Their internet service is excruciatingly slow. That, and the electronics boxes they put at the end of each block keep exploding. Maybe their video service will work better, but I am skeptical. Not too much that AT&T has done at the consumer level has worked out too well.
Bennett, I like all of your stuff and this is well-written but...
These apps are just going to increase mass neurosis. We don't need our heads filled with this crap. We need to spend more time thinking about important issues, not the trivia.
"Western man is externalizing himself with gadgets" - William S. Burroughs
We don't need protecting from ourselves. We do not need a hotel tax. In fact, we don't need any taxes except sales tax. But as soon as it is allowed to collect taxes, government invents new reasons to tax. That's because government is in business for itself. We're just the suckers who pay for it
The web worked when it had a simple standard that worked in every situation.
We've put layers on top of that, and now it's chaos. A bloated, irregular, often incomprehensible chaos designed to allow people to make custom interfaces out of the web.
The whole point of the web, versus having an application for every specific task (like we did on desktops before the 1990s, and like we now do on smartphones), was to have a standard and simplified interface.
The web grew and thrived under that goal. It's become more corporate, nuanced, isolated, sealed-off, etc. under our "new" way.
"That's excellent! Now that they're a legitimate public entity, they can be sued! That gets them out of criminal court, and into profit court err I mean civil court."
I can hear the excited clicking of Mont Blanc pens now...
I think you're right, despite the waves of vast cynicism in that post.
Another way to put this is that the audience defines the product. Our inattentive public wants news-drama, not news-factuality, so any news service run as a business will quickly start with the Justin Bieber and Jodi Arias stories...
In other words, there is no nothingness; everything is something. Thus we're looking at vacuums being a variation of type of substrate of matter, not an absence of matter. Mind-blowing. Be sure to drop acid before reading this.
At first, I was excited by this. A new way of looking at the world! Crowd-sourcing! etc.
Now I'm cynical. Crowd sourcing translates to witch-hunts. The ideas that Anon have adopted are the same old ones that got us in this mess in the first place.
You want news? Go to Slashdot or Hacker News.
Stoned basement-dwelling teenage life dropouts should not be determining what we think is "news"
Ultimately, within a hundred years, this world is going to be absolutely miserable to live on and some really pissed off person is going to create a biological weapon and bring it all down... all because people are desperate for power over others but refuse to live by the rules they themselves create. I guess it is good that I will be dead before then. I wonder how much suffering I will see before I die. The suffering from World War 2 was apparently not enough.
I hope you elaborate.
It seems to me that despite our technology, society is directionless, people are miserable under the surface, we're not really achieving anything and discontent is spreading.
Our technologies and laws allow us to do lots of things.
We should perhaps ask instead, what kind of society we are making?
If we're making a miserable place that focuses on details of law-breaking more than the big factor, which is how safe/smart of a driver someone is, we're penalizing good behavior and encouraging people to live in a nit-picky miserable world.
We can make a horrible world, if we want; however, we might prefer not to.
I think that's all true, but originally in 1900 or so, students were expected to know how to do things: they had to have abilities, outside of special disciplines. Since that time, education has been moving more toward having them memorize steps through specific tasks, which makes them good cogs (true, true) but unable to act outside of that narrow framework. Students today lack the ability to go into an unknown situation and reason it out; what they have is the ability to, given a known situation, repeat a series of steps, with no real connection to the desired consequences of those steps.
$100m is the new $20m. While this fact is virtually never reported, American currency has lost a huge amount of its actual spending value since 2007. A lot of this is hidden behind the lower quality, quantity or degree of innovation behind products; they're cheaper to make and so can be sold for the same price, which is worth less than it was.
When Americans wake up to how much they've lost, despite the numbers not changing all that much, they will surely write a lot of strongly-worded text messages to their representatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Their internet service is excruciatingly slow. That, and the electronics boxes they put at the end of each block keep exploding. Maybe their video service will work better, but I am skeptical. Not too much that AT&T has done at the consumer level has worked out too well.
Yep, those two are conflatable. You got it.
I think it's time to put all STEM grads through an English/Philosophy regimen so we can avoid people like you embarrassing yourselves.
We need quality of labor, but instead our (brilliant) politicians and business leaders pursue quantity.
Kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have lower IQs, and some say that the races and genders differ in intelligence.
Bennett, I like all of your stuff and this is well-written but...
These apps are just going to increase mass neurosis. We don't need our heads filled with this crap. We need to spend more time thinking about important issues, not the trivia.
"Western man is externalizing himself with gadgets" - William S. Burroughs
We don't need protecting from ourselves. We do not need a hotel tax. In fact, we don't need any taxes except sales tax. But as soon as it is allowed to collect taxes, government invents new reasons to tax. That's because government is in business for itself. We're just the suckers who pay for it
Dear Media,
We've heard this, or variants of it, too many times and are now desensitized to it.
Until you show us a pile of bodies, we're inert.
Sincerely,
The People
The web worked when it had a simple standard that worked in every situation.
We've put layers on top of that, and now it's chaos. A bloated, irregular, often incomprehensible chaos designed to allow people to make custom interfaces out of the web.
The whole point of the web, versus having an application for every specific task (like we did on desktops before the 1990s, and like we now do on smartphones), was to have a standard and simplified interface.
The web grew and thrived under that goal. It's become more corporate, nuanced, isolated, sealed-off, etc. under our "new" way.
A good lawyer doesn't slay it; she keeps it alive and milks it for hourly payments.
"That's excellent! Now that they're a legitimate public entity, they can be sued! That gets them out of criminal court, and into profit court err I mean civil court."
I can hear the excited clicking of Mont Blanc pens now...
In the time it took me to type this message, Google earned $1.54 million.
How much do you fine them before it's a rounding error that they fail to notice?
I think you're right, despite the waves of vast cynicism in that post.
Another way to put this is that the audience defines the product. Our inattentive public wants news-drama, not news-factuality, so any news service run as a business will quickly start with the Justin Bieber and Jodi Arias stories...
I don't think that would help.
If you have thoughts of suicide, try one of these hotlines. Talk to someone before depression wins.
The old ways are best:
This finding is relevant because it suggests the existence of a limited number of ephemeral particles per unit volume in a vacuum.
In other words, there is no nothingness; everything is something. Thus we're looking at vacuums being a variation of type of substrate of matter, not an absence of matter. Mind-blowing. Be sure to drop acid before reading this.
At first, I was excited by this. A new way of looking at the world! Crowd-sourcing! etc.
Now I'm cynical. Crowd sourcing translates to witch-hunts. The ideas that Anon have adopted are the same old ones that got us in this mess in the first place.
You want news? Go to Slashdot or Hacker News.
Stoned basement-dwelling teenage life dropouts should not be determining what we think is "news"
VIM editing Perl code in one window, another for an execution trace, and a third to run the program. Ugly and basic but it gets the job done.
I hope you elaborate.
It seems to me that despite our technology, society is directionless, people are miserable under the surface, we're not really achieving anything and discontent is spreading.
Stop all immigration.
Stop all food aid.
Stop the sharing of baby photos on Facebook.
Don't show sexy late night TV in winter.
Let's focus on raising the quality of the humans we do have, not making more.
Our technologies and laws allow us to do lots of things.
We should perhaps ask instead, what kind of society we are making?
If we're making a miserable place that focuses on details of law-breaking more than the big factor, which is how safe/smart of a driver someone is, we're penalizing good behavior and encouraging people to live in a nit-picky miserable world.
We can make a horrible world, if we want; however, we might prefer not to.
I like the positive way of looking at this that you've chosen. However, I also mourn the loss of what college should have been, could have been, etc.
I think that's all true, but originally in 1900 or so, students were expected to know how to do things: they had to have abilities, outside of special disciplines. Since that time, education has been moving more toward having them memorize steps through specific tasks, which makes them good cogs (true, true) but unable to act outside of that narrow framework. Students today lack the ability to go into an unknown situation and reason it out; what they have is the ability to, given a known situation, repeat a series of steps, with no real connection to the desired consequences of those steps.
Education in 1900: you need to be able to do things.
Education in 1980: you need to be able to know how to do things.
Education in 2000: you need to memorize things.
Education in 2013: you need to have done the reading, been present, breathing and perhaps even conscious.
Ha! Good observation. I'd forgotten about them. What happened to Occupy, anyway?
$100m is the new $20m. While this fact is virtually never reported, American currency has lost a huge amount of its actual spending value since 2007. A lot of this is hidden behind the lower quality, quantity or degree of innovation behind products; they're cheaper to make and so can be sold for the same price, which is worth less than it was.
When Americans wake up to how much they've lost, despite the numbers not changing all that much, they will surely write a lot of strongly-worded text messages to their representatives.
When I see terrorists in skinny jeans, ironic tshirts and wayfarers, on their iPhones plotting the demise of the Great Satan, then I'll worry.