Yo, Microsoft. It has come to our attention that you haven't yet realised that computers are, basically, thick.
Yeah, the human race is no doubt making great strides in the realms of fuzzy logic and neural nets and so forth, and one day, a computer will pass the Turing Test and chain itself up in front of whitehouse.gov demanding the vote; but at the moment, personal computers are just extremely quick calculating machines with little to no understanding of whatever subtlety hasn't been programmed into them by Real Live People. So, you know, stop trying to make them helpful.
I'm thinking here of the Smart Tags application that comes packaged with whichever version of Microsoft Word we've got at work. You know, the one that looks for key word patterns in the document and marks them with a tag so you can manipulate them in whatever manner you see fit; ie., adding addresses to Outlook, looking up product prices online, checking a date in your Calendar. Sure, these might be helpful under certain circumstances, but if you're using Word to create caption data for a television program then they're just intrusive; and since we don't use them, we weren't trained in them, and hardly anybody at work knows what they are and how to get rid of them.
Which would just be a petty annoyance if not for the fact that current Canadian captioning standards require the text to be in upper-case, which apparently causes the computer to conclude that, in the sentence "JASON STATHAM AND JET LI SQUARE OFF IN THE NEW ACTION THRILLER WAR," Jet Li Square is an address. Good God, y'all. That's just multiple levels of unhelpful.
Computers are thick. Just accept it, Microsoft.
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