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> It's a really nasty piece of rhetoric. I'd agree, but many of the observations in the article reflect patterns that run much deeper in users' thinking and behavior, whether they're cognitive biases, consistently false mental models of how the computer works, or perhaps the most interesting and puzzling, one or more forms of anthropomorphism. I would go so far as to suggest that anthropomorphism is central, not incidental, to everyday interaction with computers. If we get away from understanding this as superstition (which implies false beliefs that merely need to be corrected), these patterns might lead to, in Terry's words, a "foundation" for user behavior in general. Linnda Caporael has written several papers on anthropomorphism, some of them addressing machines. If anyone has citations on similar topics, I'd be interested. Caporael, L. R. (1986). Anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism: Two faces of the human machine. Computers in Human Behavior, 2, 215-234. http://homepages.rpi.edu/~caporl/home/Notes_files/Anthropomorphism.PDF Dan Zollman