With a simple mouse click, you can choose what you want to see, hear and read. At your convenience, not when broadcasters feel they can get the biggest commercial payoff. Of course, we're talking about technology here. And the one universal truth about technology is that it can and will fail. To make matters worse, Atlanta's transportation system seems hopelessly bogged down.
Visitors complain about the phone service.
A second truism is that the more sophisticated the technology, the more complex the failure. The spirit of the Olympics calls for even the most belligerent nations to lay down their arms and live in peace while their athletes compete. But there's no truce when it comes to computer glitches. And so it was this past weekend with the Olympic information system, touted to be one of the world's great technological wonders. Like a cyber wizard, the system that IBM created for the Atlanta Olympic Committee was supposed to instantly deliver Olympic scores to an anxiously waiting global network.