Just to correct the "record", such as this is. DRM-free music on iTunes launched on May 29, 2007. The Amazon MP3 store launched in beta on September 25, 2007.
You remember it the other way around because memory is an illusion.
MITM in cryptography usually stands for "man in the middle". "Monkey in the middle" is a kid's game where a group stands in a circle and tries to keep the ball away from a single kid designated the "monkey".
To be fair, this isn't really any dumber than the dozens of "OMG what if it breaks?" comments or the "OMG if pilots can use electronic devices during takeoff/landing I can't think of any reason at all why hundreds of passengers distracted with colorful screens and music could be hazardous in an emergency situation!"
It's like Slashdot has become "this new thing is stupid because I thought of a simple, obvious objection which is also wrong" central.
As some others have mentioned the Three Laws weren't exactly "rules" or even design principles exactly. Asimov's thinking was that an imitation brain would need a set of foundational ideas to be able to function. In some books it's made clear that these were the starting point for the whole mathematical art of positronic brain design (and other principles would be possible but require starting over from scratch).
This is an analogy to the human mind, since Asimov was actually imagining his version of a superior form of person rather than a "robot" at all. The human's "Laws" are things like eating, self-preservation, need for social recognition, etc that were provided by evolution.
Actual computers have foundational ideas too, though they are more prosaic perhaps: "follow one instruction, then retrieve the next instruction according to a numerical sequence, except when there is a branching instruction" and that sort of thing. Or you could argue that somewhat more advanced fundamentals have developed over the years as we use increased abstractions (functions, objects, etc).
In Soviet Russia, Oog the open-source caveman holds you wrong, in all caps. I think that about covers it
Not sorry.
Re:Nice upgrade, but no big surprises in the new i
on
Apple Unveils New iPad
·
· Score: 2
I don't think people will actually buy new devices just to replace the battery. If we reach that plateau I'd expect to see the many existing third-party shops that do iPad/iPod/iPhone battery replacement to do more business, that's all.
Not sure why people think this is a big issue. Battery replacements for laptops can already be like $150 sometimes. Adding 20 minutes of moderately-skilled labor to that equation doesn't change much.
There are a lot of iPad accessory options out there but they don't turn the device into a laptop, or into something like a laptop. Even if someone uses a keyboard to write emails once in a while they don't likely use the keyboard for Web surfing, reading maps, or for any of the many other tasks to which a tablet is better suited than a laptop. Also I think you are severely overestimating how popular these accessories are compared to the iPad itself. Frankly it's nice that the iPad is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of usage scenarios, unlike a laptop.
I'm sort of sad to see so many Slashdotters responding so poorly to tablets, which are the most important development in computing in a decade. We ought to be leading the charge forward and demanding tablet casemods and overclocking. Instead we are whining that a screen attached to a keyboard via a hinge is the One True Way. Laptops were designed for office work and they do not make very good home personal computers.
The big question I have is if it will be like AMD's previous 12-core chips, where you could get 4 of them crammed into a 2U server for not all that much money. 4-Xeon configurations are way more expensive.
God dammit, Slashdotters are so dumb about corporations and how they work. Even if you're anti-corporate you ought to know a handful of things about your enemy.
Suppose you are a corporation with basically one physical asset: a $10 billion TV factory. Raw materials and labor go in one side, and finished TVs come out the other. Let's even ignore R&D and marketing.
What you'll learn very quickly is that you can't really control the price that you sell the TVs at. Since you have competitors also making TVs, and there is only so much demand for TVs out there in the market, you're constrained. Maybe some of your competitors can build TVs cheaper than you because their labor is cheaper, or they have a better factory, or whatever. Maybe everyone expects huge TV sales due to some new technology and the sales never pan out, and there are just too many TVs in the market.
So your brilliant idea is to shut down the factory the moment that you can't sell the TVs for more than the cost of making them. In the real world it isn't always so simple. If you completely abandon the TV market, you'll have to sell your $10 billion factory even though nobody wants a TV factory right now -- you'll be lucky to find a buyer at $1 billion. If you decide to sit on your factory (still paying for maintenance, security, property taxes, etc), you'd have to get rid of your employees to really save money, and then you'll need months of lead time to re-hire people if the market picks up again. Not to mention that you'll lose your position in the marketplace -- everything from distribution contracts to your mindshare will evaporate. Nobody really wants to buy or distribute a TV from a company that only makes TVs some of the time.
There is always a point where keeping things running isn't the best decision, especially if you think the market will never come back (the buggy whip situation). I'm just saying that the point where you start selling things for less than it costs to make them isn't always the time to abandon production. Sony will be happy that it kept its TV division running if the R&D guys can come up with some new feature that everyone actually wants to buy.
Bottom line: yes it's possible that they really are losing money on each TV. Depending on how you interpret the mysterious future, they might lose even more if they stopped making them.
Not sure that the keyboard dock will prove that popular with the general public. It's almost forgotten now but Apple sold a keyboard dock accessory for the original iPad on release day. They don't bother to make it anymore due to low sales, but the iPad is still compatible with Bluetooth keyboards (as it always was). The general public hasn't had much interest in that either, though a small Bluetooth keyboard plus a small iPad stand is occasionally useful for sending email or using SSH while traveling or whatever.
That's not true; the Dow is even simpler than you are implying. There is no weighting at all applied to the individual stocks in the index, so it's incorrect to say that they weigh "each stock price with a factor". Instead, there is only one factor (the Dow divisor) for the entire index. All the share prices are simply added up and then divided by the divisor.
When AAPL was added to the Dow, the Dow divisor would be adjusted to account for the difference in price between AAPL and whatever it replaced, but that's it. So it's completely incorrect to say that a 5% change in Apple's price would have the same influence as any other company. In fact a 5% change in a high-priced stock would have much greater impact on the Dow value than a similar change in a low-priced stock.
Yes, the DJIA really, really is that bad of an index.
Apple pretending that they had no intention to allow apps on the early iPhone was obviously misdirection in retrospect. At the time they were having enough trouble making the software work at all without crashing, and they didn't want developers/users to avoid it while waiting for the bright app future. Sort of a counter to the Osborne Effect.
Yeah but, on the other hand, talking to hackers, even information security experts, isn't really good enough. There are too many opinions out there and not enough facts.
The first problem is that we don't have any sort of useful objective metric to compare the security of various operating systems. "Number of vulnerabilities found" is unfair to the popular ones. "Severity of the worst vulnerability found" is useless because everyone has remote root exploits found from time to time.
And even an objective metric doesn't measure what really matters: the threat ecosystem. Windows had lax security for years, even years during which the Internet was common, and nobody cared much. But this lax environment bred an ecosystem of hackers, and especially criminal hackers, dedicated to compromising Windows machines for profit. Then Microsoft was asleep at the switch for a while and allowed this problem to grow out of control. Melissa should have been a gigantic red flag but they pretended that it wasn't their problem and that everyone should just buy a virus scanner.
Once this sort of problem has taken root it is very difficult to eliminate. Once there was a large group of intelligent, highly-motivated individuals with experience in breaking into Windows computers, they weren't going to disappear just because Microsoft released some patches. It took a substantial security effort over many years and even still the Windows-based criminal community is likely to be much larger than the OSX one or the Linux one or the iPhone one, even by proportion to user base (although I am not aware of any actual surveys).
Even if OSX were easier to break into in an objective sense, these people have experience with Windows and they're probably not eager to switch to a new system. So Apple has an easier time of things and this could remain the case for a while as long as they are aggressive about going after new threats. I do think they are correct to recommend against virus scanners in general, since foisting the problem of security off on a third-party (and usually an incompetent one) only masks the real problems.
Telling people that the JWST could be used as a spy satellite would be what's called a "lie". But if they can get it launched before Congress finds out that it has to be permanently shielded from the Sun...
Come on! Everyone's talking about the BlackBerry as being good for "business" but nobody's talking about the elephant in the room: the "business" world is stupid!
Business is always focused on the wrong features, and stuck on consensus ideas and "best practices". Business is about being afraid of what will happen if you don't "control" your employees' phones. OMG maybe they will install Angry Birds!
Those of you who work in an office, look around. Look at your desk phone -- isn't it a piece of crap? Can you believe how badly-designed the interface is? Are you even allowed to set up your own speed dial? How about your furniture -- do you realize how expensive it all was? Would you make those choices with that budget?
The newsflash that's hitting the business world now, and why they are abandoning the BlackBerry, is that if a phone is designed to be usable the employees will be able to "manage" it themselves. "Cool" things like smooth scrolling, animations that communicate to the user where things came from and where they're going, etc are all more important than whether you can set your lame email signature policy from a central server.
The truth is that people used to think everything business did was "cool" and the hottest word in computing was "enterprise". No more, thank the stars.
It's a little more complicated than that... CME has a discussion of their match algorithms on pages 42 through 52 of their electronic trading documentation:
Not that it's necessarily that much harder in principle to implement 10 relatively-simple algorithms, but when you add requirements for performance/latency into the mix it doesn't seem that surprising that there would be some trade secrets in there somewhere.
No reason, except that the fact that you bought an iPhone, is itself a statement that you desire electronics which serve other parties' interests in preference to your own.
This is such a misguided statement that I don't even know where to start. You really aren't thinking that through.
I think the problem here is that Slashdotters are always comparing Apple's successful mass-market products and services to some Stallman-esque ideal service that doesn't exist -- or, worse, falling for some transparent marketing (like thinking the PS3 was a great console because it "ran Linux").
In the case of the iPhone, it's worth remembering the cell phone market that existed before iPhone 1.0. Those devices were entirely beholden to the interests of your cell phone provider. If they had an app store (and many did) it would be controlled by your provider. If they could play music, your provider would determine where you could get that music from. Your phone would be loaded up with crapware out of the box, again controlled by your provider.
For typical users the iPhone is way more open than the previous situation. iTunes allows music from virtually any source and any music you buy there will work on any modern device. Although there are restrictions on the app store, it is far more open than the previous carrier-curated equivalents. Music services like Pandora/etc, video services like Netflix, etc are available without having to pay any any additional monthly fee to your provider. I think it's absurd to suggest that the only reason anyone would want access to the Apple app store is because they don't care about their own interests.
So now you're comparing to Android, and I guess you think you have your utopia platform, but I'm here to disagree. If you're rational about the parties involved in Android, you have to see the way the product is designed to serve their interests over yours:
1. The carriers. With Android carriers gain more control over the software delivered on their phones than is available with iOS. Some carriers abuse this, others do not; the point is that they have additional power over the user and they are going to use it if it serves their needs. This is why it's not surprising that the carriers have stocked so many Android phones in their stores and pushed them to their customers. When people say that Android is "open", what they mostly mean is that the carriers have control. 2. Google. Android on the Google side is conceived as a powerful platform to sell the users to advertisers. While Apple runs an advertising platform, iAd, that is optionally available to app developers, no ads from iAd appear on the device unless a user installs an app that uses it. In contrast, Android phones are deeply integrated with Google's very profitable ad-supported services -- GMail, Google search, Google Maps, etc. For Google, the user is not the customer; the advertisers are. So whose interests are being served here?
We can argue all day about whether it matters who the customer is, but I think it does. I prefer to pay for things myself rather than be sold to someone else, partly because I don't trust myself to be immune to the influence of pervasive advertising. If I wanted to run something on the iPhone that wasn't allowed on the app store I'd just jailbreak it, like Android people do when their carriers lock the phone down. So far I haven't encountered such a need.
I think you're ignoring the ways that projects like Wikipedia are developing to include rigor. Look, my whole point is that I don't think anyone is seriously arguing for a 100% naive interpretation of "wisdom of crowds".
The bible thing is a really good example actually. Although handing the bible to laymen resulted in a whole ton of bad theology which persists to this day, could history really have gone any other way? Even the modern Catholic Church is still repulsive and ridiculously stale despite attempts at reform. Keeping everything in the tower would not have worked.
Personally, I think it's antil-intellectual to criticize the way others are learning to think and operate in a new, more complex world. I think it's anti-intellectual to proclaim that Wikipedia is useless. I think it's anti-intellectual to boldly assert that Google is making us stupid without solid research showing diminished capacity to solve real-world problems.
I think there's a real case to be made that some "democratization" of knowledge is a good thing. It's not that we can vote on the truth (and it's essentially dishonest for Sanger to continue to insist that Wikipedia operates democratically). I don't believe that it's very useful to absorb "knowledge" from the uninformed but I also don't believe that this is really what people are doing. Rather, I think the new information technologies make it possible to absorb knowledge from a wider, more diverse array of knowledgeable people.
I don't think anyone believes that you can understand a complex topic without careful study. However, I think it makes sense to expect the nature of this careful study to shift over time. There is some sense that "facts" are less important and understanding more so, and I think that in the past there has been in fact too much emphasis placed on memorized facts as a substitute for understanding.
We can debate the benefits of different methods of learning, but I fear that Larry Sanger in particular is not contributing to this discussion. Rather I feel he has a tendency to mis-state the arguments of those who disagree with him (Wikipedia as a democracy, etc). I wish he would spend more time understanding why Wikipedia is a better, more useful model than something like Citizendium.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to correct the "record", such as this is. DRM-free music on iTunes launched on May 29, 2007. The Amazon MP3 store launched in beta on September 25, 2007.
You remember it the other way around because memory is an illusion.
MITM in cryptography usually stands for "man in the middle". "Monkey in the middle" is a kid's game where a group stands in a circle and tries to keep the ball away from a single kid designated the "monkey".
Only to those who lack a sense of history. People always think the worst is coming.
To be fair, this isn't really any dumber than the dozens of "OMG what if it breaks?" comments or the "OMG if pilots can use electronic devices during takeoff/landing I can't think of any reason at all why hundreds of passengers distracted with colorful screens and music could be hazardous in an emergency situation!"
It's like Slashdot has become "this new thing is stupid because I thought of a simple, obvious objection which is also wrong" central.
As some others have mentioned the Three Laws weren't exactly "rules" or even design principles exactly. Asimov's thinking was that an imitation brain would need a set of foundational ideas to be able to function. In some books it's made clear that these were the starting point for the whole mathematical art of positronic brain design (and other principles would be possible but require starting over from scratch).
This is an analogy to the human mind, since Asimov was actually imagining his version of a superior form of person rather than a "robot" at all. The human's "Laws" are things like eating, self-preservation, need for social recognition, etc that were provided by evolution.
Actual computers have foundational ideas too, though they are more prosaic perhaps: "follow one instruction, then retrieve the next instruction according to a numerical sequence, except when there is a branching instruction" and that sort of thing. Or you could argue that somewhat more advanced fundamentals have developed over the years as we use increased abstractions (functions, objects, etc).
In Soviet Russia, Oog the open-source caveman holds you wrong, in all caps. I think that about covers it
Not sorry.
I don't think people will actually buy new devices just to replace the battery. If we reach that plateau I'd expect to see the many existing third-party shops that do iPad/iPod/iPhone battery replacement to do more business, that's all.
Not sure why people think this is a big issue. Battery replacements for laptops can already be like $150 sometimes. Adding 20 minutes of moderately-skilled labor to that equation doesn't change much.
There are a lot of iPad accessory options out there but they don't turn the device into a laptop, or into something like a laptop. Even if someone uses a keyboard to write emails once in a while they don't likely use the keyboard for Web surfing, reading maps, or for any of the many other tasks to which a tablet is better suited than a laptop. Also I think you are severely overestimating how popular these accessories are compared to the iPad itself. Frankly it's nice that the iPad is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of usage scenarios, unlike a laptop.
I'm sort of sad to see so many Slashdotters responding so poorly to tablets, which are the most important development in computing in a decade. We ought to be leading the charge forward and demanding tablet casemods and overclocking. Instead we are whining that a screen attached to a keyboard via a hinge is the One True Way. Laptops were designed for office work and they do not make very good home personal computers.
The big question I have is if it will be like AMD's previous 12-core chips, where you could get 4 of them crammed into a 2U server for not all that much money. 4-Xeon configurations are way more expensive.
God dammit, Slashdotters are so dumb about corporations and how they work. Even if you're anti-corporate you ought to know a handful of things about your enemy.
Suppose you are a corporation with basically one physical asset: a $10 billion TV factory. Raw materials and labor go in one side, and finished TVs come out the other. Let's even ignore R&D and marketing.
What you'll learn very quickly is that you can't really control the price that you sell the TVs at. Since you have competitors also making TVs, and there is only so much demand for TVs out there in the market, you're constrained. Maybe some of your competitors can build TVs cheaper than you because their labor is cheaper, or they have a better factory, or whatever. Maybe everyone expects huge TV sales due to some new technology and the sales never pan out, and there are just too many TVs in the market.
So your brilliant idea is to shut down the factory the moment that you can't sell the TVs for more than the cost of making them. In the real world it isn't always so simple. If you completely abandon the TV market, you'll have to sell your $10 billion factory even though nobody wants a TV factory right now -- you'll be lucky to find a buyer at $1 billion. If you decide to sit on your factory (still paying for maintenance, security, property taxes, etc), you'd have to get rid of your employees to really save money, and then you'll need months of lead time to re-hire people if the market picks up again. Not to mention that you'll lose your position in the marketplace -- everything from distribution contracts to your mindshare will evaporate. Nobody really wants to buy or distribute a TV from a company that only makes TVs some of the time.
There is always a point where keeping things running isn't the best decision, especially if you think the market will never come back (the buggy whip situation). I'm just saying that the point where you start selling things for less than it costs to make them isn't always the time to abandon production. Sony will be happy that it kept its TV division running if the R&D guys can come up with some new feature that everyone actually wants to buy.
Bottom line: yes it's possible that they really are losing money on each TV. Depending on how you interpret the mysterious future, they might lose even more if they stopped making them.
Not sure that the keyboard dock will prove that popular with the general public. It's almost forgotten now but Apple sold a keyboard dock accessory for the original iPad on release day. They don't bother to make it anymore due to low sales, but the iPad is still compatible with Bluetooth keyboards (as it always was). The general public hasn't had much interest in that either, though a small Bluetooth keyboard plus a small iPad stand is occasionally useful for sending email or using SSH while traveling or whatever.
I have to ask: is "sweat-of-the-brow argument" an actual legal term?
DJIA isn't weighted. Where are you all getting the idea that DJIA is weighted?
That's not true; the Dow is even simpler than you are implying. There is no weighting at all applied to the individual stocks in the index, so it's incorrect to say that they weigh "each stock price with a factor". Instead, there is only one factor (the Dow divisor) for the entire index. All the share prices are simply added up and then divided by the divisor.
When AAPL was added to the Dow, the Dow divisor would be adjusted to account for the difference in price between AAPL and whatever it replaced, but that's it. So it's completely incorrect to say that a 5% change in Apple's price would have the same influence as any other company. In fact a 5% change in a high-priced stock would have much greater impact on the Dow value than a similar change in a low-priced stock.
Yes, the DJIA really, really is that bad of an index.
Apple pretending that they had no intention to allow apps on the early iPhone was obviously misdirection in retrospect. At the time they were having enough trouble making the software work at all without crashing, and they didn't want developers/users to avoid it while waiting for the bright app future. Sort of a counter to the Osborne Effect.
So is using an iPad as a cookbook "content creation" or "content consumption"?
Yeah but, on the other hand, talking to hackers, even information security experts, isn't really good enough. There are too many opinions out there and not enough facts.
The first problem is that we don't have any sort of useful objective metric to compare the security of various operating systems. "Number of vulnerabilities found" is unfair to the popular ones. "Severity of the worst vulnerability found" is useless because everyone has remote root exploits found from time to time.
And even an objective metric doesn't measure what really matters: the threat ecosystem. Windows had lax security for years, even years during which the Internet was common, and nobody cared much. But this lax environment bred an ecosystem of hackers, and especially criminal hackers, dedicated to compromising Windows machines for profit. Then Microsoft was asleep at the switch for a while and allowed this problem to grow out of control. Melissa should have been a gigantic red flag but they pretended that it wasn't their problem and that everyone should just buy a virus scanner.
Once this sort of problem has taken root it is very difficult to eliminate. Once there was a large group of intelligent, highly-motivated individuals with experience in breaking into Windows computers, they weren't going to disappear just because Microsoft released some patches. It took a substantial security effort over many years and even still the Windows-based criminal community is likely to be much larger than the OSX one or the Linux one or the iPhone one, even by proportion to user base (although I am not aware of any actual surveys).
Even if OSX were easier to break into in an objective sense, these people have experience with Windows and they're probably not eager to switch to a new system. So Apple has an easier time of things and this could remain the case for a while as long as they are aggressive about going after new threats. I do think they are correct to recommend against virus scanners in general, since foisting the problem of security off on a third-party (and usually an incompetent one) only masks the real problems.
Telling people that the JWST could be used as a spy satellite would be what's called a "lie". But if they can get it launched before Congress finds out that it has to be permanently shielded from the Sun...
Come on! Everyone's talking about the BlackBerry as being good for "business" but nobody's talking about the elephant in the room: the "business" world is stupid!
Business is always focused on the wrong features, and stuck on consensus ideas and "best practices". Business is about being afraid of what will happen if you don't "control" your employees' phones. OMG maybe they will install Angry Birds!
Those of you who work in an office, look around. Look at your desk phone -- isn't it a piece of crap? Can you believe how badly-designed the interface is? Are you even allowed to set up your own speed dial? How about your furniture -- do you realize how expensive it all was? Would you make those choices with that budget?
The newsflash that's hitting the business world now, and why they are abandoning the BlackBerry, is that if a phone is designed to be usable the employees will be able to "manage" it themselves. "Cool" things like smooth scrolling, animations that communicate to the user where things came from and where they're going, etc are all more important than whether you can set your lame email signature policy from a central server.
The truth is that people used to think everything business did was "cool" and the hottest word in computing was "enterprise". No more, thank the stars.
Resistive electric heating is generally less efficient than a heat pump, and much less efficient than gas heating.
It's a little more complicated than that... CME has a discussion of their match algorithms on pages 42 through 52 of their electronic trading documentation:
http://www.cmegroup.com/globex/files/ElectronicTradingConcepts.pdf
Not that it's necessarily that much harder in principle to implement 10 relatively-simple algorithms, but when you add requirements for performance/latency into the mix it doesn't seem that surprising that there would be some trade secrets in there somewhere.
No reason, except that the fact that you bought an iPhone, is itself a statement that you desire electronics which serve other parties' interests in preference to your own.
This is such a misguided statement that I don't even know where to start. You really aren't thinking that through.
I think the problem here is that Slashdotters are always comparing Apple's successful mass-market products and services to some Stallman-esque ideal service that doesn't exist -- or, worse, falling for some transparent marketing (like thinking the PS3 was a great console because it "ran Linux").
In the case of the iPhone, it's worth remembering the cell phone market that existed before iPhone 1.0. Those devices were entirely beholden to the interests of your cell phone provider. If they had an app store (and many did) it would be controlled by your provider. If they could play music, your provider would determine where you could get that music from. Your phone would be loaded up with crapware out of the box, again controlled by your provider.
For typical users the iPhone is way more open than the previous situation. iTunes allows music from virtually any source and any music you buy there will work on any modern device. Although there are restrictions on the app store, it is far more open than the previous carrier-curated equivalents. Music services like Pandora/etc, video services like Netflix, etc are available without having to pay any any additional monthly fee to your provider. I think it's absurd to suggest that the only reason anyone would want access to the Apple app store is because they don't care about their own interests.
So now you're comparing to Android, and I guess you think you have your utopia platform, but I'm here to disagree. If you're rational about the parties involved in Android, you have to see the way the product is designed to serve their interests over yours:
1. The carriers. With Android carriers gain more control over the software delivered on their phones than is available with iOS. Some carriers abuse this, others do not; the point is that they have additional power over the user and they are going to use it if it serves their needs. This is why it's not surprising that the carriers have stocked so many Android phones in their stores and pushed them to their customers. When people say that Android is "open", what they mostly mean is that the carriers have control.
2. Google. Android on the Google side is conceived as a powerful platform to sell the users to advertisers. While Apple runs an advertising platform, iAd, that is optionally available to app developers, no ads from iAd appear on the device unless a user installs an app that uses it. In contrast, Android phones are deeply integrated with Google's very profitable ad-supported services -- GMail, Google search, Google Maps, etc. For Google, the user is not the customer; the advertisers are. So whose interests are being served here?
We can argue all day about whether it matters who the customer is, but I think it does. I prefer to pay for things myself rather than be sold to someone else, partly because I don't trust myself to be immune to the influence of pervasive advertising. If I wanted to run something on the iPhone that wasn't allowed on the app store I'd just jailbreak it, like Android people do when their carriers lock the phone down. So far I haven't encountered such a need.
I think you're ignoring the ways that projects like Wikipedia are developing to include rigor. Look, my whole point is that I don't think anyone is seriously arguing for a 100% naive interpretation of "wisdom of crowds".
The bible thing is a really good example actually. Although handing the bible to laymen resulted in a whole ton of bad theology which persists to this day, could history really have gone any other way? Even the modern Catholic Church is still repulsive and ridiculously stale despite attempts at reform. Keeping everything in the tower would not have worked.
Personally, I think it's antil-intellectual to criticize the way others are learning to think and operate in a new, more complex world. I think it's anti-intellectual to proclaim that Wikipedia is useless. I think it's anti-intellectual to boldly assert that Google is making us stupid without solid research showing diminished capacity to solve real-world problems.
I think there's a real case to be made that some "democratization" of knowledge is a good thing. It's not that we can vote on the truth (and it's essentially dishonest for Sanger to continue to insist that Wikipedia operates democratically). I don't believe that it's very useful to absorb "knowledge" from the uninformed but I also don't believe that this is really what people are doing. Rather, I think the new information technologies make it possible to absorb knowledge from a wider, more diverse array of knowledgeable people.
I don't think anyone believes that you can understand a complex topic without careful study. However, I think it makes sense to expect the nature of this careful study to shift over time. There is some sense that "facts" are less important and understanding more so, and I think that in the past there has been in fact too much emphasis placed on memorized facts as a substitute for understanding.
We can debate the benefits of different methods of learning, but I fear that Larry Sanger in particular is not contributing to this discussion. Rather I feel he has a tendency to mis-state the arguments of those who disagree with him (Wikipedia as a democracy, etc). I wish he would spend more time understanding why Wikipedia is a better, more useful model than something like Citizendium.
Thanks for the link -- although I don't remember reading that, it's most likely that I did and then forgot where I had heard the analogy from.
It really proves the point that Apple doesn't see the "post-PC" era as being a sans-PC era.