What it does say is that Comcast is trying to implement a pricing model for their Internet service similar to their existing cable TV service. To begin with, you are expected to be a consumer only. This service exists to deliver content into your home, not the other way around.
Second, that "cost is $6.95 per month for each additional outlet" thing is practically lifted straight out of their cable TV policies. It doesn't matter if they do the wiring or if you do, if you use a cable box or a cable-ready TV. If you have two television sets, Comcast expects you to pay extra for the "extra outlet" servicing the second TV, even though you're not fundamentally getting anything extra from Comcast at all. At one point they claimed they had technology which could detect if you were running an unauthorized set, but I've never heard of anyone getting "busted" (goodness knows I never have ).
What this tells me, though, is that they are at least toying with the idea of implementing the same asinine policy with regard to computers on their Internet service.
Thank you, John. That post is going to be hanging on my wall for a while now. As a "split-class" programmer/artist (they pay me for the programming) I can appreciate both sides of what I've come to see as a completely unnecessary war that is waged in the offices of every creative software project. I've seen it literally tear companies apart, especially with weak, naive direction from the top.
There's certainly a place in the world for lying on your back in the grass and playing "what if," but unless you can take something away from that and turn it into a concrete task list, then all you've done is entertain yourself for a while. Anything you intend to accomplish will require concrete goals and a hard-edged mindset.
Contrary to popular belief, this is just as true for creative, artistic endeavors as it is for technical tasks. Every artist I've ever known who was more than a pretentious dillitente has spent far more time perfecting the concrete details of his chosen medium than on the ideal of self-expression. Self-expression comes naturally to people. Doing it effectively requires intensive goal-directed labor.
(IANAL) Actually, BG could -not- sue you for defamation if you called him an asshole. Things like defamation and libel have very specific legal definitions which exclude such invective. The "in my opinion" part is understood in a statement like that. In fact, a legal paper I was reading the other day suggests that you could say something like, "Bill Gates is an evil Nazi baby-raper" and not be sued, because while the statement is offensive, it does not present a specifically actionable statement of fact, as opposed to a statement like, "Last Thursday I saw Gates attending a neo-Nazi rally, shouting antisemetic rhetoric at the crowd." Such a specific false statement is slanderous. Of course, the territory gets pretty gray around here, and ultimately in most cases a judge will have to draw a conclusion about the intent of the speaker. Bile, invective and ill opinion (informed or otherwise) can be unpleasant, but they are inevitable and they are protected speech. In fact, for a public figure (and Gates certainly qualifies), the bar is very much higher to demonstrate defamation, slander or libel.
Re:end of pay phones?!?
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 1
Except for the most part these things will make it as easy to lay your hands on a phone as it currently is to lay your hands on a quarter.
You could stash one in your wallet, one above the visor in your car, one in the drawer at work, and use those in the case that you forget your regular cell phone.
With phones and the associated minutes that cheap, it'll also be a lot easier to find a complete stranger who will loan you a phone for a necessary call, much as you might find someone to loan you a quarter now.
There you are, a marine, with a thin wooden sawhorse barricade standing between you and an unruly mob threatening to riot.
Completely unfazed, you unshoulder your brand new non-lethal microwave gun and level it at the first guy who tries to cross the line.
Pulling the trigger doesn't give you the same feedback as a rifle. It's somewhat anticlimactic. The gun emits a low hum and the battery pack becomes slightly warm to the touch.
Suddenly you are surprised with a loud crack. Your first thought is that someone has fired a conventional handgun, but you quickly connect the sound with the bright blue bolt that has appeared between your gun and the target. You smell the smoke of an electrical fire before the gun suddenly goes dead. For his part, the target has burst into flames and is thrashing about on the ground.
After the flames have been extinguished, medics quickly rush to the aid of the unfortunate wouldbe rioter. As one of them checks the man's vital signs, another reaches into the inside pocket of what remains of his jacket. His hand comes out clutching a barely recognizeable lump. "Dammit, not again," he says. Curious, you ask what he found. The medic holds up the lump for your examination. "Strawberry Pop-Tarts. Still in the foil wrapper."
The advertisers seem to be under the mistaken impression that end users don't click on their ads because they don't see them. The obvious solution? Make the ads more visible. This is just one of the internet advertising industry's myriad failures to catch a clue.
Lucky for them I'm here to tell them what's what.
The internet advertising model is based loosely on the model that has worked successfully for broadcast and print media for decades, and everybody's all confused as to why it doesn't work online.
Clue #1: It is working online. Or put more cynically, it isn't working any better in traditional channels. In old-school advertising, you don't have any way to tell how many people take immediate action upon seeing your ad. Advertisers spent the GNP of a small country to get their name spoken during the Super Bowl. Suppose they had some way to determine how many people immediately stopped watching football so they could go buy a Pepsi at the corner store, or how many people immediately started trying to find information about a new Volkswagon. If advertisers used that standard, would they be satisfied at the results? Would they feel they'd gotten their money's worth? Doubtful. But the very notion would leave a stupified frown on the faces of most sane people. The idea behind advertising is NOT that people immediately drop what they're doing to find out more about your product. It's about name recognition. It's about the moment when people do decide that they need a new car, or a tasty and refreshing cola beverage. In this respect internet advertising is done completely bass-ackwards. Internet advertising is based on "click-throughs." The higher the number of clicks, the more successful the ad is judged to be. This system is fraught with problems. The highest click generator has GOT to be that stupid "punch the monkey" ad. That's why it was everywhere. But does anybody really know or care what was being advertised? But people clicked, so it was a success. In the meantime, the top of the page I'm looking at now contains a pleasantly understated ad for Penguin Computing. I'm not going to click on it now. I have better things to do, such as composing this comment. But when I start building a new home server in a few months, I will likely check them out -- not by coming back to Slashdot and looking for an ad, but by going directly to the source. In a practical sense, the ad was successful, but because there is no logfile indicating a causal link between the ad and my potential future purchase, the ad will be judged to have failed in my case. Clue the first is, therefore, Do not have unrealistic expectations about customer response to ads. You have the technology to track it. You need the will to ignore it.
Clue #2: Trying schemes, tricks and gimmicks to get users to click builds up bad karma with customers. Your clickthrough counts may go up, but your sales will likely go way down. I have personally threatened to boycott multiple sites that carried that ad with the animated balloon floating across the browser window. It obstructed the content I was there to look at. The obvious tactic there is that people will click on the balloon to try to get rid of it -- and be taken to the advertiser's site, thus creating a successful ad. Nevermind the fact that hardly anybody actually cares what the balloon links to. This is the most extreme case (I've seen) of a disturbing trend of trying to trick or irritate people into clicking. Blindingly flashing ads, fake forms and "game" ads -- which usually don't even tell you what they're pushing -- all fall into this category. Now ridiculously huge Flash-based page-dominating ads are joining this dubious collection of tactics. At least the big ads have the virtue of a sort of honesty. Their only strength is greater power to distract and annoy. The masses come for the content, not the ads, and the more you try to pull them away from the content, the more you'll push them away altogether. You don't win more customers. You just erode the user base of otherwise good content sites. Thus clue the second is, Thou shalt not annoy thy customer, for he is fickle and will take his money elsewhere in a heartbeat.
In the "ideal" situation, there's this constant tension, kind of a romantic triangle, among the content provider, the advertiser and the user. The user wants the content. The advertiser wants money from the user. The content provider wants money from the advertiser. In reverse, the affections are more tepid. The advertisers use the content providers only as a way to get to the users. The content providers feel forever forced to choose between the advertisers and the users (they often really like the users, but the advertisers have the money). And the users view the advertisers as a somewhat necessary evil, but really wish they'd just go away altogether. Any one of them can upset the balance here. The users can decide the content isn't worth putting up with the ads. The content providers can decide they really do love their users more after all. The advertisers can decide they aren't getting enough commitment from users to justify the money they pay. This last is what's happening. The fallout in a few cases will be poor but happy relationships between content providers and users, but most will be torn apart, with the content providers left wondering why nobody loves them anymore. It's sad, but inevitable unless people reevaluate their expectations.
Speaking personally, I want this. I've been considering LASIK anyway, and I'll probably wait to see if this actually becomes available.
The bad side: I don't want my boss to have 20/2.5 vision, which would give him the ability to stand well out in the hall, glance into my office, and clearly read whatever I happen to be posting to Slashdot at that moment.
The colleges' IT departments see it as a matter of resource ownership. They own the hardware that supports the network, and thus they feel that they have both responsibility for and ownership of the data that travels on the network.
The problem, of course, is that there are plenty of existing analogies. Most closely, most schools have their own PBXes. That doesn't give them the right to tap students' phone lines. Schools also own the mailboxes, and often maintain an internal mail routing system, but that doesn't mean they get to read the students' mail, and claiming that they OWN the mail just because it was routed through a university-supplied system would be laughable.
The reason they don't get to do these things is that there are federal laws making it illegal for them to do so. There are no such laws regarding network traffic, as far as I know. That's the difference.
They give you that plastic wall mount bracket. Use it. Even if you have it sitting on the floor, put it on the bracket. That little bit of ventiliation is apparently more than enough to resolve the problem, since I've never noticed the least bit of heat coming off my base station.
The line here is simple: Is the virtual RP romance competing with your real life marriage? You know if it is, hence you know if you're cheating.
As a further tip, if your spouse thinks your Evercrack romance is competing with your marriage and you don't, that's probably one of those situations where it would behoove you to be gracious instead of defensive.
Adultery always begins with the adulterer(s) claiming to themselves and to others that the relationship is "harmless" because it hasn't crossed a certain line. The line where it becomes wrong is the line where you start having to rationalize like that.
Online romances are more risky than the real life equivalent for a number of reasons, even if you ignore the risk that your virtual snugglebunny is really an ax-wielding maniac.
Most significantly, no matter what it feels like, you just don't know somebody until you've met them face to face. Even if you've seen pictures, talked on the phone, and even if all that is accurate, your impression of that person in live interaction might contradict all of what you thought you knew about him or her. It's impossible to determine whether an online romance would "work" in real life before you actually meet.
The biggest problem with online romance is how easy it is to fall for a stranger based on some exchanges of text. The reason this happens is that you fill in the gaps in a very narrow communication channel with your own expectations and assumptions. When you fall in love online, you're in love with yourself as much or more than you're in love with the other person. You automatically read the stranger in terms of your ideal romantic partner.
Adultery's most frequent cause is the fact that life with a spouse can't be kept in some dreamlike ideal state. People have foibles and they will have conflicts with each other. In an adulterous situation, the spouse is seen in terms of his or her faults (realistic, if pessimistic), while the lover is seen in terms of his or her virtues (ideal, and naively optimistic). It's hard for the spouse to compete when someone starts thinking this way.
The tendency of people to map online correspondents onto their own romantic ideals exacerbates this problem greatly. It's easier to view someone as your ideal, therefore easier to get into an adulterous situation, and easy to rationalize it because real life sex is not taking place. The worst part is, the online adulterer doesn't really know if the online relationship could carry over into real life. So his/her existing marriage suffers for the sake of a relationship with someone who is far more a stranger than s/he imagines.
I'm pretty sure that in 20 or 30 years, parents will be explaining the oddities of online infatuation to their kids along with the birds and the bees. It will just become basic advice, which of course most kids will ignore initially until it bites them once, but at least after that they'll have a grounding to understand what's going on, whereas our generation is having to figure this stuff out as we go.
It's true that the smaller ISPs are being sucked up here on the West Coast, where there were probably too many of them to start with. That isn't to suggest that monolithic corporate providers are better by a longshot. Just that there was too much competition out here.
But this isn't a nationwide phenomenon. Personally, I still maintain an account with my old ISP across the country, which is still essentially a "Mom & Pop" outfit, albeit a pretty large and successful one. They provide the best service I've seen, and they still let me have a shell account, which is pretty much impossible to find these days.
I fully support respect based on merit rather than age. When it comes to listening to opinions on a specific topic, I don't really think even past performance is a good excuse for shutting somebody out entirely. Even utter idiots have their moments, so you shouldn't dismiss anyone out of hand.
That said, you should be very careful about making the age argument to anyone. Why? Simply, because every, say, 18-23 year old believes [s]he is listened to less than [his|her] ability merits, and every one of them believes it's age discrimination that prevents people from listening to them. Now it's statistically implausible that everyone 18-23 is some kind of unappreciated prodigy, even considering those who started working with technology when they were young. So before you go and talk to your boss about something like this, be aware of the possibility that you may really not know as much as you think you do.
Also keep in mind that the "today's young techies started earlier" argument is not really as compelling as it seems, mainly because the "I started young" thing is not new. I'm closing in on 30, and I "started young." So did most of my peers. So did lots of people older than I am, too. Don't think that automatically gives you a leg up. It just means you don't have to work as hard to catch up.
Slashdot Mirror
What it does say is that Comcast is trying to implement a pricing model for their Internet service similar to their existing cable TV service. To begin with, you are expected to be a consumer only. This service exists to deliver content into your home, not the other way around.
Second, that "cost is $6.95 per month for each additional outlet" thing is practically lifted straight out of their cable TV policies. It doesn't matter if they do the wiring or if you do, if you use a cable box or a cable-ready TV. If you have two television sets, Comcast expects you to pay extra for the "extra outlet" servicing the second TV, even though you're not fundamentally getting anything extra from Comcast at all. At one point they claimed they had technology which could detect if you were running an unauthorized set, but I've never heard of anyone getting "busted" (goodness knows I never have ).
What this tells me, though, is that they are at least toying with the idea of implementing the same asinine policy with regard to computers on their Internet service.
Thank you, John. That post is going to be hanging on my wall for a while now. As a "split-class" programmer/artist (they pay me for the programming) I can appreciate both sides of what I've come to see as a completely unnecessary war that is waged in the offices of every creative software project. I've seen it literally tear companies apart, especially with weak, naive direction from the top.
There's certainly a place in the world for lying on your back in the grass and playing "what if," but unless you can take something away from that and turn it into a concrete task list, then all you've done is entertain yourself for a while. Anything you intend to accomplish will require concrete goals and a hard-edged mindset.
Contrary to popular belief, this is just as true for creative, artistic endeavors as it is for technical tasks. Every artist I've ever known who was more than a pretentious dillitente has spent far more time perfecting the concrete details of his chosen medium than on the ideal of self-expression. Self-expression comes naturally to people. Doing it effectively requires intensive goal-directed labor.
(IANAL) Actually, BG could -not- sue you for defamation if you called him an asshole. Things like defamation and libel have very specific legal definitions which exclude such invective. The "in my opinion" part is understood in a statement like that. In fact, a legal paper I was reading the other day suggests that you could say something like, "Bill Gates is an evil Nazi baby-raper" and not be sued, because while the statement is offensive, it does not present a specifically actionable statement of fact, as opposed to a statement like, "Last Thursday I saw Gates attending a neo-Nazi rally, shouting antisemetic rhetoric at the crowd." Such a specific false statement is slanderous. Of course, the territory gets pretty gray around here, and ultimately in most cases a judge will have to draw a conclusion about the intent of the speaker. Bile, invective and ill opinion (informed or otherwise) can be unpleasant, but they are inevitable and they are protected speech. In fact, for a public figure (and Gates certainly qualifies), the bar is very much higher to demonstrate defamation, slander or libel.
Except for the most part these things will make it as easy to lay your hands on a phone as it currently is to lay your hands on a quarter.
You could stash one in your wallet, one above the visor in your car, one in the drawer at work, and use those in the case that you forget your regular cell phone.
With phones and the associated minutes that cheap, it'll also be a lot easier to find a complete stranger who will loan you a phone for a necessary call, much as you might find someone to loan you a quarter now.
There you are, a marine, with a thin wooden sawhorse barricade standing between you and an unruly mob threatening to riot.
Completely unfazed, you unshoulder your brand new non-lethal microwave gun and level it at the first guy who tries to cross the line.
Pulling the trigger doesn't give you the same feedback as a rifle. It's somewhat anticlimactic. The gun emits a low hum and the battery pack becomes slightly warm to the touch.
Suddenly you are surprised with a loud crack. Your first thought is that someone has fired a conventional handgun, but you quickly connect the sound with the bright blue bolt that has appeared between your gun and the target. You smell the smoke of an electrical fire before the gun suddenly goes dead. For his part, the target has burst into flames and is thrashing about on the ground.
After the flames have been extinguished, medics quickly rush to the aid of the unfortunate wouldbe rioter. As one of them checks the man's vital signs, another reaches into the inside pocket of what remains of his jacket. His hand comes out clutching a barely recognizeable lump. "Dammit, not again," he says. Curious, you ask what he found. The medic holds up the lump for your examination. "Strawberry Pop-Tarts. Still in the foil wrapper."
The advertisers seem to be under the mistaken impression that end users don't click on their ads because they don't see them. The obvious solution? Make the ads more visible. This is just one of the internet advertising industry's myriad failures to catch a clue.
Lucky for them I'm here to tell them what's what.
The internet advertising model is based loosely on the model that has worked successfully for broadcast and print media for decades, and everybody's all confused as to why it doesn't work online.
Clue #1: It is working online. Or put more cynically, it isn't working any better in traditional channels. In old-school advertising, you don't have any way to tell how many people take immediate action upon seeing your ad. Advertisers spent the GNP of a small country to get their name spoken during the Super Bowl. Suppose they had some way to determine how many people immediately stopped watching football so they could go buy a Pepsi at the corner store, or how many people immediately started trying to find information about a new Volkswagon. If advertisers used that standard, would they be satisfied at the results? Would they feel they'd gotten their money's worth? Doubtful. But the very notion would leave a stupified frown on the faces of most sane people. The idea behind advertising is NOT that people immediately drop what they're doing to find out more about your product. It's about name recognition. It's about the moment when people do decide that they need a new car, or a tasty and refreshing cola beverage. In this respect internet advertising is done completely bass-ackwards. Internet advertising is based on "click-throughs." The higher the number of clicks, the more successful the ad is judged to be. This system is fraught with problems. The highest click generator has GOT to be that stupid "punch the monkey" ad. That's why it was everywhere. But does anybody really know or care what was being advertised? But people clicked, so it was a success. In the meantime, the top of the page I'm looking at now contains a pleasantly understated ad for Penguin Computing. I'm not going to click on it now. I have better things to do, such as composing this comment. But when I start building a new home server in a few months, I will likely check them out -- not by coming back to Slashdot and looking for an ad, but by going directly to the source. In a practical sense, the ad was successful, but because there is no logfile indicating a causal link between the ad and my potential future purchase, the ad will be judged to have failed in my case. Clue the first is, therefore, Do not have unrealistic expectations about customer response to ads. You have the technology to track it. You need the will to ignore it.
Clue #2: Trying schemes, tricks and gimmicks to get users to click builds up bad karma with customers. Your clickthrough counts may go up, but your sales will likely go way down. I have personally threatened to boycott multiple sites that carried that ad with the animated balloon floating across the browser window. It obstructed the content I was there to look at. The obvious tactic there is that people will click on the balloon to try to get rid of it -- and be taken to the advertiser's site, thus creating a successful ad. Nevermind the fact that hardly anybody actually cares what the balloon links to. This is the most extreme case (I've seen) of a disturbing trend of trying to trick or irritate people into clicking. Blindingly flashing ads, fake forms and "game" ads -- which usually don't even tell you what they're pushing -- all fall into this category. Now ridiculously huge Flash-based page-dominating ads are joining this dubious collection of tactics. At least the big ads have the virtue of a sort of honesty. Their only strength is greater power to distract and annoy. The masses come for the content, not the ads, and the more you try to pull them away from the content, the more you'll push them away altogether. You don't win more customers. You just erode the user base of otherwise good content sites. Thus clue the second is, Thou shalt not annoy thy customer, for he is fickle and will take his money elsewhere in a heartbeat.
In the "ideal" situation, there's this constant tension, kind of a romantic triangle, among the content provider, the advertiser and the user. The user wants the content. The advertiser wants money from the user. The content provider wants money from the advertiser. In reverse, the affections are more tepid. The advertisers use the content providers only as a way to get to the users. The content providers feel forever forced to choose between the advertisers and the users (they often really like the users, but the advertisers have the money). And the users view the advertisers as a somewhat necessary evil, but really wish they'd just go away altogether. Any one of them can upset the balance here. The users can decide the content isn't worth putting up with the ads. The content providers can decide they really do love their users more after all. The advertisers can decide they aren't getting enough commitment from users to justify the money they pay. This last is what's happening. The fallout in a few cases will be poor but happy relationships between content providers and users, but most will be torn apart, with the content providers left wondering why nobody loves them anymore. It's sad, but inevitable unless people reevaluate their expectations.
Speaking personally, I want this. I've been considering LASIK anyway, and I'll probably wait to see if this actually becomes available.
The bad side: I don't want my boss to have 20/2.5 vision, which would give him the ability to stand well out in the hall, glance into my office, and clearly read whatever I happen to be posting to Slashdot at that moment.
The colleges' IT departments see it as a matter of resource ownership. They own the hardware that supports the network, and thus they feel that they have both responsibility for and ownership of the data that travels on the network.
The problem, of course, is that there are plenty of existing analogies. Most closely, most schools have their own PBXes. That doesn't give them the right to tap students' phone lines. Schools also own the mailboxes, and often maintain an internal mail routing system, but that doesn't mean they get to read the students' mail, and claiming that they OWN the mail just because it was routed through a university-supplied system would be laughable.
The reason they don't get to do these things is that there are federal laws making it illegal for them to do so. There are no such laws regarding network traffic, as far as I know. That's the difference.
They give you that plastic wall mount bracket. Use it. Even if you have it sitting on the floor, put it on the bracket. That little bit of ventiliation is apparently more than enough to resolve the problem, since I've never noticed the least bit of heat coming off my base station.
The line here is simple: Is the virtual RP romance competing with your real life marriage? You know if it is, hence you know if you're cheating.
As a further tip, if your spouse thinks your Evercrack romance is competing with your marriage and you don't, that's probably one of those situations where it would behoove you to be gracious instead of defensive.
Adultery always begins with the adulterer(s) claiming to themselves and to others that the relationship is "harmless" because it hasn't crossed a certain line. The line where it becomes wrong is the line where you start having to rationalize like that.
Online romances are more risky than the real life equivalent for a number of reasons, even if you ignore the risk that your virtual snugglebunny is really an ax-wielding maniac.
Most significantly, no matter what it feels like, you just don't know somebody until you've met them face to face. Even if you've seen pictures, talked on the phone, and even if all that is accurate, your impression of that person in live interaction might contradict all of what you thought you knew about him or her. It's impossible to determine whether an online romance would "work" in real life before you actually meet.
The biggest problem with online romance is how easy it is to fall for a stranger based on some exchanges of text. The reason this happens is that you fill in the gaps in a very narrow communication channel with your own expectations and assumptions. When you fall in love online, you're in love with yourself as much or more than you're in love with the other person. You automatically read the stranger in terms of your ideal romantic partner.
Adultery's most frequent cause is the fact that life with a spouse can't be kept in some dreamlike ideal state. People have foibles and they will have conflicts with each other. In an adulterous situation, the spouse is seen in terms of his or her faults (realistic, if pessimistic), while the lover is seen in terms of his or her virtues (ideal, and naively optimistic). It's hard for the spouse to compete when someone starts thinking this way.
The tendency of people to map online correspondents onto their own romantic ideals exacerbates this problem greatly. It's easier to view someone as your ideal, therefore easier to get into an adulterous situation, and easy to rationalize it because real life sex is not taking place. The worst part is, the online adulterer doesn't really know if the online relationship could carry over into real life. So his/her existing marriage suffers for the sake of a relationship with someone who is far more a stranger than s/he imagines.
I'm pretty sure that in 20 or 30 years, parents will be explaining the oddities of online infatuation to their kids along with the birds and the bees. It will just become basic advice, which of course most kids will ignore initially until it bites them once, but at least after that they'll have a grounding to understand what's going on, whereas our generation is having to figure this stuff out as we go.
It's true that the smaller ISPs are being sucked up here on the West Coast, where there were probably too many of them to start with. That isn't to suggest that monolithic corporate providers are better by a longshot. Just that there was too much competition out here.
But this isn't a nationwide phenomenon. Personally, I still maintain an account with my old ISP across the country, which is still essentially a "Mom & Pop" outfit, albeit a pretty large and successful one. They provide the best service I've seen, and they still let me have a shell account, which is pretty much impossible to find these days.
I fully support respect based on merit rather than age. When it comes to listening to opinions on a specific topic, I don't really think even past performance is a good excuse for shutting somebody out entirely. Even utter idiots have their moments, so you shouldn't dismiss anyone out of hand.
That said, you should be very careful about making the age argument to anyone. Why? Simply, because every, say, 18-23 year old believes [s]he is listened to less than [his|her] ability merits, and every one of them believes it's age discrimination that prevents people from listening to them. Now it's statistically implausible that everyone 18-23 is some kind of unappreciated prodigy, even considering those who started working with technology when they were young. So before you go and talk to your boss about something like this, be aware of the possibility that you may really not know as much as you think you do.
Also keep in mind that the "today's young techies started earlier" argument is not really as compelling as it seems, mainly because the "I started young" thing is not new. I'm closing in on 30, and I "started young." So did most of my peers. So did lots of people older than I am, too. Don't think that automatically gives you a leg up. It just means you don't have to work as hard to catch up.