Recently, however, both the public and business administration arenas have seen the first appearances of what these pages see as an essentially novel class of computer constructs, Directive Decision Devices.
On May 19, the ministry issued a directive to computer makers that required the preinstallation of Green Dam on hard drives or a CD-ROM with installation software that usually is packaged with computers.
In addition, his followers have used cellphones and computer messages to disseminate his directives.
The initiative, which would encrypt information while it was being processed inside the computer, would also violate European Union directives governing the transparency of computer data, Dr. Anderson said.
Try as they might, these folks can't resist references to the Wachowski siblings' sci-fi trilogy and Q, borrowing the directives given via computer screen to Neo in The Matrix, has craftily urged his horde to follow the white rabbit.
Foreign computer makers learned of the directive just three weeks ago and have been asking the Chinese government to reconsider the rules.
But the regatta director, Iain Murray, has simply been responding to the weather data and directives delivered to his computer on the committee boat.
As Fred Kaplan laid out in a recent article in The New York Times, "WarGames" was the direct cause of the United States' first-ever national directive to secure its computer technology.
He has accepted the post of "technology chair" for School District 5, in Harlem, along with the directive to put a computer on every desk.
But the directive leaves the issue of computer levies up to national governments.
As the backlog of calls grew — it ultimately reached 1,300 at its highest point — an unusual directive went out across the computer screens within ambulances, emergency workers said.
