friend of a 14 year old illiterate: “The french R stupid lol.” But I think it should be one or the other. I say you either change “envelope” icons into @ symbols. Or better yet, change it the other way: change the front of anti-virus programs’ boxes to a picture of a computer puking all over a hospital floor as a nurse inserts a thermometer into its printer port. Let’s change the icon for TweakUI (a MS program for changing Windows settings) into a picture of a University of Idaho student with erect nipples. Let’s create viruses that wipe your hard drive, complete with an icon featuring a hard drive staining a roll of toilet paper a fantastic shade of raw umber. Just whatever you do, take that stupid MS Office paperclip and put him in prison. He’s way too happy.