Yeah except that it basically costs nothing for people to migrate over to a new site. It won't happen all at once, but if myspace/facebook become so cluttered that they aren't easy and/or fun to use anymore, then people will look for something new. They'll sort of keep both the old and the new accounts active side by side for a while, but the switch can still happen.
Neither of them will disappear entirely. One isn't going to crush the other. What's going to happen is that the masses will get tired of both of them, and move on to something new. There will still be some plenty of diehards who refuse to switch, and most of their current users will still keep and check on their accounts every once-in-a-while. But the bulk of the daily traffic will move to some newer, lightweight site that has a couple of novel ideas/features. And that site will be the big thing until it gets too bloated and tired, and then the cycle will repeat itself again.
All of these sorts of things tend to collapse under their own weight. When they start out, they're being created by people who are passionate about it and doing it because they care/enjoy working on it. Then it grows and more people sign up and suddenly there's a potential for some money to be made exploiting it. And that's what happens. The advertisers and spammers move in in full force, deals are made in order to afford all the new servers needed to keep up with traffic, and more and more people keep joining just because their friends told them they should.
The ratio of signal to noise gets skewed to the point where it becomes hard to use, and that combined with the general fickleness of people (especially the younger people that make up a significant portion of the userbase), means that the eyeballs go elsewhere. And at the end of the day, nothing that myspace or facebook or any social networking site does is really all that complicated. There are plenty of other websites out there that are offering ways to communicate with other people.
I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but the churn and turn over seems to be pretty consistent. Before facebook everyone talked about myspace. Before myspace everyone talked about orkut. Before orkut everyone talked about livejournal, etc... All those sites still exist, but today facebook is the one that people are writing headlines about. A couple years down the line some new upstart will be getting all the attention. It's just the way it is, and investing in one of these sites like it's going to be the next amazon or google is pretty silly.
I think it's pretty unlikely that two particles are going to hit each other 100% square on and all that energy will somehow cancel out and the result will just dead stop and drop to the floor. The particles in the LHC are going to be colliding with so much energy that the results are most certainly going to be moving at a very high rate of speed, high enough that something like the Earth's gravity will hardly be noticeable to it.
Earlier this morning I was thinking about how with as much media as we have these days, and the so many types of "celebrity" that exist, soon we're quickly approaching a future where someone famous is going to be dying pretty much constantly. The cnn.com homepage will become just a slideshow of who died today, while real news websites will decide that it's not worth the trouble and maybe just move those sorts of stories to a little sidebar somewhere.
If you'd like, I could draw you a diagram that says that at certain pressures ice instantly turns to chocolate milk. Do you want me to do that? It'll change everything you thought you knew about the universe.
Heh, yes, sadly I'm not an expert on much, but that doesn't mean I can't have opinions. At the end of the day, people as large groups generally work in pretty predictable ways, and as much as computer geeks would like to pretend otherwise, they fall into most of those same patterns.
I have no direct experience or knowledge, but I'd imagine that it's not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. Steve Jobs might not give a rats ass about most of his employees beyond whether or not they're being productive (I doubt most CEO's of large companies are), but that doesn't mean he'd kick dirt in your face just for the fun of it.
I don't think it's really possible for any company to make products that so many consumers are ridiculously passionate about unless the employees working on it are at least as passionate about their work. I'm not sure how Apple specifically motivates their employees, but I'd wager a guess that they seek out people who are already fairly strongly-self motivated for whatever reason, and once you've got people like that, as long as you keep them busy with work that they feel is worthwhile and they feel like they're producing something of quality, then it's pretty self-perpetuating.
We've all had the experience where a project that we were doing (maybe not at work, maybe as a hobby) becomes so engrossing that we willingly stay up to the wee hours of the morning, because we're really enjoying what we're doing. If a job can provide that on any sort of consistent basis, then it's a good place to be. The stuff that I read about Apple makes it sound like it's that sort of place for a lot of people.
The GUI certainly has gotten more complicated in many ways, but I think that's just a natural consequence of the fact that there are a whole lot more things that we use our computers for these days. Operating systems (and computers in general I guess) could be stuck under the "jack of all trades, master of none" adage, where they have to be capable not only of performing the tasks that the manufacturer can think of, but also provide a structure for random developers to add their own tasks.
There are small steps that can be taken to make certain tasks easier. On my mac LC maybe 12 or so years ago, I had a broad and complex series of folders that I used to organize my various personal text documents so that I could find what I was looking for with relative ease. Now, on my Macbook I have only maybe two or three folders that I keep those sorts of documents in. I have significantly more of those documents now, but the processing power of my current computer combined with software like spotlight makes finding something very simple indeed. Activating spotlight isn't an intuitive process, but it's very simple and easy to learn. And that's also an ability that doesn't really have any metaphor in the physical world. Being able to instantly find a particular string of text from a pile of thousands of pages is pretty awesome.
There might be some sort of amazingly innovative way to simplify all of that without dumbing it down or reducing capabilities, but I kind of doubt it, short of some sort of direct neural interface that lets me control the computer with my thoughts. As long as I'm feeing the computer data with my hands and the computer is sending me data via my eyes(and occasionally ears), I cannot imagine effectively using a computer without someway of quickly inputting text (a keyboard) and without a pointing device (a mouse/trackpad/touchscreen/etc). Once you've got that, icons are obvious, as is the need to contain tasks (windows). Add in the various ways of inputting and displaying text/images, and you've got your basic GUI.
The thing is, I'm not sure that "intuitive" is even the best thing to strive for. Humans are generally pretty good at learning, so requiring someone to grasp some basic actions in order to interact with a computer isn't that big of a deal. More important is that the system be internally consistent, so that those basic actions can become automatic and thoughtless.
The Wii is only a partially useful example, because while it does allow for new ways of interacting with a video game, there are also sacrifices. You might think an Xbox360 controller has a ridiculous number of buttons on it, but there are games that use all of those buttons. You might be able to find some way to map all those buttons onto the control methods provided to you by the Wii-mote, but there's no guarantee that that new control scheme will be superior.
Multi-touch on the iPhone is really just an evolution of our current gui, and one that as much as anything only makes up for the lack of a keyboard/mouse, rather than being some sort of evolution beyond them.
While I certainly agree that it's nice to see Apple totally focusing on the back-end stuff for this version, I don't think you're entirely correct in saying that up until now all we've ever been getting is eye candy. The people who design shiny buttons and fancy graphical effects are probably not the same people writing multi-processor optimization code, and it's not useful to pretend that doing one precludes any possibility of doing the other.
Apple in particular has been steadily improving the inner workings of OSX, not just adding new layers of shine and sticking it in a box. They do love their shine, no doubt, but there's been plenty of new stuff under the hood with just about every release as well.
This isn't about rules of engagement. If someone attacks an army base in Afghanistan, the army soldiers will most likely try to kill them. The supreme court ruling says nothing about that. But when the fighting is over and the dust settles and the army ends up with some prisoners, then that's where this might become an issue.
Apple already did their complete OS overhaul, that's what OSX is. I don't think they're planning on doing it again any time soon. There's a number of reasons why Apple was able to do it successfully while MS is stumbling, but I think the biggest is that Windows is mired in backwards compatability, while with OS X Apple only really paid lip service to it.
There are plenty of sensible reasons for Microsoft to stress that backwards compatibility, but at the same time, it's just a huge weight around their neck.
There's two really bad direct effects of the administration's "enemy combatant" policy that are now going to have to be dealt with. Like you said, there's a bunch of people who were held captive for dubious reasons, and should be released. The big problem there is that their extended time in captivity has most certainly soured their attitudes towards the US, and so even if they weren't a threat before, they could potentially be one now. Not that that's a good reason to continue to hold them captive. The US created this mess, and should expect to bear the consequences.
The second big problem is that because declaring someone an "enemy combatant" made it so easy to make them disappear, I think it's likely that there are plenty of prisoners that were captured for valid reason, but the government didn't bother to do their homework after the fact. The fact that just now, over 6 years later, are cases starting to go to trial (and very dubious sounding trials at that). Now that real trials are going to end up happening, don't be surprised if the groundwork hasn't been laid to actually convict guilt people. End result, more dangerous people get freed. Once again, this is a mess that the US has created for itself, and is going to have to bear some consequences for.
The Bush administration has never been particularly interested in going through the proper channels to get things done (see FISA and wiretapping), instead they prefer to make up their own easy rules and then just do things in the most half-assed way possible. And as a result, things were not done anywhere near the right way, and so we end up with an even bigger mess than we started with.
You seem to be implying that there's only two positions that person can take. Either they be completely involved in the minutiae of everything that goes on around them, or they're an ignorant sheeple allowing the man to trample all over them. In reality, it's not quite that easy.
You say that mutual agreement is the way to go. I'd argue that organizations like the government are the manifestations of that mutual agreement. Sure, not everyone agrees, but you're never going to get a group of 100 people, much less millions or billions of people, to fully agree on anything.
I guess I just don't get what you're suggesting the alternative is. You say you don't care if people awaken. Awaken to what? To the fact that there are people richer than them? Everyone knows that already. The fact that going to work sucks? Everyone knows that too. You're talking like there's some utopia alternative just sitting there waiting for us. The reality that I see is that civilization takes a lot of work, and that's just how life works. There are certainly people out there who find ways to game the system and live better at the expense of others, but again, that's life. If we all used those same tricks, then they'd cease to work and we'd all be back at square one.
So what you're saying is that anyone who lives in any fashion beyond subsistence farming is stupid?
Banking, religion, and politics all have their problems, no doubt. But they're all important and persistent factors in the progress that humanity has made. They've all been involved in bad things, but they've all be involved in lots of good things as well.
A human being is, on their own, capable of many things, both good and bad. Structures, systems, corporations, religions, corporations...they've all allowed us as a civilization to accomplish tasks that no one man could accomplish on his own. Some good and some bad, but all it does is amplify our abilities.
You're pretty much right, but I think it's worth mentioning that although the software is really the keystone of Apple's success, they've also got the ability to make decent hardware if the need arises. They didn't have to wait for someone to release an mp3 player with a scroll wheel. They decided that that'd be the best interface for their iPod software(or more likely the two evolved together), and so they designed their own hardware. The same happened to a lesser extend with the iPhone. Apple didn't need to convince a phone manufacturer to build a handset that was basically just a big multi-touch capable screen, they went and designed their own.
It's also important to notice that those hardware specifics are generally tied to hardware requirements to make the user-interface work. That is to say, it ties really directly and clearly back into the software. At the same time that Apple is designing new hardware features to interface with their software, they've been generally moving towards more commodity hardware for the guts of their stuff. While the iMac has a history of the outside looking rather unusual compared to most computers, the components inside the shell are usually pretty standard stuff that'd be just as at home in a PC as in a Mac. The recent-ish switch to Intel being one of the most obvious examples.
It's a pretty reasonable strategy for product design, especially considering the consumer market.
In the USA, at least, bundling is the normal thing. Terms like "weirdness" and "normal" don't necessarily carry value judgements.
It'd be weird and certainly not normal if I got home tonight and someone had filled my mailbox with hundred dollar bills, but I wouldn't consider that to be a a bad thing.
All a corporation or anybody else needs to do to be "normal" is do what everyone else is doing. Whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing is an entirely different subject.
Maybe when Apple stops making products that provide features that people like. It might just be a voice call device to you, but you do not represent the entire world.
When my family first got a computer, it functioned basically as a really fancy typewriter. 15 years later, and I spend hours each day at a computer using it to help me with hundreds of different tasks. Technology has been creeping along to the point where phones are starting to really make that big push into a diversity of uses, and Apple is pretty good at designing interfaces that allow that sort of thing.
In conclusion, you're dumb. The phone companies have always done their best to screw us over, since well before Apple ever even looked in their direction. Every hardware manufacturer is continuously releasing new hardware (or their company dies), so "upgrade fatigue" (if such a thing even exists) is hardly an Apple or ATT specific issue. And third, there's only been two versions of the iPhone, and one of them isn't even for sale yet. It's hard to be tired of upgrading when you haven't even had the chance to do so yet.
Or maybe I'm the dumb one and I just got trolled hard. Oh well, it beats working.
Especially in a game where death has significant consequences, there really needs to be areas safe from PVP. Or else it wouldn't really be possible for new players to come in and participate in any way. That's the problem with having such a high stakes game. Older players can grief the hell out of newbies, and the newbies get left with absolutely no recourse. Sure, it's fun for the people who've been building their skills since day one, but making the game impossible for new players is a good way to have your MMO die.
EvE is tough enough for new players to get involved in just because of its learning curve. If there wasn't protected space, your average newbie would hardly last a week. (Some of the more established corps/alliances have created good newbie support structures, but I think it'd be silly for the devs to rely on that to keep their playerbase growing.)
Google and the internet in genera are pretty neutral as are most tools. As is usually the case, their effects on you as a person are pretty much defined by how you choose to use that tool.
If all you're looking for is simple answers/facts/etc, then Google is pretty easy, and like you said, you can grab that info quickly and then forget about it. If you want more in-depth understanding of a particular topic, chances are the internet has that bouncing around somewhere as well, and Google's not a bad place to find it.
I fail to see how looking up the capital of Argentina the "old way" in a paper bound encyclopedia is anymore educational than looking it up on the internet. If all I care about is the capital, then I'll skim a website or a book all the same until I find it, then close the page. If I've got the time and desire to learn more about Argentina, then I'll read some of the text around it. And through the magic of hyperlinks, the internet has much more text "around" it.
I think you can also make a pretty strong argument that the important part of being smarter is less about memorizing random information and more about being able to analyze the information and then make your own decisions based upon it. Being able to pull that information off the top of your head is great, but I think it's a fair trade to have quick access to billions of times of more information if the tradeoff is that I don't remember as much of it.
Slashdot Mirror
What is a "Solution Architect"?
Let's be fair, I only reworded a portion of the parent post. I was too lazy to rewrite the rest of it.
Yeah except that it basically costs nothing for people to migrate over to a new site. It won't happen all at once, but if myspace/facebook become so cluttered that they aren't easy and/or fun to use anymore, then people will look for something new. They'll sort of keep both the old and the new accounts active side by side for a while, but the switch can still happen.
I could tell you about that if you're interested in hearing it. (spoiler: it went well)
Neither of them will disappear entirely. One isn't going to crush the other. What's going to happen is that the masses will get tired of both of them, and move on to something new. There will still be some plenty of diehards who refuse to switch, and most of their current users will still keep and check on their accounts every once-in-a-while. But the bulk of the daily traffic will move to some newer, lightweight site that has a couple of novel ideas/features. And that site will be the big thing until it gets too bloated and tired, and then the cycle will repeat itself again.
What does crappy hardware/software with inadequate error checking have to do with what I was talking about?
All of these sorts of things tend to collapse under their own weight. When they start out, they're being created by people who are passionate about it and doing it because they care/enjoy working on it. Then it grows and more people sign up and suddenly there's a potential for some money to be made exploiting it. And that's what happens. The advertisers and spammers move in in full force, deals are made in order to afford all the new servers needed to keep up with traffic, and more and more people keep joining just because their friends told them they should.
The ratio of signal to noise gets skewed to the point where it becomes hard to use, and that combined with the general fickleness of people (especially the younger people that make up a significant portion of the userbase), means that the eyeballs go elsewhere. And at the end of the day, nothing that myspace or facebook or any social networking site does is really all that complicated. There are plenty of other websites out there that are offering ways to communicate with other people.
I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but the churn and turn over seems to be pretty consistent. Before facebook everyone talked about myspace. Before myspace everyone talked about orkut. Before orkut everyone talked about livejournal, etc... All those sites still exist, but today facebook is the one that people are writing headlines about. A couple years down the line some new upstart will be getting all the attention. It's just the way it is, and investing in one of these sites like it's going to be the next amazon or google is pretty silly.
I think it's pretty unlikely that two particles are going to hit each other 100% square on and all that energy will somehow cancel out and the result will just dead stop and drop to the floor. The particles in the LHC are going to be colliding with so much energy that the results are most certainly going to be moving at a very high rate of speed, high enough that something like the Earth's gravity will hardly be noticeable to it.
Earlier this morning I was thinking about how with as much media as we have these days, and the so many types of "celebrity" that exist, soon we're quickly approaching a future where someone famous is going to be dying pretty much constantly. The cnn.com homepage will become just a slideshow of who died today, while real news websites will decide that it's not worth the trouble and maybe just move those sorts of stories to a little sidebar somewhere.
If you'd like, I could draw you a diagram that says that at certain pressures ice instantly turns to chocolate milk. Do you want me to do that? It'll change everything you thought you knew about the universe.
Heh, yes, sadly I'm not an expert on much, but that doesn't mean I can't have opinions. At the end of the day, people as large groups generally work in pretty predictable ways, and as much as computer geeks would like to pretend otherwise, they fall into most of those same patterns.
I have no direct experience or knowledge, but I'd imagine that it's not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. Steve Jobs might not give a rats ass about most of his employees beyond whether or not they're being productive (I doubt most CEO's of large companies are), but that doesn't mean he'd kick dirt in your face just for the fun of it.
I don't think it's really possible for any company to make products that so many consumers are ridiculously passionate about unless the employees working on it are at least as passionate about their work. I'm not sure how Apple specifically motivates their employees, but I'd wager a guess that they seek out people who are already fairly strongly-self motivated for whatever reason, and once you've got people like that, as long as you keep them busy with work that they feel is worthwhile and they feel like they're producing something of quality, then it's pretty self-perpetuating.
We've all had the experience where a project that we were doing (maybe not at work, maybe as a hobby) becomes so engrossing that we willingly stay up to the wee hours of the morning, because we're really enjoying what we're doing. If a job can provide that on any sort of consistent basis, then it's a good place to be. The stuff that I read about Apple makes it sound like it's that sort of place for a lot of people.
The GUI certainly has gotten more complicated in many ways, but I think that's just a natural consequence of the fact that there are a whole lot more things that we use our computers for these days. Operating systems (and computers in general I guess) could be stuck under the "jack of all trades, master of none" adage, where they have to be capable not only of performing the tasks that the manufacturer can think of, but also provide a structure for random developers to add their own tasks.
There are small steps that can be taken to make certain tasks easier. On my mac LC maybe 12 or so years ago, I had a broad and complex series of folders that I used to organize my various personal text documents so that I could find what I was looking for with relative ease. Now, on my Macbook I have only maybe two or three folders that I keep those sorts of documents in. I have significantly more of those documents now, but the processing power of my current computer combined with software like spotlight makes finding something very simple indeed. Activating spotlight isn't an intuitive process, but it's very simple and easy to learn. And that's also an ability that doesn't really have any metaphor in the physical world. Being able to instantly find a particular string of text from a pile of thousands of pages is pretty awesome.
There might be some sort of amazingly innovative way to simplify all of that without dumbing it down or reducing capabilities, but I kind of doubt it, short of some sort of direct neural interface that lets me control the computer with my thoughts. As long as I'm feeing the computer data with my hands and the computer is sending me data via my eyes(and occasionally ears), I cannot imagine effectively using a computer without someway of quickly inputting text (a keyboard) and without a pointing device (a mouse/trackpad/touchscreen/etc). Once you've got that, icons are obvious, as is the need to contain tasks (windows). Add in the various ways of inputting and displaying text/images, and you've got your basic GUI.
The thing is, I'm not sure that "intuitive" is even the best thing to strive for. Humans are generally pretty good at learning, so requiring someone to grasp some basic actions in order to interact with a computer isn't that big of a deal. More important is that the system be internally consistent, so that those basic actions can become automatic and thoughtless.
The Wii is only a partially useful example, because while it does allow for new ways of interacting with a video game, there are also sacrifices. You might think an Xbox360 controller has a ridiculous number of buttons on it, but there are games that use all of those buttons. You might be able to find some way to map all those buttons onto the control methods provided to you by the Wii-mote, but there's no guarantee that that new control scheme will be superior.
Multi-touch on the iPhone is really just an evolution of our current gui, and one that as much as anything only makes up for the lack of a keyboard/mouse, rather than being some sort of evolution beyond them.
While I certainly agree that it's nice to see Apple totally focusing on the back-end stuff for this version, I don't think you're entirely correct in saying that up until now all we've ever been getting is eye candy. The people who design shiny buttons and fancy graphical effects are probably not the same people writing multi-processor optimization code, and it's not useful to pretend that doing one precludes any possibility of doing the other.
Apple in particular has been steadily improving the inner workings of OSX, not just adding new layers of shine and sticking it in a box. They do love their shine, no doubt, but there's been plenty of new stuff under the hood with just about every release as well.
This isn't about rules of engagement. If someone attacks an army base in Afghanistan, the army soldiers will most likely try to kill them. The supreme court ruling says nothing about that. But when the fighting is over and the dust settles and the army ends up with some prisoners, then that's where this might become an issue.
Apple already did their complete OS overhaul, that's what OSX is. I don't think they're planning on doing it again any time soon. There's a number of reasons why Apple was able to do it successfully while MS is stumbling, but I think the biggest is that Windows is mired in backwards compatability, while with OS X Apple only really paid lip service to it.
There are plenty of sensible reasons for Microsoft to stress that backwards compatibility, but at the same time, it's just a huge weight around their neck.
There's two really bad direct effects of the administration's "enemy combatant" policy that are now going to have to be dealt with. Like you said, there's a bunch of people who were held captive for dubious reasons, and should be released. The big problem there is that their extended time in captivity has most certainly soured their attitudes towards the US, and so even if they weren't a threat before, they could potentially be one now. Not that that's a good reason to continue to hold them captive. The US created this mess, and should expect to bear the consequences.
The second big problem is that because declaring someone an "enemy combatant" made it so easy to make them disappear, I think it's likely that there are plenty of prisoners that were captured for valid reason, but the government didn't bother to do their homework after the fact. The fact that just now, over 6 years later, are cases starting to go to trial (and very dubious sounding trials at that). Now that real trials are going to end up happening, don't be surprised if the groundwork hasn't been laid to actually convict guilt people. End result, more dangerous people get freed. Once again, this is a mess that the US has created for itself, and is going to have to bear some consequences for.
The Bush administration has never been particularly interested in going through the proper channels to get things done (see FISA and wiretapping), instead they prefer to make up their own easy rules and then just do things in the most half-assed way possible. And as a result, things were not done anywhere near the right way, and so we end up with an even bigger mess than we started with.
You seem to be implying that there's only two positions that person can take. Either they be completely involved in the minutiae of everything that goes on around them, or they're an ignorant sheeple allowing the man to trample all over them. In reality, it's not quite that easy.
You say that mutual agreement is the way to go. I'd argue that organizations like the government are the manifestations of that mutual agreement. Sure, not everyone agrees, but you're never going to get a group of 100 people, much less millions or billions of people, to fully agree on anything.
I guess I just don't get what you're suggesting the alternative is. You say you don't care if people awaken. Awaken to what? To the fact that there are people richer than them? Everyone knows that already. The fact that going to work sucks? Everyone knows that too. You're talking like there's some utopia alternative just sitting there waiting for us. The reality that I see is that civilization takes a lot of work, and that's just how life works. There are certainly people out there who find ways to game the system and live better at the expense of others, but again, that's life. If we all used those same tricks, then they'd cease to work and we'd all be back at square one.
So what you're saying is that anyone who lives in any fashion beyond subsistence farming is stupid?
Banking, religion, and politics all have their problems, no doubt. But they're all important and persistent factors in the progress that humanity has made. They've all been involved in bad things, but they've all be involved in lots of good things as well.
A human being is, on their own, capable of many things, both good and bad. Structures, systems, corporations, religions, corporations...they've all allowed us as a civilization to accomplish tasks that no one man could accomplish on his own. Some good and some bad, but all it does is amplify our abilities.
You're pretty much right, but I think it's worth mentioning that although the software is really the keystone of Apple's success, they've also got the ability to make decent hardware if the need arises. They didn't have to wait for someone to release an mp3 player with a scroll wheel. They decided that that'd be the best interface for their iPod software(or more likely the two evolved together), and so they designed their own hardware. The same happened to a lesser extend with the iPhone. Apple didn't need to convince a phone manufacturer to build a handset that was basically just a big multi-touch capable screen, they went and designed their own.
It's also important to notice that those hardware specifics are generally tied to hardware requirements to make the user-interface work. That is to say, it ties really directly and clearly back into the software. At the same time that Apple is designing new hardware features to interface with their software, they've been generally moving towards more commodity hardware for the guts of their stuff. While the iMac has a history of the outside looking rather unusual compared to most computers, the components inside the shell are usually pretty standard stuff that'd be just as at home in a PC as in a Mac. The recent-ish switch to Intel being one of the most obvious examples.
It's a pretty reasonable strategy for product design, especially considering the consumer market.
In the USA, at least, bundling is the normal thing. Terms like "weirdness" and "normal" don't necessarily carry value judgements.
It'd be weird and certainly not normal if I got home tonight and someone had filled my mailbox with hundred dollar bills, but I wouldn't consider that to be a a bad thing.
All a corporation or anybody else needs to do to be "normal" is do what everyone else is doing. Whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing is an entirely different subject.
You're right, the threat of asteroids means we shouldn't bother doing anything, we should just all kill ourselves now.
Maybe when Apple stops making products that provide features that people like. It might just be a voice call device to you, but you do not represent the entire world.
When my family first got a computer, it functioned basically as a really fancy typewriter. 15 years later, and I spend hours each day at a computer using it to help me with hundreds of different tasks. Technology has been creeping along to the point where phones are starting to really make that big push into a diversity of uses, and Apple is pretty good at designing interfaces that allow that sort of thing.
In conclusion, you're dumb. The phone companies have always done their best to screw us over, since well before Apple ever even looked in their direction. Every hardware manufacturer is continuously releasing new hardware (or their company dies), so "upgrade fatigue" (if such a thing even exists) is hardly an Apple or ATT specific issue. And third, there's only been two versions of the iPhone, and one of them isn't even for sale yet. It's hard to be tired of upgrading when you haven't even had the chance to do so yet.
Or maybe I'm the dumb one and I just got trolled hard. Oh well, it beats working.
Especially in a game where death has significant consequences, there really needs to be areas safe from PVP. Or else it wouldn't really be possible for new players to come in and participate in any way. That's the problem with having such a high stakes game. Older players can grief the hell out of newbies, and the newbies get left with absolutely no recourse. Sure, it's fun for the people who've been building their skills since day one, but making the game impossible for new players is a good way to have your MMO die.
EvE is tough enough for new players to get involved in just because of its learning curve. If there wasn't protected space, your average newbie would hardly last a week. (Some of the more established corps/alliances have created good newbie support structures, but I think it'd be silly for the devs to rely on that to keep their playerbase growing.)
Google and the internet in genera are pretty neutral as are most tools. As is usually the case, their effects on you as a person are pretty much defined by how you choose to use that tool.
If all you're looking for is simple answers/facts/etc, then Google is pretty easy, and like you said, you can grab that info quickly and then forget about it. If you want more in-depth understanding of a particular topic, chances are the internet has that bouncing around somewhere as well, and Google's not a bad place to find it.
I fail to see how looking up the capital of Argentina the "old way" in a paper bound encyclopedia is anymore educational than looking it up on the internet. If all I care about is the capital, then I'll skim a website or a book all the same until I find it, then close the page. If I've got the time and desire to learn more about Argentina, then I'll read some of the text around it. And through the magic of hyperlinks, the internet has much more text "around" it.
I think you can also make a pretty strong argument that the important part of being smarter is less about memorizing random information and more about being able to analyze the information and then make your own decisions based upon it. Being able to pull that information off the top of your head is great, but I think it's a fair trade to have quick access to billions of times of more information if the tradeoff is that I don't remember as much of it.