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Does Google = God?
lgreco writes "In an op/ed for the NYT, Thomas Friedman wonders "Is Google God?" Interesting article that disseminates things mostly known to and hopefully well understood by the Slashdot readership. The fact that such commentary made it to the NYT op/ed pages is remarkable." It's the NYT, so a free registration is required.
A co-worker of mine has been claiming that google is god for two years now.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/06/29/nyt.friedman/
Give us now our dayly searches, forgive us of our articles, as we have put them in our keywords. Please O Google grant me now a privilige to use your mighty powers to find the answers to my searches.
"... only one-third come from inside the U.S. The rest are in 88 other languages."
Americans may speak funny but generally its still known as english. Amazingly it's actually spoken outside of the US as well.
It just has some vague statistics about increasing numbers of Google searches and DNS requests in the last three years, then some specualtion by a talking head tech pundit about how "the rate of technological integration has intensified" and how in future everybody will be connected to everybody else.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
I thought this article was supposed to be about Google and God, but it was more about wi-fi and how wi-fi combined with Google will allow you to "find anything, anywhere, anytime". But it THEN goes on about how broadband adoption will allow al-Qaeda will be able to more easily send recruitment videos using video-on-demand. Of course, it mentions 9/11, as expected. It also says that America has to take "it" seriously. Oh, and it states a couple of interesting statistics. Yay. There, now you don't need to RTFA.
Jeez Louise.. Terrorists will be using the interweb to organize more efficiently! Foreign people who hate use will be able to talk about us behind our backs! (No mention that the internet has done more to proliferate American culture and "values" than MTV or McDonalds, or that the internet can be, and actually is, used for good as well as evil..)
Don't get your panties in a wad, United States. Better start fearing your domestic Police State To Be!
OMFG! There's a knife next to my plate! What if a terrorist had sat down here!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Drugs will do that to you sometimes, but the important thing is not to try and write articles and stuff in that "bent" state of mind. In my case, these delusions of grandeur usually pass in a few hours time. A good night's sleep should help too.
Peace \\//
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
If God == 0, then Google = God would be false.
Then again, if you believe that God is real, or at least a float, then the specific test that God == 0.000000 is likely to come back true. Now, the real question is whether having strcmp("Google", "God") > 0 being true is a serious theological problem.
However, the real point of the article is that in an increasingly linked world, it is more important than ever to be good world citizens.
Lord Rees Moag and James Davidson make this point in their book 'Sovereign Individual": large countries become increasingly vulnerable to small countries and organized groups because of the threats of cyber attacks, etc.
As this article points out, with the free flow of information, small groups can share information and form larger political and action groups.
Not to be political, but I was against the recent Iraq War because I think that it is a very bad idea to alienate other countries when we largely depend on the global "dollar standard" for hoarding money and purchasing oil to prop up our economy. I am a more than a little concerned that our turning our backs on the UN will cause us all kinds of problems in the future. (BTW, the US has vetoed 35 UN security council resolutions ssince 1970 - so, it was not so atypical for Russia, France, and Germany to threaten to veto one of our resolutions.
-Mark
Here is the results on GoogleFight :
google is god = 157049 results
google is evil = 204364 results
Conclusion : Google is NOT God, Google is EVIL!! We are doomed!!
Actually I prefer to think about Google, or the web in general, as the hitchikers guide to galaxy as described in Douglas Adams novels. It knows about anything but most of the time the answer might not quite be what you were looking for.
cu,
Lispy
I don't know if Google is God, but I do know that I accepted him as my personal savior.
:wq
And that brings me to the point of this column: While we may be emotionally distancing ourselves from the world, the world is getting more integrated. That means that what people think of us, as Americans, will matter more, not less. Because people outside America will be able to build alliances more efficiently in the world we are entering and they will be able to reach out and touch us -- whether with computer viruses or anthrax recipes downloaded from the Internet -- more than ever.
The point is more fear and paranoiac fantasies as only Thomas Friedman can spin, with an evil-doer under every rock, a terrorist behind every tree and, now, a rabid, sweaty-toothed madman coming to get us behind every keyboard.
From his lofty perch high atop the NY Times, Friedman has seen a career revival thanks to 9/11, winning a Pulitzer for his turgid writing about the event and its effects. When Friedman gets basic facts just plain wrong, it makes you wonder how much else he gets wrong, or otherwise intentionally distorts or misrepresents just so he can make everyone see the world through his lens where terrorists will get all of us.
Examples?
VeriSign, which operates much of the Internet's infrastructure...
and
A domain request is anytime anyone types in .com or .net
Really? The last time I checked VeriSign was only responsible for maintaining the .com and .net registries, as well as most SSL certificate services. There are 243 country code top-level domains, plus the .org TLD, not just .com and .net. The way Friedman makes it sound it's as if there's nothing else out there, and I'm not sure which is worse: that he was too lazy or too apathetic to talk to anyone other than VeriSign to get a basic understanding of the Internet to accurately write about it for his many non-technical readers.
These are basic facts and are simple to check. Any journalism student can do this so why doesn't Friedman?
Given his penchant for hyperbole in overstating the negative consequences of everything and minimizing the positives, it's no surprise that Friedman has completely missed the fact that the same technologies he fears are just as capable of opening up communications. He says that while the world is growing more integrated and what the world thinks about the USA will matter more, the USA is becoming ideologically isolationist and it doesn't need to heed what the rest of the world tells it. Proliferation of the Internet facilitates the free exchange of ideas that can result in better understanding and relations with the rest of the world, which Friedman apparently believes is full of nothing but some sort of irrational monolithic hatred.
When Friedman takes such a reductionist view of the world that amounts to Us vs. Them, is it any wonder that all Friedman can see are terrorists, terrorists everywhere and not a refuge in sight.
When the only tool you have is a hammer the whole world looks like a nail.