#1 Threat to the Internet Today

Perhaps (and by perhaps, I mean obviously definitely) the largest threat to the Internet as we know it today is the double click. Born in the twentieth century and popularized by desktop computing, the double click is an antiquated way to tell your computer you want it to do something. Like beating your horse with a live stick or teaching your children how smoking cures boredom, though, the double click is largely a relic of a bygone age and should rightly be lumped in the section of the dictionary that discusses cavemen, dinosaurs and organized religion. The double click rose into contemporary traditional use in an era when personal computers were just not that useful, and therefore software developers–needing to find a way to keep people playing Mine Sweeper–thought that if they increased user input by a factor of two, more time would be spent in awe of just how powerful Windows 3.1 truly was.

In this modern age of the future, however, the double click is obsolete. Officially deemed “dorky” by anyone who will never know what it was like to be alive during Grunge music, the double click is quickly becoming the biggest threat to the Internet–above cyberterrorism and eBay combined–since commercials stopped saying “www” before their URL. Just look at this list of facts about double click usage and the toll it has on the largest network of connected international computers around, the ‘Net:

  • Every double click = at least two clicks (depending on the speed of click and the age of the grandma using the mouse, up to as many as four clicks, or five, may be necessary)
  • Mice and trackpads wear out at a rate somewhere between 50-200% faster with double clicking than with regular clicking. This statistic largely depends on what x2 is when represented as a percentage. I don’t know, but it’s fact.
  • Surprisingly, this is not an issue with touch screens, but that is largely attributed to the realization that anyone using a touch screen is a hip, 11 year old boy.
an example of a png file that has been clicked on too many times
Before and after of highly double-clicked icon

If that isn’t enough to cool your jets and get you switching to either a single click solution or, ideally, some type of advanced speech recognition input (I suggest a personal assistant, preferably one of your children as they don’t require monetary compensation–it’s called child labor and it’s legal, look it up), then just take a look at what double clicking did to the icon presented here. The before and after clearly show that only twenty to five-thousand clicks later the icon has had a hole worn through it, making it nearly useless except as an image representing a file which can be clicked on to open that file in a predetermined fashion by your operating system.

Please, exercise caution. Promote singularity. Click once.

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