[Newspoetry] Breakthrough Announced At Conference

[Wendy Edwards]

NPR Host Reveals Differences Between Genders 

"Girls are different than boys," announced Moira Gunn at a national women's
computing conference, revealing the latest breakthrough in human knowledge.
Audience members were stunned.  "I always thought that I'd just misplaced my
penis somewhere, but this may mean that I never actually had one," mused
organizationally-challenged graduate student Wendy Edwards.  This finding
was consistent with other observed phenomena.  "When the sixth grade girls
were taken out of class to view movies on menstruation, we'd just assumed
that the boys were receiving intensive training in armpit farts and other
sophisticated sound effect production, but now we find that there may be
other reasons for this disparity," noted Edwards.  It's currently uncertain
whether Edwards' newly-discovered lack of a penis will cause her code to
compile any differently for future class assignments.  

The talk on "The Digital Divide" Thursday night also inspired worldwide
excitement.  Gunn pointed out out that most of the Internet connections are
in First World countries and discussed the untapped potential.  Sub-Saharan
Africa is currently facing an AIDS crisis, and many were excited about
connectivity.  "T-1s, T-Cells, what's the difference?" asked a CIO at a
startup.  Several dotcoms offer free personal e-mail accounts, and managers
are confident of their ability to tailor tasteful banner ads to the
individual preferences of people dying of AIDS in third-world countries.
Market leaders are also optimistic about the potential for e-commerce.  "So
far, we've ignored the possibility that people who are starving to death in
countries like Bangladesh could become major consumers on the 'Net, but we
plan to explore that untapped market.  We've considered offering credit
cards with a low APR to such individuals, but we've noticed that customers
in some countries show a tendency to be killed in civil wars, which would
present a major challenge to us in managing our consumer data," commented
the executive.  "However, we truly care about our customers, and we're
continuing to work on finding a way to offer them credit cards at a
reasonable annual rate."