True, sorry (my Southern US history ain't too good). I was speaking not about party divisions, but rather about political divisions. Right now, in general the Republicans are right-wing and the Democrats are left wing. If you look at that one through world history, then you could probably call the Democrats center-right, but just keep to the two wings.
I'm pretty sure that my history is good on this one, though: traditionally left-wing issues, like civil rights and gun control, have not been among the most popular there.
Hi there, I'm a Canadian, speaking to you live from igloo, along with the 5 other people in my country (we all live in two igloos, side by side) as we work to pay our takes.
Canada's taxes are much higher than the United States (hardly 50%, unless you're in the absolute highest tax bracket, in which case you've got tax lawyers to bring you down a couple of brackets), but the money is used to do something. The health care system certainly does work, I have never had any problems whatsoever accessing health care, and I've never paid for it directly. If you're stinking rich, then of course you can get better health care in the US, but if you're poor you're essentially ignored and left to die without medical care.
I could very easily give reasons why Canada's politics are far superiour to those in the States. Let me see... welfare and employment insurance that actually works (for now...). Reduced access to guns which - get this! - leads to lower violent crime rates and an odd lack of kids shooting each other on a regular basis. A nationwide pension plan which, while it doesn't give you a fortune, gives you real money.
A popular Canadian comedy TV show has a feature called "Talking to Americans" in which they basically laugh at the various American opinions of Canada. In one episode, they had a quick talk with the Republican governor of Arkansas. If I remember correctly, the story they gave was that due to global warming, Canada's national Parliament - an igloo - was slowly melting, and they were embarking on a restoration project, and he fully believed it, of course, and gave the requisite "Good luck refreezing your parliament, Canada!" speech.
Right-wing has nothing to do with anything. Fundamentalist Christian ethics (if the terms can be used together non-oxymoronically) have little or nothing to do with conservatism or the "Right Wing".
Please... you're serious? Historically, right-wing and religious (particularly Protestant) fundamentalism have been very close. Look at voting patterns for, say, people from the Bible Belt who consider themselves very religious. Think they're all voting Democrat? I think not. If I remember correctly, the Christian Coalition - basically fundamental Protestantism incorporated - had troubles with its charitable-organisation status because it was distributing "voting guides" that essentially said "vote Republican". Not in those words - instead it gave a list of issues, and gee whiz! guess which party was campaigning on those issues?
Also, while conservatism maybe literally mean "preserving the status quo", words change meaning. In today's world, it is the name for right-wing political beliefs, which often mean changing things. In some cases the status quo is preserved (watching kids shoot each other and saying "What? Safety locks on guns? That's horrible! Read the Consitution! It'll be the end of our nation!") and in others it is not (you mean conservatives have been known to advocate cutting taxes? You must be joking!).
I could also start rebut your comments about what you do with your money, but it's a debate that has happenned oh-so-many times before. You are of course exxagerating things - I particularly like the bit about the starving wood owls, consdering America's environmental record - but again, I won't argue it. You are right wing, I (and the original poster) am not. But to deny that a severe case of Protestantism is linked with right-wing politics is closing your eyes to the obvious - kind of like not teaching evolution in schools.
According to the article (I love it when Slashdot gets its news from MSNBC!) teaching of creationism is not being mandated, all that's happenning is teaching of evolution is being removed. However, contrary to what some posts said, they're not simply saying that evolution should be taught as theory and not fact (it IS taught as theory in most public schools, but hell most of science is theory) but "banning evolution from the classroom".
In other words, they're not pushing creationism, church and state are still very separate. Instead, they've just decided to make students dumber. The religious freakos realized that their efforts to make creationism weren't going to working, so they did the next best thing: don't teach them anything, so that when the emerge stupidly from school they might actually believe creationism.
I agree with the posts that say that Darwinian evolution is a flawed theory. Flawed or not, though, it's certainly closer to the truth than creationism. Creationism has zero scientific merit; unlike a true theory, it grew from trying to make the evidence fit a specific theory, and still failed miserably. My favorite piece of creation "science" was when a "scientist" explained why progressively more developed and recent fossils were found in higher strata: because during the Flood, the smarter animals ran to high ground (presumably the middlingly smart ones ran only halfway up the mountain) and so when they died anyway they were higher up.
Much of current textbook science is flawed, though; science is in a perpetual state of being flawed. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be taught. Which is better: teach students a plausible theory that may be wrong on a couple of points, or teach them "You evolved from your mommy and daddy." There is no past, the past is the present... this story and that "Education" topic gif (2+2=5) have way too many 1984 parallells for my liking.
This thing is what really scares me about religious zealots: the feeling that if they won't teach what we want them too, we better not teach them at all. Hell, science contradicts the Bible in so many places, why not just get rid of it? Science is hard, kind of like math. We should just replace them both with communal family events, where people eat large amounts of fatty foods, shoot people, and lynch people of different religion/race/sexuality. Hmm... this sounds oddly familiar.
Or, for a slightly longer answer: Slashdot is surreptitiously letting us know that our perception of reality is nonexistent, and that what reality there is is formed by Slashdot. They're telling us that we are driven by the fetishism of technology which distorts our perception of the past and present.
It isn't a crack because the contest is to crack LinuxPPC, or gain access to the server, and NOT to crack the guestbook software. If by subverting the guestbook software you gain access to the server, or disturb people who access crack.linuxppc.org/, then you've cracked them. If all you've done is disturb people who access the guestbook script, that isn't a crack. This also isn't a vulnerability in the operating system; it's something that could also be fixed with a s///g;
> A couple of points here: first of all, it's free, so it seems unlikely that anybody would have to submit an expense report for it, unless they really WERE doing something nefarious, like embezzling.
Nitpick! My point was that software designed for use adminstering networks would not have a name like Back Orifice.
>I don't honestly see a contradiction. Well, let me restate my point. Legitimate network administration software does not claim to exploit security holes, design-related or not.
>Okay, I'll correct you. You are 100% wrong about this.
Sorry about that. I DID try out the original BO, though, and it was certainly like that.
The truth is that no matter what the press releases say, you know that you're not going find any large networks administered by Back Orifice soon. There's no need to go into details; that knowledge is enough to prove that it isn't legitimate network management software.
Still, it is a very nice piece of software. Also, it's open source. So, if someone whose programming skills extend beyond Perl (unlike mine), here's a job for you: - rename the program - get rid of some of the more dubious features, i.e. lockup and redirect mic (while that is certainly in some commercial products, it's just scary, dammit! I can live with someone looking through my files, but they can't listen to me!) - make it less stealthy on the server side - change it so that existing antivirus definitions won't detect it, and slashdot-effect mcafee.com and the cNc if they put the changed version into their software.
By the way, does the Cult have any lawyers among its members? (I can see it already... "Approach the bench, Tweety Fish!") I'm sure that there is an excellent case to sue anti-virus software makers, as their "protection" against BO certainly will prevent people from using it, and it could certainly be argued that the program, legitimate or not, is not in of itself malicious.
A couple of reasons why BO2K is NOT a legitimate remote network administration tool.
1. It's called Back Orifice. "Yes sir, I'd like to submit an expense report for...umm... Back Orifice"
2. The cDc claims that both that BO2K is a legitimate remote network administration tool, and that it is releasing BO2K to force Microsoft to plug (intrinsic design-related) security holes in NT. That's a contradiction. Imagine the press release for pcAnywhere 2000: "This version contains all kinds of all-new features, primarily designed to force Microsoft to plug security holes." And maybe Symantec will rename itself the Cult of the Norton Commander (cNc).
Also, it's quite obvious that use as a cracking tool was a consideration in the design of BO2K. While SMS and other remote administration systems do have "Stealth modes", BO2K has *only* a stealth mode, and stealth seems to have been a major design consideration. (Correct me if I'm wrong here, I didn't actually download it as I don't want to be sifting through my registry to get rid of it.)
Still, it is NOT a trojan. Trojans don't have install programs. I think anti-virus programs scanning for it is a bit of a joke. For that matter, I think anti-virus programs should stick with viruses (which, of course, BO2K is not by definition) - the only true protection against trojans is to be careful what software you run.
BO2K is certainly a useful program for remote administration. It's small, fast, etc. But claiming that it's just a useful little open source administration tool is engaging in a Microsoft-style bending of facts. For those of you who still claim this, think about who most of the future users of BO2K will be. Will they be script kiddies and people who just want to try it out, or will they be sysadmins of large networks? If it will very rarely be used to administer large networks ("Help Desk? I'm having trouble with Word." "OK, just let me Orifice into your system. Our custom BUTTplugs should help with this one") but rather used by the kind of people who haven't yet mastered the concept of digits being used in numbers and letters being used in words, and as such think that the program is l33t, then it isn't a legitimate remote administration tool.
I remember reading an article in a magazine a few years ago which really scared me. I don't know much about crypto, so I may be getting some of these facts wrong, but it centred around a technique called 'differential cryptanalysis' that had just been invented and used against DES (this was the early 90s). The researchers who had found this noticed that it worked very well with some non-government-created DES variants like Blowfish (created, it seems, partially out of fear that the government could crack DES). It didn't help very much, however, with plain-vanilla DES.
They said that this was because the NSA had designed DES with protection against this technique in mind. DES was designed a while ago - 40s? 50s? - and at that time, the NSA was supposedly advanced enough to incorporate protection against a method of cryptanalysis which wouldn't be found by the public until half a decade later. If this is true... ouch.
Now, before everyone turns on the flamethrowers, let's think about the matter-is this true?
I think the fact that flamethrowers are so regularly involved is enough to prove that it's true. The arguments about RMS are completely true - to me, it seems as if the sprit behind the GPL is one of not arguing over names, but instead allowing code to be shared freely for the benefit of users, regardless of its creator. Not including GNU in the name of an OS that is about 18% (according to a recent calculation) FSF software, when the license under which the software was released doesn't required that it be named that and in fact seems to encourage naming it whatever you want to, is certainly not "like, extreme".
As to the Talkback article, I do agree that the poster seems to be living on another planet. In his article on his website (which I only skimmed through, couldn't make myself read the whole thing, but I think I got the gist) he says that the danger of an open source system is that someone could introduce some malicious code into the software. Huh? This, obviously, makes no sense, particularly as it certainly isn't restricted to open-source: infect COMMAND.COM with a virus. That open source allows people to find security holes by examining code is certainly true, but also fairly obvious, and proven wrong by years of experience with Apache and Linux, which have had virtually no major security bugs when compared with NT/IIS. Not acknowledging this argument, and insulting the proponent of it, isn't arrogance but rather justified condescension towards the crackpot who brought it up.
Far as I know, the code Network Solutions follows is that if the name of a domain was trademarked before the domain was reserved (by another person, obviously), then the original trademarker has a right to the domain, provided they pay transfer fees and reimburse the original registrar for the cost of registering. And if Theos was registered before theos.com (I think it was, and it certainly must have been if they created BASIC and C like they say on their website:) ), then Theos does have the right. That said, a lawyer's letter is not the easy way to do things.
Far as I know, Canadian laws regarding freedom of speech/parody are fairly close to US ones. One major difference is that you can easily countersue for legal fees in Canada, which makes sue-them-and-bankrupt-them tactics more difficult.
In terms of brand/product awareness, the marketing is working very well. In terms of making people want to buy the product... not.
I really doubt that anyone here would ever BUY one of their products (what is it, the spam suitcase? I hope Hormel sues them). They're getting publicity, but it's pretty negative stuff.
RMS has enriched all our lives as much as any other great person in history.
How has the life of the average person been enriched by free software/RMS? Truly great people - and there haven't been many - have done something for the universal good. What percentage of the population knows what GNU means? Writing Emacs does not make you a candidate for sainthood...
Like most other Katz articles, this has one main point: that we are currently undergoing a great revolution, that society is changing from the bottom up, and that our world will never be the same. This may very well be true, though of course there's a long way to go, but are we really undergoing a revolution greater than anything we've experienced in our collective lifetimes?
Journalists and politicians are constantly telling us that we live in an important time, that great things are happenning, that this is an incredibly important juncture in the history of our nation/the world. Ever heard a speech about how this is a completely unimportant time in the world, and how not much is changing, we're just going on with our lives? Not me. I've also never seen an article about how we live in a modern Dark Age, where nothing much different goes on, an era that future generations will forget about completely.
People have been talking about whatever the current revolution is for as long as I can remember (which isn't that long, but...). Every decade has its own great advance which will revolutionize everything. In the late 90s, and probably early 00s, we have the Digital Revolution. The world is always changing, always will be, just as there are always people who talk ad nauseum about how the world is changing more than ever before. The great change due to computers, the Internet, and even/. will be when people stop talking about how it's going to revolutionize, and actually start recognizing it as a normal, integral part of their life, indistinct from the other parts. And, presumably, Jon Katz and the rest of the essay-writing world (by the way, I did think it was a good essay) will find another revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
True, sorry (my Southern US history ain't too good). I was speaking not about party divisions, but rather about political divisions. Right now, in general the Republicans are right-wing and the Democrats are left wing. If you look at that one through world history, then you could probably call the Democrats center-right, but just keep to the two wings.
I'm pretty sure that my history is good on this one, though: traditionally left-wing issues, like civil rights and gun control, have not been among the most popular there.
Hi there, I'm a Canadian, speaking to you live from igloo, along with the 5 other people in my country (we all live in two igloos, side by side) as we work to pay our takes.
Canada's taxes are much higher than the United States (hardly 50%, unless you're in the absolute highest tax bracket, in which case you've got tax lawyers to bring you down a couple of brackets), but the money is used to do something. The health care system certainly does work, I have never had any problems whatsoever accessing health care, and I've never paid for it directly. If you're stinking rich, then of course you can get better health care in the US, but if you're poor you're essentially ignored and left to die without medical care.
I could very easily give reasons why Canada's politics are far superiour to those in the States. Let me see... welfare and employment insurance that actually works (for now...). Reduced access to guns which - get this! - leads to lower violent crime rates and an odd lack of kids shooting each other on a regular basis. A nationwide pension plan which, while it doesn't give you a fortune, gives you real money.
A popular Canadian comedy TV show has a feature called "Talking to Americans" in which they basically laugh at the various American opinions of Canada. In one episode, they had a quick talk with the Republican governor of Arkansas. If I remember correctly, the story they gave was that due to global warming, Canada's national Parliament - an igloo - was slowly melting, and they were embarking on a restoration project, and he fully believed it, of course, and gave the requisite "Good luck refreezing your parliament, Canada!" speech.
There, told you this was going to be a rant!
Please... you're serious? Historically, right-wing and religious (particularly Protestant) fundamentalism have been very close. Look at voting patterns for, say, people from the Bible Belt who consider themselves very religious. Think they're all voting Democrat? I think not. If I remember correctly, the Christian Coalition - basically fundamental Protestantism incorporated - had troubles with its charitable-organisation status because it was distributing "voting guides" that essentially said "vote Republican". Not in those words - instead it gave a list of issues, and gee whiz! guess which party was campaigning on those issues?
Also, while conservatism maybe literally mean "preserving the status quo", words change meaning. In today's world, it is the name for right-wing political beliefs, which often mean changing things. In some cases the status quo is preserved (watching kids shoot each other and saying "What? Safety locks on guns? That's horrible! Read the Consitution! It'll be the end of our nation!") and in others it is not (you mean conservatives have been known to advocate cutting taxes? You must be joking!).
I could also start rebut your comments about what you do with your money, but it's a debate that has happenned oh-so-many times before. You are of course exxagerating things - I particularly like the bit about the starving wood owls, consdering America's environmental record - but again, I won't argue it. You are right wing, I (and the original poster) am not. But to deny that a severe case of Protestantism is linked with right-wing politics is closing your eyes to the obvious - kind of like not teaching evolution in schools.
According to the article (I love it when Slashdot gets its news from MSNBC!) teaching of creationism is not being mandated, all that's happenning is teaching of evolution is being removed. However, contrary to what some posts said, they're not simply saying that evolution should be taught as theory and not fact (it IS taught as theory in most public schools, but hell most of science is theory) but "banning evolution from the classroom".
In other words, they're not pushing creationism, church and state are still very separate. Instead, they've just decided to make students dumber. The religious freakos realized that their efforts to make creationism weren't going to working, so they did the next best thing: don't teach them anything, so that when the emerge stupidly from school they might actually believe creationism.
I agree with the posts that say that Darwinian evolution is a flawed theory. Flawed or not, though, it's certainly closer to the truth than creationism. Creationism has zero scientific merit; unlike a true theory, it grew from trying to make the evidence fit a specific theory, and still failed miserably. My favorite piece of creation "science" was when a "scientist" explained why progressively more developed and recent fossils were found in higher strata: because during the Flood, the smarter animals ran to high ground (presumably the middlingly smart ones ran only halfway up the mountain) and so when they died anyway they were higher up.
Much of current textbook science is flawed, though; science is in a perpetual state of being flawed. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be taught. Which is better: teach students a plausible theory that may be wrong on a couple of points, or teach them "You evolved from your mommy and daddy." There is no past, the past is the present... this story and that "Education" topic gif (2+2=5) have way too many 1984 parallells for my liking.
This thing is what really scares me about religious zealots: the feeling that if they won't teach what we want them too, we better not teach them at all. Hell, science contradicts the Bible in so many places, why not just get rid of it? Science is hard, kind of like math. We should just replace them both with communal family events, where people eat large amounts of fatty foods, shoot people, and lynch people of different religion/race/sexuality. Hmm... this sounds oddly familiar.
Sometimes, I'm proud not to be American.
A reference to 1984.
Or, for a slightly longer answer: Slashdot is surreptitiously letting us know that our perception of reality is nonexistent, and that what reality there is is formed by Slashdot. They're telling us that we are driven by the fetishism of technology which distorts our perception of the past and present.
Either that or they though it looked kinda funny.
Because everyone knows that the "prevailent" (see article) attitude on the Internet is one of excellent spelling...
It isn't a crack because the contest is to crack LinuxPPC, or gain access to the server, and NOT to crack the guestbook software. If by subverting the guestbook software you gain access to the server, or disturb people who access crack.linuxppc.org/, then you've cracked them. If all you've done is disturb people who access the guestbook script, that isn't a crack. This also isn't a vulnerability in the operating system; it's something that could also be fixed with a s///g;
> A couple of points here: first of all, it's free, so it seems unlikely that anybody would have to submit an expense report for it, unless they really WERE doing something nefarious, like embezzling.
Nitpick! My point was that software designed for use adminstering networks would not have a name like Back Orifice.
>I don't honestly see a contradiction.
Well, let me restate my point. Legitimate network administration software does not claim to exploit security holes, design-related or not.
>Okay, I'll correct you. You are 100% wrong about this.
Sorry about that. I DID try out the original BO, though, and it was certainly like that.
The truth is that no matter what the press releases say, you know that you're not going find any large networks administered by Back Orifice soon. There's no need to go into details; that knowledge is enough to prove that it isn't legitimate network management software.
Still, it is a very nice piece of software. Also, it's open source. So, if someone whose programming skills extend beyond Perl (unlike mine), here's a job for you:
- rename the program
- get rid of some of the more dubious features, i.e. lockup and redirect mic (while that is certainly in some commercial products, it's just scary, dammit! I can live with someone looking through my files, but they can't listen to me!)
- make it less stealthy on the server side
- change it so that existing antivirus definitions won't detect it, and slashdot-effect mcafee.com and the cNc if they put the changed version into their software.
By the way, does the Cult have any lawyers among its members? (I can see it already... "Approach the bench, Tweety Fish!") I'm sure that there is an excellent case to sue anti-virus software makers, as their "protection" against BO certainly will prevent people from using it, and it could certainly be argued that the program, legitimate or not, is not in of itself malicious.
A couple of reasons why BO2K is NOT a legitimate remote network administration tool.
1. It's called Back Orifice. "Yes sir, I'd like to submit an expense report for...umm... Back Orifice"
2. The cDc claims that both that BO2K is a legitimate remote network administration tool, and that it is releasing BO2K to force Microsoft to plug (intrinsic design-related) security holes in NT. That's a contradiction. Imagine the press release for pcAnywhere 2000: "This version contains all kinds of all-new features, primarily designed to force Microsoft to plug security holes." And maybe Symantec will rename itself the Cult of the Norton Commander (cNc).
Also, it's quite obvious that use as a cracking tool was a consideration in the design of BO2K. While SMS and other remote administration systems do have "Stealth modes", BO2K has *only* a stealth mode, and stealth seems to have been a major design consideration. (Correct me if I'm wrong here, I didn't actually download it as I don't want to be sifting through my registry to get rid of it.)
Still, it is NOT a trojan. Trojans don't have install programs. I think anti-virus programs scanning for it is a bit of a joke. For that matter, I think anti-virus programs should stick with viruses (which, of course, BO2K is not by definition) - the only true protection against trojans is to be careful what software you run.
BO2K is certainly a useful program for remote administration. It's small, fast, etc. But claiming that it's just a useful little open source administration tool is engaging in a Microsoft-style bending of facts. For those of you who still claim this, think about who most of the future users of BO2K will be. Will they be script kiddies and people who just want to try it out, or will they be sysadmins of large networks? If it will very rarely be used to administer large networks ("Help Desk? I'm having trouble with Word." "OK, just let me Orifice into your system. Our custom BUTTplugs should help with this one") but rather used by the kind of people who haven't yet mastered the concept of digits being used in numbers and letters being used in words, and as such think that the program is l33t, then it isn't a legitimate remote administration tool.
Told you I didn't know what I was talking about :)
I remember reading an article in a magazine a few years ago which really scared me. I don't know much about crypto, so I may be getting some of these facts wrong, but it centred around a technique called 'differential cryptanalysis' that had just been invented and used against DES (this was the early 90s). The researchers who had found this noticed that it worked very well with some non-government-created DES variants like Blowfish (created, it seems, partially out of fear that the government could crack DES). It didn't help very much, however, with plain-vanilla DES.
They said that this was because the NSA had designed DES with protection against this technique in mind. DES was designed a while ago - 40s? 50s? - and at that time, the NSA was supposedly advanced enough to incorporate protection against a method of cryptanalysis which wouldn't be found by the public until half a decade later. If this is true... ouch.
Now, before everyone turns on the flamethrowers, let's think about the matter-is this true?
I think the fact that flamethrowers are so regularly involved is enough to prove that it's true.
The arguments about RMS are completely true - to me, it seems as if the sprit behind the GPL is one of not arguing over names, but instead allowing code to be shared freely for the benefit of users, regardless of its creator. Not including GNU in the name of an OS that is about 18% (according to a recent calculation) FSF software, when the license under which the software was released doesn't required that it be named that and in fact seems to encourage naming it whatever you want to, is certainly not "like, extreme".
As to the Talkback article, I do agree that the poster seems to be living on another planet. In his article on his website (which I only skimmed through, couldn't make myself read the whole thing, but I think I got the gist) he says that the danger of an open source system is that someone could introduce some malicious code into the software. Huh? This, obviously, makes no sense, particularly as it certainly isn't restricted to open-source: infect COMMAND.COM with a virus. That open source allows people to find security holes by examining code is certainly true, but also fairly obvious, and proven wrong by years of experience with Apache and Linux, which have had virtually no major security bugs when compared with NT/IIS. Not acknowledging this argument, and insulting the proponent of it, isn't arrogance but rather justified condescension towards the crackpot who brought it up.
Far as I know, the code Network Solutions follows is that if the name of a domain was trademarked before the domain was reserved (by another person, obviously), then the original trademarker has a right to the domain, provided they pay transfer fees and reimburse the original registrar for the cost of registering. And if Theos was registered before theos.com (I think it was, and it certainly must have been if they created BASIC and C like they say on their website :) ), then Theos does have the right. That said, a lawyer's letter is not the easy way to do things.
Far as I know, Canadian laws regarding freedom of speech/parody are fairly close to US ones. One major difference is that you can easily countersue for legal fees in Canada, which makes sue-them-and-bankrupt-them tactics more difficult.
In terms of brand/product awareness, the marketing is working very well. In terms of making people want to buy the product... not.
I really doubt that anyone here would ever BUY one of their products (what is it, the spam suitcase? I hope Hormel sues them). They're getting publicity, but it's pretty negative stuff.
RMS has enriched all our lives as much as any other great person in history.
How has the life of the average person been enriched by free software/RMS? Truly great people - and there haven't been many - have done something for the universal good. What percentage of the population knows what GNU means? Writing Emacs does not make you a candidate for sainthood...
Like most other Katz articles, this has one main point: that we are currently undergoing a great revolution, that society is changing from the bottom up, and that our world will never be the same. This may very well be true, though of course there's a long way to go, but are we really undergoing a revolution greater than anything we've experienced in our collective lifetimes?
Journalists and politicians are constantly telling us that we live in an important time, that great things are happenning, that this is an incredibly important juncture in the history of our nation/the world. Ever heard a speech about how this is a completely unimportant time in the world, and how not much is changing, we're just going on with our lives? Not me. I've also never seen an article about how we live in a modern Dark Age, where nothing much different goes on, an era that future generations will forget about completely.
People have been talking about whatever the current revolution is for as long as I can remember (which isn't that long, but...). Every decade has its own great advance which will revolutionize everything. In the late 90s, and probably early 00s, we have the Digital Revolution. The world is always changing, always will be, just as there are always people who talk ad nauseum about how the world is changing more than ever before. The great change due to computers, the Internet, and even /. will be when people stop talking about how it's going to revolutionize, and actually start recognizing it as a normal, integral part of their life, indistinct from the other parts. And, presumably, Jon Katz and the rest of the essay-writing world (by the way, I did think it was a good essay) will find another revolution.