As with the US election of 2000, the US election of 2008 features two slates and four new faces running for the top offices. While many of the issues concerning the electorate are different in 2008 than in 2000, remarkably some issues are the same. We thought you might be amused at Doug Isenberg's resurrected reflections on the 2000 election. You can see what has changed and what has not.

As we use and design computing systems, Michael Schrage asks us to reflect on what these systems reveal of ourselves and not just what they reveal to others. We may find many surprises about design and privacy. In 1892, the newspapers published a series of editorials of leading thinkers about what the world would be like in 1992. (See Dave Walter, TODAY THEN, Am Geographical Union, 1992.) Collectively, they were almost 100 percent wrong. Their reflections revealed more about how they saw themselves than about the future. This is exactly what Michael Schrage is warning us about.

Terry Winograd is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he directs the program on human-computer interaction. His SHRDLU program done at the MIT AI Lab was one of the early explorations in natural language understanding by computers. His book with Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition, critiqued the underlying assumptions of AI and much of computer system design, and led to completely new directions in those fields. He was a founder and national president of Computer Professionals for Responsibility. His remarks, made in 2002, are as relevant today as they were when first spoken.

Persons in every age group wonder why time seems to move so much faster than it did in their pasts. It seems as if there is never enough time to get everything done and that the situation only gets worse. Many explanations have been offered for this, but few seem to hit the target as well as Phil Yaffe's explanation. We hope you enjoy and find it provocative. Phil has been a writer and journalist for over four decades and is able to write eloquently about his personal experience with accelerating time.