But it's not just the IT sector: Capitalism is rigged so that single workaholics with no children are the ones rewarded the most because they have no life outside of work and don't mind putting in 50 or 80 hours a week and dedicating their lives to a company.
Capitalism is a system that deals with scarcity and hence rations resources according to how one chooses to live one's life. That means if you value money and material positions, you shouldn't get married and have a family. Still, as most people know, there's more to life than dying with the most toys, so they choose a different route. Just because you chose one doesn't mean you should condemn the system that assumes people are rational actors who pursue their own interests.
If you make a choice to marry and raise a family, you can still have a job in the IT sector -- I know plenty of people who do -- but you'll also be at least something of a disadvantage compared to single coworkers. That doesn't mean they should get special priviledges they don't work for, and neither should you. Life is a eries of trade-offs, and having a family is one of them.
Apparently you were, but not by much: I wrote a similar post at 6:38 a.m., wondering the same thing.
I think most of the "conclusions" drawn from this article aren't worth anything without further information pertaining to the actual number of women in IT, as opposed to just percentages. And anecdotes don't count: this is my second time through this thread, and geek #1 saying he's never met a competant woman programmer while geek #2 says three of the best programmers he knows are women while geek #3 says maybe women just aren't that interested isn't as useful as real data, at which point maybe those anecdotes make more sense.
The best responses to the article so far are the ones like the parent poster, because they say that, from this article, we don't have enough information to draw conclusions. Another poster pointed out that they measured data from 1996, as the dotcom boom started, until 2002, when the detritus was still being cleared. So what happened in the middle? That doesn't get answered, and only one person I noticed had the presence of mind to ask.
Headline somewhat misleading
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The article doesn't actually say there are fewer women in IT -- only that the percentage of IT workers who are women has declined. In other words, since the IT field has no doubt grown, the number of women may have increased -- just not as fast as the number of male IT workers.
Rather than crying that the sky is falling and theorizing as to why a trend that may not exist happen, maybe the article should question the way it uses statistics more closely. (You see similar things in Apple marketshare stories -- Apple is down to 2% of the market, but they sell a steady or increasing number of machines. Why? Because the market is growing. It helps to have perspective on these things.)
I wouldn't say the broadband "cannot" replace DVDs: rather, today's broadband will not replace DVDs because the amount of data on a DVD is vastly too large. I remember reading that Netflix ships about as much data through the mail in the form of DVDs per day as something like 3/4 of all internet traffic. Those numbers may be off somewhat, but I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix ships an appreciable percentage of the Internet's total traffic, since each DVD they send contains two - nine GB of data. I don't think I transfer that much data over the net in the course of a year, or even the last two years -- but I receive more than a dozen DVDs from Netflix every year.
That being said, though, I'm guessing that twenty years from now, when broadband is really broad, connections ubiquitious and storage space much larger than it is today, some form of Video over IP will replace shiny plastic discs. That day is coming, but I think it's further off than a lot of/. types think -- although it won't be put off forever, as part of your post seems to indicate.
People care about advocacy because computers, especially now that so many are interconnected, exhibit a strong network effect. The more people who use a given OS or architecture or whatever, the more likely developers will write programs for it and the more likely that costs will drop from economies of scale. Peripheral vendors and ISPs will support the most common configurations possible. That means if you want your life to have fewer computer hassles, you're better off recommending that others use OSes and such similar to the one you use -- otherwise you'll buy scanners that are unsupported, and your ISP won't give you tech support and if you need an obscure piece of software you might not be able to find it.
People do need to worry, at least somewhat, about what other people are doing, because what other people are doing usually affects the people observing, at least to some degree.
The individual is a part of a larger web, and the vibrations you send from your tiny part of the (metaphorical) web travel through it in ways not always perceived by you.
but by absolute measures the UK is down a bit lower [cia.gov].M
This should actually read "but by absolute measures the UK is still below fourth in terms of GDP by country." Sorry about that. If I could edit the post directly I would.
Well, by GDP per capita, Britain is down around 19, but by absolute measures the UK is down a bit lower. That second link lists the EU as a whole as well as its individual components, but with or without Britain is not in the top four. Obviously Britain is still very important -- I'm an American living in England atm -- but it's not quite as large as you make it out to be.
Actually, I'd say the quality of Adobe products has declined over the last few years - they've reached that stage where they try to milk the current line for as long as possible, while adding more and more mis-features rather than listening to their customers and splitting out features into different products. Quark in its time was also an innovate company, and look what happened to them...
I don't think Photoshop quality has declined, and I think InDesign is a better program than PageMaker, but I do think the rate of improvement has hit a plateau. Like MS and Office, Adobe has hit all the easy, obvious features, and fulfilled almost all the expectations of the market. The menu bar layout and such is probably symtomatic of the underlying problem, which is that Adobe's done almost as much as they can for their big deal apps.
The only really puzzling thing they've done (or haven't done, rather) is not brought FM to OS X. With Carbon it shouldn't be overly hard; the only answer that makes sense as far as I can tell is that they've moved OS X to a low-priority platform, and would ideally want to do everything on Windows.
I don't agree that there will be no competition to them - Apple for one have the incentive and resources to create a competitor if Adobe continues their slide towards windows.
I disagree -- I think you underestimate the resources Adobe has poured into Photoshop over more than a decade. The kind of stuff they've got in there boggles the mind, and with their market penetration it's extremely unlikely that Apple could make a program sufficient for the professionals Adobe really targets. Technical and strategic reasons argue against the Apple as competitor to Adobe argument.
If Adobe got a wiff of Apple making a competitor program, they'd cancel Photoshop and maybe a lot of their other Mac programs and force a whole lot of people to Windows. That would be bad in the short run, certainly, for Adobe, and really bad for Apple. It's just not going to happen.
First, the Borg use Word, so WYSIWYG writers moved to that format as they could, especially if they didn't want/need/appreciate the Framemaker features. Every corporation buys site licenses for Word, but Frame means you have to buy it special, support it special, contend with translating into and out of Word, etc. Putting your word processing product up head to head with Word on Windows is like putting your new TV show up against the March NCAA playoff games.
Have you ever used FrameMaker, or do you even have any conception of what it's used for? Unless I'm badly misunderstanding your post, you're totally wrong. Word is not a replacement from FM, and FM is not a replacement for Word; the two are designed for fundamentally different purposes. FM is a layout engine designed chiefly for books and very long articles, while Word is a general-purpose word processor. No one, anywhere, who uses FM for anything remotely serious has changed from FM to Word.
I'm not even aware of any real FM competitors, because the program is so entrenched in its industry. Remember that FM is NOT a word processing application, so your last comment -- "The many nonzealots can and will change their word processing application every 5-10 years. They've been changing away from Framemaker." -- has nothing to do with anything.
If you're a professional who uses InDesign, FrameMaker or Photoshop, that's unlikely to happen anytime in the near future. I've posted similar comments to GIMP threads, because the fact remains that Photoshop is so many man-years ahead of the competition and such an excellent program that a viable competitor with anywhere near Photoshop's combination of (relative) speed, ease of use and features seems highly unlikely. Commercial competitors will probably never appear because Photoshop eats the high end, Photoshop Elements now offers a low-mid end and the GIMP, for all its problems, probably gets the rest of the market. The GIMP suffers a variety of ills, including the problem of difficult OS X support and an unfortunate name, but it still gets some love for simple uses. Finally, even if the GIMP managed to threaten Photoshop, I'll bet on 1:50 odds that Adobe comes out with their patent canons firing, and today's patent situation makes them all too likely to triumph in the United States.
FrameMaker, meanwhile, is simply too much a niche and too well entrenched to see any serious competitor take it out, and InDesign probably falls into the same category. Quark, meanwhile, has become a non-entity and continues to survive solely through cruising; it makes Sun look like a vibrant, growing company by comparison.
I'm also disenchanted with Adobe as a company, but logically I can't see anyone else arising to challenge Adobe, because their products are too good, too complex and too much of a niche. Hell, the FOSS community can't even get close to OO.org parity with MSO, and a whole lot more people use office suites than Photoshop, InDesign and Framemaker combined.
Good post overall, though -- I agree with most of your points.
The Mini comes with iPhoto (similar to Picasa on PC, which is free), iDVD (similar to Sonic or other software included with most PCs), iTunes (free for PC), and iMovie (similar to Windows Movie Maker, also free).
I can only assume you've never actually used the iApps and the Windows alternatives you cite, because the difference in quality (with the exception of iTunes, for obvious reasons) is so high that I don't even think you should make the comparison. Furthermore, at least with my PowerBook, I also got Omnigraffle, iCal, GarageBand, OmniOutliner and Stickies all pre-loaded. Plus Xcode and Interface Builder on the CD.
Most importantly, Macs come with the full version of OS X, not the "Win XP Home" that your Best Buy example probably loads by default.
In addition, I think you're wrong about your iBook/PC laptop comparison. If you compare similarly priced machines from similar eras, I think you'll find that Macs hold their values better. No, I don't feel like getting in even more of a "mine is bigger than yours" contest, but you might want to post some actual comparisons before you make incorrect generalizations.
As usual, of course, you should use whatever computer and system make you happy. If you want the Best Buy special, go for it; just don't go spreading old Apple FUD.
... And once enough consumers have SMP machines, game developers will reach a tipping point at which they'll start writing code that takes advantage of the second processor, and then more gamers will buy SMP machines to improve performance and the industry will have changed.
Besides, although SMP might not help much for gaming, it will help with a variety of other tasks; when I have a variety of software running (esp. Photoshop and anything else), I often wish I had two processors.
Like a lot of old problems with no good solution, education reform comes along perenially like a comet. People have been pointing out the various problems with the educational system for years -- but the real question is what to do about it. As another poster pointed out, Bill Gates is really just formulating the ideas brought up by ASPEN, a group of rich people who want to reform the system. I don't know how long they've been around, but I suspect they get some of their ideas from the early 60s. The Student as Nigger (don't be put off by the title), was published in 1969, and contains some criticisms similar to what Gates has to say. Hell, even Paul Graham talked about high school in a recently posted article, and although he doesn't say high schools are mess that's one of the points underlying his thesis.
There are, of course, a variety of indicators of the malaise of the system; one of the more interesting I've seen recently is this commentary on how textbooks used in schools actually get produced.
Actually, I think Joel of Joel on Software has a parallel example of part of the problem with schools, which is that good teaching doesn't scale -- and neither does good programming. Chances are, most slashdot readers can remember a few really great teachers (I can) and can't remember a slew of mediocre or indifferent ones. That's because really good teachers can't be produced by an assembly line, and there is no good system for figuring out who the good teachers are; instead, we have a system today in which teachers willing to put in the time are kept in regardless of whether or not they're actually good (Insert political comment here regarding unions, depending on one's alignment).
We have two big problems: the system as a whole and the quality of particular teachers. The real question becomes how one solves the riddle; I don't know, but I suspect the solution is deeper than "throw money at it."
The ability to work with end users, gather requirements and turn them into a working system are distinct from the ability to understand why MS made a "Pro" and "Home" version of Windows XP (something that still isn't clear to me).
Ask an economist why MS makes a "Pro" and "Home" version. I believe it's in part something called Market segmentation and in part price discrimination -- MS is trying to get purchasers at varying pricepoints by offering different products, even though in the case of the OS those differences are totally artifical -- MS simply made the better product, simply stripped out some features and called it a less expensive product. It's not like a physical product that uses more expensive materials or something like that to justify the different pricepoints.
I'm not an economist, but I did take a class in college that used Gregory Mankiw's book _Principles of Economics_. If you're interested in understanding why MS, and a lot of other companies, price their products the way they do, you may want to read it.
But seriously, who thinks blogs are where great literatire is to be found anyway? The best blogs-with-a-purpose seem to be the ones that report news stories the mainstream media won't cover.
Not only are blogs that report on topics outside the mainstream interesting, but blogs on specialized, niche topics are quite useful too. Take, for example, good Mac blogs, or the ones dedicated to esoteric subjects like the publishing industry. Such subjects can't easily be covered inexpensively by other media (like magazines and newspapers) because of the printing costs, distribution time, etc. That means relatively small communities interested in specific subject areas can coalesce around websites, instead of existing as isolated stars in a vast universe of people.
The Enlightenment is over, the Renaissance is forgotten and millions of people live day to day in the darkness of oblivion. Oblivious to the great works and thoughts of millions of humans before them. Goethe would have cursed them.
Remember that history is (and certainly was, anyway) written by the academics and the educated; the kind of intellectual stimulation you're describing through the ideas of the Englightenment and Renaissance probably only applied to a tiny veneer of high society, while for the vast majority of the European population, life remained, to quote Hobbes, nasty, brutish and short -- and without education.
I think the real difference between "then" and "now" is that virtually anyone can throw anything on the internet -- so people who are ignorant or poor writers can bloviate on whatever subject they want, whereas the system that developed since the advent of the printing press usually imposed some sort of editorial judgment on writers. That meant someone acted as a gatekeeper, and the overall quality of writing was better. (Note that I'm not advocating for this kind of system of saying it was better; I'm just contrasting what was versus what is.)
Plus, remember that when you read writings from, say, The Enlightenment, you're looking at what generations of scholars have determined to be the most significant and insightful writing of the time. The less important stuff that regurgitated outdated ideas isn't studied. At that time, it might not have been so obvious -- just like today, it's not very obvious what "blogs" are important, or how they are important. When newspapers first got started in a big way in America in the 1800s, they didn't adhere to to the high-quality standards most do today; in a century, maybe we'll see big, reputable "blogs" evolve into the NYTimes of the net -- and we'll have forgotten about how Sarah's parents are so mean and no one understands her anyway, but we'll remember something that may be obvious in hindsight but isn't obvious now.
Maybe there is something about drinking the climbing koolaid that I don't understand, but why the hell would you take a perfectly good body and use it to climb Mt. Everest just to accomplish something unimportant???
[greencine.com] already rents out porn, although the main focus is foreign and indie titles. The idea of renting porn dozens of other people have had their hands on doesn't sound appealing to me.
I don't think it's their hands you should worry about...
... and you have to live with red necks and face the dearth of cultural and other opportunities that come with heavy concentrations of people living together. I realize we all face trade-offs in life, but I'm not sure that the answer to terrorism is to move out to the country where "hey! I won't affect me, and office space is cheap anyway" is a way of life.
Never mind if the rest of the world doesn't want to be "westernized" right?
I think it might be more accurate to say that the entrenched power structures in the rest of the world don't want liberal ideas spreading to their population, because that might create a population sufficiently knowledable to demand unusual things like fairness and transparency in government.
As long as people are ignorant they can be controlled; and those at the top of a given social structure will repeat short-term benefits at the expense of the population as a whole. In the meantime, wielders of power at the top of a given structure can demonize its supposed "enemies" (The United States, Western Europe, Israel, secular values, etc.) to distract its people from real problems at home.
Oh, but wait: I forgot that things like human rights and accountability were culturally relative.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm in Norwich, and most people don't understand that a) Washington is a state on the west coast, while Washington D.C. is the capitol on the east coast.
One woman I know was planning to visit Texas and then possibly go to Boston, and she said she thought it would take about six hours to drive. Another, once I explained that I was in Washington State near Seattle, didn't understand that it takes 5.5 hours by plane to get to Boston.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect it here as fast as a Tiger although Cheetahs are faster. Still, I'd expect either one would eat a Longhorn for dinner.
Capitalism is a system that deals with scarcity and hence rations resources according to how one chooses to live one's life. That means if you value money and material positions, you shouldn't get married and have a family. Still, as most people know, there's more to life than dying with the most toys, so they choose a different route. Just because you chose one doesn't mean you should condemn the system that assumes people are rational actors who pursue their own interests.
If you make a choice to marry and raise a family, you can still have a job in the IT sector -- I know plenty of people who do -- but you'll also be at least something of a disadvantage compared to single coworkers. That doesn't mean they should get special priviledges they don't work for, and neither should you. Life is a eries of trade-offs, and having a family is one of them.
I think most of the "conclusions" drawn from this article aren't worth anything without further information pertaining to the actual number of women in IT, as opposed to just percentages. And anecdotes don't count: this is my second time through this thread, and geek #1 saying he's never met a competant woman programmer while geek #2 says three of the best programmers he knows are women while geek #3 says maybe women just aren't that interested isn't as useful as real data, at which point maybe those anecdotes make more sense.
The best responses to the article so far are the ones like the parent poster, because they say that, from this article, we don't have enough information to draw conclusions. Another poster pointed out that they measured data from 1996, as the dotcom boom started, until 2002, when the detritus was still being cleared. So what happened in the middle? That doesn't get answered, and only one person I noticed had the presence of mind to ask.
Rather than crying that the sky is falling and theorizing as to why a trend that may not exist happen, maybe the article should question the way it uses statistics more closely. (You see similar things in Apple marketshare stories -- Apple is down to 2% of the market, but they sell a steady or increasing number of machines. Why? Because the market is growing. It helps to have perspective on these things.)
I wouldn't say the broadband "cannot" replace DVDs: rather, today's broadband will not replace DVDs because the amount of data on a DVD is vastly too large. I remember reading that Netflix ships about as much data through the mail in the form of DVDs per day as something like 3/4 of all internet traffic. Those numbers may be off somewhat, but I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix ships an appreciable percentage of the Internet's total traffic, since each DVD they send contains two - nine GB of data. I don't think I transfer that much data over the net in the course of a year, or even the last two years -- but I receive more than a dozen DVDs from Netflix every year.
That being said, though, I'm guessing that twenty years from now, when broadband is really broad, connections ubiquitious and storage space much larger than it is today, some form of Video over IP will replace shiny plastic discs. That day is coming, but I think it's further off than a lot of /. types think -- although it won't be put off forever, as part of your post seems to indicate.
Coincidentally, that's also the /. HOWTO.
People care about advocacy because computers, especially now that so many are interconnected, exhibit a strong network effect. The more people who use a given OS or architecture or whatever, the more likely developers will write programs for it and the more likely that costs will drop from economies of scale. Peripheral vendors and ISPs will support the most common configurations possible. That means if you want your life to have fewer computer hassles, you're better off recommending that others use OSes and such similar to the one you use -- otherwise you'll buy scanners that are unsupported, and your ISP won't give you tech support and if you need an obscure piece of software you might not be able to find it.
People do need to worry, at least somewhat, about what other people are doing, because what other people are doing usually affects the people observing, at least to some degree.
The individual is a part of a larger web, and the vibrations you send from your tiny part of the (metaphorical) web travel through it in ways not always perceived by you.
This should actually read "but by absolute measures the UK is still below fourth in terms of GDP by country." Sorry about that. If I could edit the post directly I would.
Well, by GDP per capita, Britain is down around 19, but by absolute measures the UK is down a bit lower. That second link lists the EU as a whole as well as its individual components, but with or without Britain is not in the top four. Obviously Britain is still very important -- I'm an American living in England atm -- but it's not quite as large as you make it out to be.
I don't think Photoshop quality has declined, and I think InDesign is a better program than PageMaker, but I do think the rate of improvement has hit a plateau. Like MS and Office, Adobe has hit all the easy, obvious features, and fulfilled almost all the expectations of the market. The menu bar layout and such is probably symtomatic of the underlying problem, which is that Adobe's done almost as much as they can for their big deal apps.
The only really puzzling thing they've done (or haven't done, rather) is not brought FM to OS X. With Carbon it shouldn't be overly hard; the only answer that makes sense as far as I can tell is that they've moved OS X to a low-priority platform, and would ideally want to do everything on Windows.
I don't agree that there will be no competition to them - Apple for one have the incentive and resources to create a competitor if Adobe continues their slide towards windows.
I disagree -- I think you underestimate the resources Adobe has poured into Photoshop over more than a decade. The kind of stuff they've got in there boggles the mind, and with their market penetration it's extremely unlikely that Apple could make a program sufficient for the professionals Adobe really targets. Technical and strategic reasons argue against the Apple as competitor to Adobe argument.
If Adobe got a wiff of Apple making a competitor program, they'd cancel Photoshop and maybe a lot of their other Mac programs and force a whole lot of people to Windows. That would be bad in the short run, certainly, for Adobe, and really bad for Apple. It's just not going to happen.
Have you ever used FrameMaker, or do you even have any conception of what it's used for? Unless I'm badly misunderstanding your post, you're totally wrong. Word is not a replacement from FM, and FM is not a replacement for Word; the two are designed for fundamentally different purposes. FM is a layout engine designed chiefly for books and very long articles, while Word is a general-purpose word processor. No one, anywhere, who uses FM for anything remotely serious has changed from FM to Word.
I'm not even aware of any real FM competitors, because the program is so entrenched in its industry. Remember that FM is NOT a word processing application, so your last comment -- "The many nonzealots can and will change their word processing application every 5-10 years. They've been changing away from Framemaker." -- has nothing to do with anything.
If you're a professional who uses InDesign, FrameMaker or Photoshop, that's unlikely to happen anytime in the near future. I've posted similar comments to GIMP threads, because the fact remains that Photoshop is so many man-years ahead of the competition and such an excellent program that a viable competitor with anywhere near Photoshop's combination of (relative) speed, ease of use and features seems highly unlikely. Commercial competitors will probably never appear because Photoshop eats the high end, Photoshop Elements now offers a low-mid end and the GIMP, for all its problems, probably gets the rest of the market. The GIMP suffers a variety of ills, including the problem of difficult OS X support and an unfortunate name, but it still gets some love for simple uses. Finally, even if the GIMP managed to threaten Photoshop, I'll bet on 1:50 odds that Adobe comes out with their patent canons firing, and today's patent situation makes them all too likely to triumph in the United States.
FrameMaker, meanwhile, is simply too much a niche and too well entrenched to see any serious competitor take it out, and InDesign probably falls into the same category. Quark, meanwhile, has become a non-entity and continues to survive solely through cruising; it makes Sun look like a vibrant, growing company by comparison.
I'm also disenchanted with Adobe as a company, but logically I can't see anyone else arising to challenge Adobe, because their products are too good, too complex and too much of a niche. Hell, the FOSS community can't even get close to OO.org parity with MSO, and a whole lot more people use office suites than Photoshop, InDesign and Framemaker combined.
Good post overall, though -- I agree with most of your points.
I can only assume you've never actually used the iApps and the Windows alternatives you cite, because the difference in quality (with the exception of iTunes, for obvious reasons) is so high that I don't even think you should make the comparison. Furthermore, at least with my PowerBook, I also got Omnigraffle, iCal, GarageBand, OmniOutliner and Stickies all pre-loaded. Plus Xcode and Interface Builder on the CD.
Most importantly, Macs come with the full version of OS X, not the "Win XP Home" that your Best Buy example probably loads by default.
In addition, I think you're wrong about your iBook/PC laptop comparison. If you compare similarly priced machines from similar eras, I think you'll find that Macs hold their values better. No, I don't feel like getting in even more of a "mine is bigger than yours" contest, but you might want to post some actual comparisons before you make incorrect generalizations.
As usual, of course, you should use whatever computer and system make you happy. If you want the Best Buy special, go for it; just don't go spreading old Apple FUD.
Besides, although SMP might not help much for gaming, it will help with a variety of other tasks; when I have a variety of software running (esp. Photoshop and anything else), I often wish I had two processors.
There are, of course, a variety of indicators of the malaise of the system; one of the more interesting I've seen recently is this commentary on how textbooks used in schools actually get produced.
Actually, I think Joel of Joel on Software has a parallel example of part of the problem with schools, which is that good teaching doesn't scale -- and neither does good programming. Chances are, most slashdot readers can remember a few really great teachers (I can) and can't remember a slew of mediocre or indifferent ones. That's because really good teachers can't be produced by an assembly line, and there is no good system for figuring out who the good teachers are; instead, we have a system today in which teachers willing to put in the time are kept in regardless of whether or not they're actually good (Insert political comment here regarding unions, depending on one's alignment).
We have two big problems: the system as a whole and the quality of particular teachers. The real question becomes how one solves the riddle; I don't know, but I suspect the solution is deeper than "throw money at it."
Ask an economist why MS makes a "Pro" and "Home" version. I believe it's in part something called Market segmentation and in part price discrimination -- MS is trying to get purchasers at varying pricepoints by offering different products, even though in the case of the OS those differences are totally artifical -- MS simply made the better product, simply stripped out some features and called it a less expensive product. It's not like a physical product that uses more expensive materials or something like that to justify the different pricepoints.
I'm not an economist, but I did take a class in college that used Gregory Mankiw's book _Principles of Economics_. If you're interested in understanding why MS, and a lot of other companies, price their products the way they do, you may want to read it.
Not only are blogs that report on topics outside the mainstream interesting, but blogs on specialized, niche topics are quite useful too. Take, for example, good Mac blogs, or the ones dedicated to esoteric subjects like the publishing industry. Such subjects can't easily be covered inexpensively by other media (like magazines and newspapers) because of the printing costs, distribution time, etc. That means relatively small communities interested in specific subject areas can coalesce around websites, instead of existing as isolated stars in a vast universe of people.
Remember that history is (and certainly was, anyway) written by the academics and the educated; the kind of intellectual stimulation you're describing through the ideas of the Englightenment and Renaissance probably only applied to a tiny veneer of high society, while for the vast majority of the European population, life remained, to quote Hobbes, nasty, brutish and short -- and without education.
I think the real difference between "then" and "now" is that virtually anyone can throw anything on the internet -- so people who are ignorant or poor writers can bloviate on whatever subject they want, whereas the system that developed since the advent of the printing press usually imposed some sort of editorial judgment on writers. That meant someone acted as a gatekeeper, and the overall quality of writing was better. (Note that I'm not advocating for this kind of system of saying it was better; I'm just contrasting what was versus what is.)
Plus, remember that when you read writings from, say, The Enlightenment, you're looking at what generations of scholars have determined to be the most significant and insightful writing of the time. The less important stuff that regurgitated outdated ideas isn't studied. At that time, it might not have been so obvious -- just like today, it's not very obvious what "blogs" are important, or how they are important. When newspapers first got started in a big way in America in the 1800s, they didn't adhere to to the high-quality standards most do today; in a century, maybe we'll see big, reputable "blogs" evolve into the NYTimes of the net -- and we'll have forgotten about how Sarah's parents are so mean and no one understands her anyway, but we'll remember something that may be obvious in hindsight but isn't obvious now.
Answer: Because it's there. And because we can.
I don't think it's their hands you should worry about...
... and you have to live with red necks and face the dearth of cultural and other opportunities that come with heavy concentrations of people living together. I realize we all face trade-offs in life, but I'm not sure that the answer to terrorism is to move out to the country where "hey! I won't affect me, and office space is cheap anyway" is a way of life.
I think it might be more accurate to say that the entrenched power structures in the rest of the world don't want liberal ideas spreading to their population, because that might create a population sufficiently knowledable to demand unusual things like fairness and transparency in government.
As long as people are ignorant they can be controlled; and those at the top of a given social structure will repeat short-term benefits at the expense of the population as a whole. In the meantime, wielders of power at the top of a given structure can demonize its supposed "enemies" (The United States, Western Europe, Israel, secular values, etc.) to distract its people from real problems at home.
Oh, but wait: I forgot that things like human rights and accountability were culturally relative.
Amazon charges sales tax in WA, which I believe they do because they have a physical presence in the state.
I'm aware of Norwich's location; I'm an American living here, but back home I live in Washington State, which is on the west coast of the US.
One woman I know was planning to visit Texas and then possibly go to Boston, and she said she thought it would take about six hours to drive. Another, once I explained that I was in Washington State near Seattle, didn't understand that it takes 5.5 hours by plane to get to Boston.