The main reason for that is that there is no shorthand phrase for "Person from the United States of America". "USian" isn't a word. "USA-ite" isn't a word. When the country was founded, people were "New Yorkers" and "Virginians" and "Georgians" first, and "members of the conglomerate called USA" second - so nobody ever bothered to make a name for it - kind of like there's no shorthand for "Citizen of a Nato Country."
Actually, you did. Refer back to your first post and your definition of web traffic (requoted at the start of this post). You made it very clear that HTTP is browsing, even using ALL CAPS to really drive your point home.
An application that performs a protocol is not the same as the protocol itself. I never said HTTP is a browser. I said a client program that uses HTTP is a browser. See the difference?
You were attempting a logical statement that just happens to be incorrect. That's really all I was pointing out.
And if you want to point out that two plus two equals four is an incorrect statement, you go right ahead and I will laugh at you for it.
You are using circular logic. You can't say the risk for the average driver population is skewed because bad drivers were included in the calculations.
Yes, I can. There is nothing circular about realizing that in English the following two phrases are different:
"The average of all X's is Y"
"The average X has value Y".
One is called the "mean". The other is the "mode". The problem is, these studies find the mean, and then claim it's the mode when they publish, by using the little trick of rephrasing it and hoping nobody will notice.
Claiming the average driver behaves in a certain fashion, based on the average of a sampling of drivers is just like claiming the average American family has 2.5 children. Nope, I'm sorry - ZERO families have 2.5 children. There are no such families in existance.
Most people already KNOW how to read those pictures by looking 'at infinity' making their eyes see in parallel directions. It's a simple concept. The problem is that it's not actually phyisically possible for many people, myself included. The problem is that there often is NO way for them to put the aim of their eyeballs under conscious control. Those muscles can't be moved directly like a bicep can. For some of us, those muscles are involuntary. We just think "I want to look, *there*, and some low-level process we don't consciously percieve does the rest. Thus we lack the ability to decouple focus distance from directional aim of the eyes. (So, if we want to make our eyes look "in paralel", it automatically also triggers the muscles that alter the shape of the eye to focus at infinity. We can't seperate the two because it was never learned as a conscious voluntary act. For us, trying to focus close while not aiming the eyes at a close point (angling inward) is like trying to consciously tell our stomachs to stop digesting food. We don't know the control mechanism to do that, and we never needed to learn it until stereograms came out. The brain pathway to give us that control just isn't there.
It's like trying to wriggle my ear. I don't know what muscle to flex to make that happen.
The problem with "knowing" you are best is that that attitude often results in "knowing" you are best whether you actually *are* or not. That's the attitude that usually brings empires down to their knees. It leads to decadence and decline. It's far better to BEGIN with an attitude of not knowing you are best, looking at the results, and when you *are*, celebrate it, and when you are NOT, have the humility to recognize it. If we don't have that, we'll never be able to improve because we can't tell what's working and what's not.
Perhaps that says more about the Americanisation of my home country (Australia) than anything else, but there it is.
I think that is very common in places where English is the primary language. See, people are hungry for television and movie shows, both of which are extremely expensive to produce. The USA has a well established media industry infrastructure in California and New York. And, having that helps to reduce some of that cost - if you are making a TV show in Los Angeles and need to find a specialty company that lets you rent the use of bizzare things for your shoot, you are likely to find a few companies that will provide that service, no matter how weird the service is.
You can find companies that provide the use of trained monkeys and their handlers for a day, or companies that will arrange and perform an automobile stunt to tape for your show, or companies that will provide the use of a helicopter and stunt pilot on an hourly basis, or companies that specialize in providing you with any sort of strange uniforms you can think of, in any quantity. These sort of things make it a lot easier to produce TV and movie shows in and around Hollywood. (In much the same way that it's easier to buy twenty sacks of corn seeds in a rural farming communitity than in New York city.)
So, anywhere where English is the primary language, American TV and movies get imported a lot because it's cheaper to import an American TV show than to produce one from scratch. So, to fill up all the airtime, a lot of shows get imported. (This is changing as it becomes easier to distribute the media making business to multiple locations when everything is done digitally.)
(And often when people say "American", the Canadians get a bit annoyed because they don't like the US co-opting the name of the whole continent, but in this case it really is appropriate becuase so much of US television and Canadian television are intertwined. Many American "icon" actors are Canadian, and a lot of American TV shows are actually filmed in Vancouver and Toronto. So, in this case, "American" really is an appropriate term.)
their pride may be less patriotic arrogance and more a statement of fact.
Well, from this US citizen, let me say that the problem is that Mars missions have had a very bad success rate (not surprising given what's being attempted), and the US has just had more trials so far than Britain had. Some US missions have vanished without a trace also. Britain has only had one single "roll of the dice" so far, so that's not enough to make a judgement call on as to what kind of success rate they are capable of.
And how does explaining it prove that the poster didn't know it was from the movie? Just like most geeks don't find it funny when people make stupid jokes based on not knowing what "illegal operation" means, or what "general protection" means, someone who actually KNOWS what PC Load Letter means probably wouldn't find that scene as funny.
Personally, I wouldn't consider grip or wget or a perl script a browser.
Why? Tell me how the server knows the difference (other than memorizing various user-agent strings, a technique that's inevitably flawed because it fails to account for unknown people's browser projects) between a browser and some other web client.
Remember, these statistics are gathered at the server end. The server doesn't know (and *shouldn't know*) what the client is doing with the data being given to it via HTTP. As far as the server cares, they are all web browsers.
If it is a client talking to an HTTP server, and it renders the content to a human being, it's a web browser. Plain and simple. The only things that cuts out are the programs that don't render anything directly to a human - like a spider gathering data for google for example. And I didn't say using HTTP is browsing, by the way - I said that one END of the connection is a browser.
While your arguments are true, they ignore the unfairness of the law in quetsion, which would ban any laptop from the passenger seat, even if the person using it IS THE PASSENGER and not the driver, and even if they have the screen aimed such that the driver doesn't see it.
True, to a point - but the problem is that a sufficiently pessimistic attitude can always generate an even LOWER lowest common denominator, and restrict the mass of people even further, in a never ending cycle. Seing has how the person doing the driving might be an elderly person with Alzheimer's and a very weak deteriorating body with slow reaction times, let's make sure that the cars can't go faster than 10 miles per hour.
Oddly, I find it much easier to simply stop talking to a passenger when driving requires my full attention.
Then that's your psychological problem, NOT a problem inherent with cell phones. Getting a person on a cellphone to shut up is decidedly simpler. There's a little button you can hit that will shut them up immediately. Not so for a passenger.
If you are driving 55 and aren't leaving enough room to react, then that's a problem no matter whether you are on a cell phone or not. The need to context switch comes up a lot - a passenger asks you a question, a car cuts in front of you, an animal runs out on the road, etc. People who aren't trying to leave two seconds of 'context switch' room with the car in front are *already* being bad drivers right there. The cellphone that they are using isn't causing the accident - their failure to leave enough room to react WITH OR WITHOUT the cellphone factor, is the cause of those accidents. (Exception - if traffic is dense, sometimes you can't leave 2 seconds of room because someone pulls into your lane to fill the gap every time you try. But in those situations, you shouldn't be talking to passengers or doing *anything* else either.
Statistical evidence indicates that the average person is not fully capable of driving properly while using a cell phone,
No, it does NOT.
A study of a random sampling of drivers is *NOT* the same thing as a study of what the average driver can handle. A random sampling such as would exist in such a study will include some average drivers, some bad drivers, and some good drivers. If there's some situation that the bad drivers don't handle well, that would drag down the score of the whole set of them, even if the average and better than average drivers are able to handle it.
The score of a random sample is not necessarily indicative of the average people within that sample.
I really hate people who think this way. "I am above average and don't need to be treated like the rest of you." Just like people who still drink and drive.
You're analogy is bad, because AVERAGE people are severely impared by drinking, but AVERAGE people are NOT severely impared by doing something else while driving. He's not saying he's above average - just that he not BELOW average like the idiots who can't talk and drive at the same time. Drivers do it all the time when there's passengers in the car.
Any law that cannot be fairly enforced to avoid false positives should not exist. It's better to let some of the guilty go free than to punish some of the innocent. If the intent of the no-laptop law is to prevent inattentive driving, then it is an unfair law because not all uses of laptops in the front seat will result in inattentive driving. If it isn't possible to tell, in general, who is being inattentive and who isn't, then it shouldn't be a law. PERIOD.
The fact that innatentive driving can get you killed should already be incentive enough for people. If that's not enough for some people, than a law won't help.
Here's an example - using a cellphone in a car being illegal in some places. When I'm in the car, I have my cellphone on to receive calls, but all I do with it is glance at it for a moment to see who the call is from. If I think it's not important, I let them leave a message and call back when I'm done driving. If I think it is important, I still let them leave a messgae instead of picking up - but I find the first spot to pull over so I can stop the car and call them back within a few minutes. But with those stuipid laws, as soon as I pick up and look at the phone, it would count as a violation of that law - even though it takes no more distractive effort than changing the radio station.
IE speaks HTTP to a server, it renders the resulting data that comes back.
Opera speaks HTTP to a server, it renders the resulting data that comes back.
Mozilla speaks HTTP to a server, it renders the resulting data that comes back.
Grip speaks HTTP to a server, it renders the resulting data that comes back. (as CDDB entries)
wget speaks HTTP to a server, it renders the resulting data that comes back. (as file-transfers to a directory).
If it is web traffic, then by definition, it's HTTP traffic, and then BY DEFINITION, the application that's talking to the server is called a browser.
Now, the actual article ITSELF (Rather than the bad summary of it posted to slashdot) didn't actually say 75% of web traffic - it said 75% of INTERNET traffic. ANd *that* makes sense. The person writing the summary should have realized that the statement made was nonsense the way the summary prhased it.
If it was originally stored on the "device", then you should be presenting the device to the cops, not just your hard-drive copy. I can't see how that would pose a problem, and you would somehow be unable to do it.
In the real world, people don't bother anymore with thinking of a physical copy of a file as having any permanency. If your digital camera can hold, say, 80 pictures of a particular resolution and color depth, and you've taken 240 pictures with it since you've owned it, then any of the first 160 images will now only exist on the hard drive of some computer you transfered the camera's memory into, and won't BE in the camera anymore. With the speed (or lack thereof) of the court system, you have to deal with the case where the picture being used as evidence is many months old and you didn't know at the time you took it and stored it that it was going to be used as evidence, so you didn't do anything special with it to preserve low-level bit integrety on your hard drive. You might have copied it to a scratch directory, then moved it to a directory called "my pics from vacation, 2003", and then moved it to a new hard drive when you upgraded your computer, and so on and so forth. NONE of this is suspicious behavior, but with the rules you are implying, it would invalidate the evidence - which supports my original point rather than contradicting it as you are implying.
"The internet" is just a name change and an ownership change of what had been ARPAnet. They were the same thing from a technical standpoint, and even a physical structure standpoint. And ARPAnet began in 1969.
Well, okay, I admit to not knowing much about graphic artistry, so I won't try to deny your claims that the forgery can be detected in the image itself. However, I *do* know that you couldn't guarantee a lack of altering of the data by looking at the hard drive on which the image is stored. Where's the proof that it is or is not the original picture? (file timestamps are easier to falsify than the images themselves.) If you download the image electronically from a device to a hard drive, then there *is* no such thing as the original image. The hard drive copy is the only one you can use, and hard drives can be changed. And if you are worried about really detailed shrewd computer experts looking at the underlying bits and bytes to see if, from the fragmentation, they can tell that the image was re-copied, you still can't tell the difference between deliberate moving of the file versus normal disk housekeeping (which might not even be under conscious control of an end-user.)
After all, running a defrag on a drive shouldn't be assumed to be a case of falsifying evidence, and if you *do* start putting rules into place that get that strict about what counts as evidence, then we're right back to my claim that it turns the world into a place where images are not submittable evidence anymore. (Since you'd have to be able to predict *ahead* of time that an image you have on your drive is going to be needed as evidence in the future and never do any disk housekeeping on that drive *ever*.)
Okay, I'm going to reveal my geekiness. Dunbar The Inept is the name of a halfling thief character I played for several years back in college. "Dunbar" was the original name of the character. "The Inept" was a title bestowed on him by the other party members because, despite the fact that he had really good skills, I (the player) had the worst strings of luck with the d100 rolls - i'd succeed when it didn't matter, and fail when it did.
In the alternate universe where I had a large short term memory, that might have been true. Here in the real world, I won't remember the digits in the number and I'll have to make a second pass. For me "count the number of digits" cannot coincide with "parse the digits" in a single operation. So I can't comprehend the style of thinking where that would be possible - it's not the way my brain works. For me, I have to do two passes no matter what.
Slashdot Mirror
The main reason for that is that there is no shorthand phrase for "Person from the United States of America". "USian" isn't a word. "USA-ite" isn't a word. When the country was founded, people were "New Yorkers" and "Virginians" and "Georgians" first, and "members of the conglomerate called USA" second - so nobody ever bothered to make a name for it - kind of like there's no shorthand for "Citizen of a Nato Country."
Actually, you did. Refer back to your first post and your definition of web traffic (requoted at the start of this post). You made it very clear that HTTP is browsing, even using ALL CAPS to really drive your point home.
An application that performs a protocol is not the same as the protocol itself. I never said HTTP is a browser. I said a client program that uses HTTP is a browser. See the difference?
You were attempting a logical statement that just happens to be incorrect. That's really all I was pointing out.
And if you want to point out that two plus two equals four is an incorrect statement, you go right ahead and I will laugh at you for it.
You are using circular logic. You can't say the risk for the average driver population is skewed because bad drivers were included in the calculations.
Yes, I can. There is nothing circular about realizing that in English the following two phrases are different:
"The average of all X's is Y"
"The average X has value Y".
One is called the "mean". The other is the "mode". The problem is, these studies find the mean, and then claim it's the mode when they publish, by using the little trick of rephrasing it and hoping nobody will notice.
Claiming the average driver behaves in a certain fashion, based on the average of a sampling of drivers is just like claiming the average American family has 2.5 children. Nope, I'm sorry - ZERO families have 2.5 children. There are no such families in existance.
Most people already KNOW how to read those pictures by looking 'at infinity' making their eyes see in parallel directions. It's a simple concept. The problem is that it's not actually phyisically possible for many people, myself included. The problem is that there often is NO way for them to put the aim of their eyeballs under conscious control. Those muscles can't be moved directly like a bicep can. For some of us, those muscles are involuntary. We just think "I want to look, *there*, and some low-level process we don't consciously percieve does the rest. Thus we lack the ability to decouple focus distance from directional aim of the eyes. (So, if we want to make our eyes look "in paralel", it automatically also triggers the muscles that alter the shape of the eye to focus at infinity. We can't seperate the two because it was never learned as a conscious voluntary act. For us, trying to focus close while not aiming the eyes at a close point (angling inward) is like trying to consciously tell our stomachs to stop digesting food. We don't know the control mechanism to do that, and we never needed to learn it until stereograms came out. The brain pathway to give us that control just isn't there.
It's like trying to wriggle my ear. I don't know what muscle to flex to make that happen.
The problem with "knowing" you are best is that that attitude often results in "knowing" you are best whether you actually *are* or not. That's the attitude that usually brings empires down to their knees. It leads to decadence and decline. It's far better to BEGIN with an attitude of not knowing you are best, looking at the results, and when you *are*, celebrate it, and when you are NOT, have the humility to recognize it. If we don't have that, we'll never be able to improve because we can't tell what's working and what's not.
Perhaps that says more about the Americanisation of my home country (Australia) than anything else, but there it is.
I think that is very common in places where English is the primary language. See, people are hungry for television and movie shows, both of which are extremely expensive to produce. The USA has a well established media industry infrastructure in California and New York. And, having that helps to reduce some of that cost - if you are making a TV show in Los Angeles and need to find a specialty company that lets you rent the use of bizzare things for your shoot, you are likely to find a few companies that will provide that service, no matter how weird the service is.
You can find companies that provide the use of trained monkeys and their handlers for a day, or companies that will arrange and perform an automobile stunt to tape for your show, or companies that will provide the use of a helicopter and stunt pilot on an hourly basis, or companies that specialize in providing you with any sort of strange uniforms you can think of, in any quantity. These sort of things make it a lot easier to produce TV and movie shows in and around Hollywood. (In much the same way that it's easier to buy twenty sacks of corn seeds in a rural farming communitity than in New York city.)
So, anywhere where English is the primary language, American TV and movies get imported a lot because it's cheaper to import an American TV show than to produce one from scratch. So, to fill up all the airtime, a lot of shows get imported. (This is changing as it becomes easier to distribute the media making business to multiple locations when everything is done digitally.)
(And often when people say "American", the Canadians get a bit annoyed because they don't like the US co-opting the name of the whole continent, but in this case it really is appropriate becuase so much of US television and Canadian television are intertwined. Many American "icon" actors are Canadian, and a lot of American TV shows are actually filmed in Vancouver and Toronto. So, in this case, "American" really is an appropriate term.)
their pride may be less patriotic arrogance and more a statement of fact.
Well, from this US citizen, let me say that the problem is that Mars missions have had a very bad success rate (not surprising given what's being attempted), and the US has just had more trials so far than Britain had. Some US missions have vanished without a trace also. Britain has only had one single "roll of the dice" so far, so that's not enough to make a judgement call on as to what kind of success rate they are capable of.
And how does explaining it prove that the poster didn't know it was from the movie? Just like most geeks don't find it funny when people make stupid jokes based on not knowing what "illegal operation" means, or what "general protection" means, someone who actually KNOWS what PC Load Letter means probably wouldn't find that scene as funny.
Personally, I wouldn't consider grip or wget or a perl script a browser.
Why? Tell me how the server knows the difference (other than memorizing various user-agent strings, a technique that's inevitably flawed because it fails to account for unknown people's browser projects) between a browser and some other web client.
Remember, these statistics are gathered at the server end. The server doesn't know (and *shouldn't know*) what the client is doing with the data being given to it via HTTP. As far as the server cares, they are all web browsers.
If it is a client talking to an HTTP server, and it renders the content to a human being, it's a web browser. Plain and simple. The only things that cuts out are the programs that don't render anything directly to a human - like a spider gathering data for google for example. And I didn't say using HTTP is browsing, by the way - I said that one END of the connection is a browser.
While your arguments are true, they ignore the unfairness of the law in quetsion, which would ban any laptop from the passenger seat, even if the person using it IS THE PASSENGER and not the driver, and even if they have the screen aimed such that the driver doesn't see it.
True, to a point - but the problem is that a sufficiently pessimistic attitude can always generate an even LOWER lowest common denominator, and restrict the mass of people even further, in a never ending cycle. Seing has how the person doing the driving might be an elderly person with Alzheimer's and a very weak deteriorating body with slow reaction times, let's make sure that the cars can't go faster than 10 miles per hour.
Oddly, I find it much easier to simply stop talking to a passenger when driving requires my full attention.
Then that's your psychological problem, NOT a problem inherent with cell phones. Getting a person on a cellphone to shut up is decidedly simpler. There's a little button you can hit that will shut them up immediately. Not so for a passenger.
If you are driving 55 and aren't leaving enough room to react, then that's a problem no matter whether you are on a cell phone or not. The need to context switch comes up a lot - a passenger asks you a question, a car cuts in front of you, an animal runs out on the road, etc. People who aren't trying to leave two seconds of 'context switch' room with the car in front are *already* being bad drivers right there. The cellphone that they are using isn't causing the accident - their failure to leave enough room to react WITH OR WITHOUT the cellphone factor, is the cause of those accidents. (Exception - if traffic is dense, sometimes you can't leave 2 seconds of room because someone pulls into your lane to fill the gap every time you try. But in those situations, you shouldn't be talking to passengers or doing *anything* else either.
Statistical evidence indicates that the average person is not fully capable of driving properly while using a cell phone,
No, it does NOT.
A study of a random sampling of drivers is *NOT* the same thing as a study of what the average driver can handle. A random sampling such as would exist in such a study will include some average drivers, some bad drivers, and some good drivers. If there's some situation that the bad drivers don't handle well, that would drag down the score of the whole set of them, even if the average and better than average drivers are able to handle it.
The score of a random sample is not necessarily indicative of the average people within that sample.
I really hate people who think this way. "I am above average and don't need to be treated like the rest of you." Just like people who still drink and drive.
You're analogy is bad, because AVERAGE people are severely impared by drinking, but AVERAGE people are NOT severely impared by doing something else while driving. He's not saying he's above average - just that he not BELOW average like the idiots who can't talk and drive at the same time. Drivers do it all the time when there's passengers in the car.
Any law that cannot be fairly enforced to avoid false positives should not exist. It's better to let some of the guilty go free than to punish some of the innocent. If the intent of the no-laptop law is to prevent inattentive driving, then it is an unfair law because not all uses of laptops in the front seat will result in inattentive driving. If it isn't possible to tell, in general, who is being inattentive and who isn't, then it shouldn't be a law. PERIOD.
The fact that innatentive driving can get you killed should already be incentive enough for people. If that's not enough for some people, than a law won't help.
Here's an example - using a cellphone in a car being illegal in some places. When I'm in the car, I have my cellphone on to receive calls, but all I do with it is glance at it for a moment to see who the call is from. If I think it's not important, I let them leave a message and call back when I'm done driving. If I think it is important, I still let them leave a messgae instead of picking up - but I find the first spot to pull over so I can stop the car and call them back within a few minutes. But with those stuipid laws, as soon as I pick up and look at the phone, it would count as a violation of that law - even though it takes no more distractive effort than changing the radio station.
75% of web connections do not use a browser
More like 100%.
IE speaks HTTP to a server, it renders the resulting data that comes back.
Opera speaks HTTP to a server, it renders the resulting data that comes back.
Mozilla speaks HTTP to a server, it renders the resulting data that comes back.
Grip speaks HTTP to a server, it renders the resulting data that comes back. (as CDDB entries)
wget speaks HTTP to a server, it renders the resulting data that comes back. (as file-transfers to a directory).
If it is web traffic, then by definition, it's HTTP traffic, and then BY DEFINITION, the application that's talking to the server is called a browser.
Now, the actual article ITSELF (Rather than the bad summary of it posted to slashdot) didn't actually say 75% of web traffic - it said 75% of INTERNET traffic. ANd *that* makes sense. The person writing the summary should have realized that the statement made was nonsense the way the summary prhased it.
If it was originally stored on the "device", then you should be presenting the device to the cops, not just your hard-drive copy. I can't see how that would pose a problem, and you would somehow be unable to do it.
In the real world, people don't bother anymore with thinking of a physical copy of a file as having any permanency. If your digital camera can hold, say, 80 pictures of a particular resolution and color depth, and you've taken 240 pictures with it since you've owned it, then any of the first 160 images will now only exist on the hard drive of some computer you transfered the camera's memory into, and won't BE in the camera anymore. With the speed (or lack thereof) of the court system, you have to deal with the case where the picture being used as evidence is many months old and you didn't know at the time you took it and stored it that it was going to be used as evidence, so you didn't do anything special with it to preserve low-level bit integrety on your hard drive. You might have copied it to a scratch directory, then moved it to a directory called "my pics from vacation, 2003", and then moved it to a new hard drive when you upgraded your computer, and so on and so forth. NONE of this is suspicious behavior, but with the rules you are implying, it would invalidate the evidence - which supports my original point rather than contradicting it as you are implying.
What do you think the "journal" in a journaling filesystem is doing anyhow?
What it's doing is failing to exist. I'm using ext2.
You are obviously a Windows-only guy
You are obviously a liar.
"The internet" is just a name change and an ownership change of what had been ARPAnet. They were the same thing from a technical standpoint, and even a physical structure standpoint. And ARPAnet began in 1969.
Well, okay, I admit to not knowing much about graphic artistry, so I won't try to deny your claims that the forgery can be detected in the image itself. However, I *do* know that you couldn't guarantee a lack of altering of the data by looking at the hard drive on which the image is stored. Where's the proof that it is or is not the original picture? (file timestamps are easier to falsify than the images themselves.) If you download the image electronically from a device to a hard drive, then there *is* no such thing as the original image. The hard drive copy is the only one you can use, and hard drives can be changed. And if you are worried about really detailed shrewd computer experts looking at the underlying bits and bytes to see if, from the fragmentation, they can tell that the image was re-copied, you still can't tell the difference between deliberate moving of the file versus normal disk housekeeping (which might not even be under conscious control of an end-user.)
After all, running a defrag on a drive shouldn't be assumed to be a case of falsifying evidence, and if you *do* start putting rules into place that get that strict about what counts as evidence, then we're right back to my claim that it turns the world into a place where images are not submittable evidence anymore. (Since you'd have to be able to predict *ahead* of time that an image you have on your drive is going to be needed as evidence in the future and never do any disk housekeeping on that drive *ever*.)
Okay, I'm going to reveal my geekiness. Dunbar The Inept is the name of a halfling thief character I played for several years back in college. "Dunbar" was the original name of the character. "The Inept" was a title bestowed on him by the other party members because, despite the fact that he had really good skills, I (the player) had the worst strings of luck with the d100 rolls - i'd succeed when it didn't matter, and fail when it did.
No need to back up.
In the alternate universe where I had a large short term memory, that might have been true. Here in the real world, I won't remember the digits in the number and I'll have to make a second pass. For me "count the number of digits" cannot coincide with "parse the digits" in a single operation. So I can't comprehend the style of thinking where that would be possible - it's not the way my brain works. For me, I have to do two passes no matter what.
As someone employed at a university, NO, I would still have been using the internet.