Canada embraced debit card transitions under the name "Interac" long before the US started experimenting with visa debit/check cards.
I got a debit card in Canada in 1984, at the first bank that implemented one without requiring me to consent to a credit check as part of the application process. It's like, dude, it's a debit card. You're only giving me my own money back. We may have been ahead of the States but we're still a bit slow in the head.
Then I moved to Sweden. I was working and motorcycle touring. I got a debit card, no problem. It worked across the entire country at every ATM. It worked at gas pumps even in the middle of the night when the pumps were unattended. It was brilliant.
And Swedish currency? They had already got rid of their one-öre coin and if I recollect were in the process of losing the 5-öre as well. Some things in Sweden were a bit lame but their monetary and postal systems were topnotch.
You're not alone. And I think you're on to something.
Being mortal, we're all going to die after some finite time. If we ask ourselves what is our purpose as human beings, as compared to the many other configurations in which our atoms have found themselves over the past few billion years, it seems reasonable to suppose that this is our time to experience specifically what it is to be human. There's time, but not infinite time, to experience all of the essential aspects of being human, including participation, withdrawal, boredom, transcending boredom, and so on.
Being fully present in whatever you're doing is a basic motif for living a fulfilling life. So when you come to the end of your life, you know that you were really there during all that time, you can regard your life as complete and satisfying.
The question is, how do you know? The best way I know is to run a calibration test on yourself.
Early in my career, I had the good fortune of working for about a decade in a research lab where there was essentially no supervision. During the first couple of years, I was very diligent about keeping myself to fixed hours. Then I started to relax my schedule, sort of testing the waters of acceptability. After a couple of years of that, with absolutely no reaction pro or con on the part of my colleagues, I recognized that I had completely lost track of whether I was working too little or too much. That bothered me. As a professional, I want the peace of mind of knowing that I'm providing good value, and at the same time I want to be sure that I'm living a balanced, sustainable life.
So my next step - and this I really recommend - was to maintain a log of my working time over several months without tallying the log or making any effort to adjust my behavior. Then I went and tallied up my hours. I was a bit astonished to find that I was right where I wanted to be: around 8.5 hours/day x 5 days/week of actual, effective work. If I had been lower or higher, I would have had to figure out some means of recalibrating myself. Since I didn't need to do that, I can't report on it. I can only say that the measurement exercise proved to be really valuable to my peace of mind.
Even if you're a consultant and tend to think primarily in terms of billable hours, you owe it to yourself to track the non-billable ones as well. Not only does it benefit your own health and peace of mind, and it also provides some clarity about your business model. If we have inherently high overheads, we either have to bill accordingly or recognize the point at which we're operating at a loss.
So true. Looking in on the US from a Canadian perspective, this meme appears ubiquitous. Often with the best of intentions, it's repeated over and over in all walks of life: among my wealthy friends who use it to ease their conscience, and also among disadvantaged people who coach each other with the "You can do it! Just try harder!" message.
The problem is not with the concept of success being related to effort. The problem is when a concept is turned into an ideology. (With our current government in Canada we've been suffering from a rash of this lately. I have to say that it feels very American, particularly the religious fundamentalism that's just beneath the surface.)
The problem with any ideology is that it needs to be rigid and simplistic in order to hold together. It tends to maintain a confirmation bias. It tends to treat its own adherents as normative and everyone else as aberrant. The American Dream ideology doesn't want to acknowledge that in a given population there will be people who are suffering through no fault of their own but simply because of circumstance. It's not that people are callous, just that ideologies offer the illusion of certainty and simplicity. Reality is a lot messier.
On the other hand, reality is inexorable. It eventually catches up and overtakes ideology. What a train wreck that is, when it happens. Canada is a good place to live precisely because we have a strong record of diversity and pluralism. Not that it's perfect. We've had residential schools and internment camps, just to give two recent examples of egregious discrimination. But these examples make us humble, which is a good attitude to take in a complex world. Being humble means not expecting to get rich just because we work hard. Somehow the work has to be its own reward. That's a bit closer to the European attitude.
religion, regardless of what flavor, is predicated on the abandonment of analytical thought at least where one particular idea is concerned
I'll dispute that claim. Can you think of any characteristic reason why a given religion must have this shortcoming? If so, I suspect that we need to examine what is meant by "religion". If you're using a definition of religion that requires explicit belief or faith, the existence of God, or anything else premised on the supernatural, you're excluding some pretty important and diverse world religions such as Buddhism and Taoism.
Certainly many religions are, to varying degrees, incompatible with evidence and logic. But the claim is not universally true, and I find that very interesting. It suggests that a more essential definition of "religion" could be made. I don't know what would be satisfactory, only that what we now have seems to be too vague and circular to do justice to the concept.
Given this general definition, there would then be a special category for those religions which are characteristically incompatible with evidence and reason. And then I think we may be really on to something.
you cannot use logic to counter an argument that was made without logic
Of course you can! Indeed, this is the first step of logical analysis: to determine whether a set of propositions is either (a) self-consistent or (b) self-contradictory. There's no point in entertaining an argument that fails even the basic test of self-consistency. Either the proponent of that argument has to fix it, or it will be dismissed as irrational.
Now, if what you're saying is that proponents of an irrational argument can't be reached through reason, that may be true. But who cares? That was never the point. The point is whether or not we are convinced.
Destroying evidence is obstruction of justice. That's illegal.
It's a question of what constitutes "evidence". In an instance like this, we're pretty close to the dividing line.
Suppose, for example, that a heinous murder has been committed. The murderer has left his fingerprints on a ceramic coffee cup. Someone puts the coffee cup in the dishwasher, and the fingerprints are destroyed.
Is the coffee cup evidence or not?
Certainly it is, if it was identified and treated as such by investigators, for example by maintaining and documenting the chain of custody. If it was in an evidence locker and then mysteriously ends up in the dishwasher then we could talk about destruction of evidence.
Certainly it is not, if it's just one of the hundreds of coffee cups that the murderer has touched in the course of his lifetime. At that rate, the entire universe is evidence for something or other, and we mustn't destroy any of it.
It comes down to who gets to decide whether or not a specific item is evidence. In the first pass, that task usually falls to the police. Secondarily, it falls to the courts. Dozens of Perry Mason episodes notwithstanding, you can't usually just walk into the courthouse with a coffee cup and say, "This proves that the murderer was at the scene of the crime."
But interesting and significant exceptions do arise. In the case of Robert Dziekanski, a man who died after repeated Tasering while detained by police at Vancouver International Airport, a video shot by a bystander was confiscated by police and only reluctantly returned to its owner after intense media pressure. That video was treated as evidence by the inquiry, as were police emails that eventually surfaced. On the basis of this evidence, the inquiry concluded that officers deliberately misrepresented their actions during investigations into the incident and at the inquiry.
The authenticity of the video was not challenged. Ironically, this may have had something to do with the police having had it for some time in their custody.
Speaking only anecdotally, I've found, on many occasions when installing server applications, that the vendor's installation mechanism breaks the system in some way. These products can't be trusted in their default configuration, yet the nature of software installation entails an elevated degree of trust.
A characteristic example would be a network service which inserts its own startup behavior into one of the standard Unix scripts in/etc/init.d rather than providing its own standalone script. There's really no excuse for this; it's just a mediocre hack by someone who doesn't know or care to do it the right way. But it's exactly here, where the application is provisioned to the system, that the greatest opportunity lies for breakage.
It's also been my experience that contractors who perform installations on site, as well as vendors acting in that capacity, are generally not motivated to do the installation in a clean manner. Sure, it's nice to have someone to blame when things go wrong, but the kind of things that go wrong are often not encountered until the next system upgrade or patch interacts with whatever the installation broke, by which time the outside party is long gone. So usually the local staff take the blame, and in any case they're the ones who have to identify and fix the issues.
Ideally, the remedy for these scenarios lies with the operating system vendor. If the system provided and enforced its own defensive installation API instead of relying on third parties to play nice, then the system vendor and the application vendor could duke it out on their own turf instead of dragging site administrators into the battle.
Can anyone think of an example where this approach is strictly not possible?
Unfortunately, Kodak charted a doomed strategy with PhotoCD by making the format proprietary. Rather than locking customers into the format as Kodak may have intended, the decision created a huge disincentive for the emerging digital image processing industry to go anywhere near it. And it created a perception that Kodak was not a credible player in that industry.
There's all sorts of reasons someone might not spell well. So who cares?
Go to your local library or bookstore some day. See all those things on the shelves there? Those are called "books". Choose one of these books at random and open it. Notice that all the words are spelled correctly?
That's an example of who cares: people who write books, and those who publish them. People, in other words, who we would reasonably regard as literate. The same goes for newspapers, magazines, trade journals and research publications. It's true, really, for almost anything committed to print, with only the occasional embarrassing exception on something like a road sign or a product label.
It's not as necessary, we should concede, for people who read books to be fully literate. Many struggle with reading comprehension. Perhaps such people aren't inclined to notice spelling errors, so we can't categorically state that book readers are all equally concerned with spelling. The weight of evidence, however, is that correct spelling is the universal standard for published materials, and that standard is universally achieved.
The conclusion therefore is that a lot of people care about spelling, and just as important, they are competent spellers. If you're not one of them, fine, that's your own problem, to solve as best you can. But kindly don't project it onto the rest of us.
Finally sadly security can't be solved by tech, well not unless you can cook up something that shocks the shit out of the user and says "WTF are you doing? Stop that!"
I'm responding not to give you personally a hard time but because you've expressed a common misperception that seems peculiar to the personal computer generation.
Certainly security can be solved by tech, for many important classes of security and with many types of technology. What's a bank vault, for example?
In terms of information security, there are again many important classes of security that have been effectively realized. Those of us who grew up with mainframe architectures understand this from firsthand experience. If your only access to a system is through a particular application, your attack surface is limited to the functionality and privileges of that application. The choice of technology can indeed make this system secure. Electric shocks are not required.
Now consider distributed applications. For example, there is a server somewhere waiting for network connections from clients. With respect to the server, your attack surface is again limited to the functionality and privileges of the application, in this case the network service. With reasonable effort, technology can secure this server. The network protocol presents a different target and likewise a different attack surface. If we want to secure the protocol then we have to be concerned with how to reliably identify clients, mitigate denial of service attacks, preserve confidentiality of data in transit, and so on. This is harder than the mainframe problem but, given reasonable criteria, can also be solved technologically.
When we turn to something like a personal computer, a completely different situation prevails. It's easy, almost trivial, to build a fully-functioning personal computer from off-the-shelf components. There is nothing to stop you from building an arbitrarily insecure system. Without exception, all credible DRM schemes are based on functionality baked into one or more of these components, such that you can't build a working system without them. (I'm not an advocate of DRM, just saying that this is the only indefeasible way to implement it.)
See, it all depends on who owns the system. You can't generalize the particular circumstances of personal computer ownership to computing in general, let alone to technology as a whole.
Holding the original question open for a moment, we we might gain some insight into hypertext in general by looking at growth stats for a highly hyperlinked corpus such as Wikipedia.
Some interesting effects are showing up. After an initial exponential burst, growth in terms of pages added is more or less linear, with some expectation that it will eventually level out. Interval between page edits is another interesting measure. After the initial burst it seems to be fairly constant, despite the increase in absolute number of pages over time.
I don't know that we can necessarily take this behavior as a way of bounding other forms such as hypertext literature, but it may help to inform what to look for. If the entire body of hypertext literature is growing at anything close to a linear rate, that would put it in pretty much optimal company. We shouldn't be too surprised if its growth falls short of that measure.
In your haste to dismiss my comment with trivial criticism, you've overlooked its merits, in particular the problem of creating an arms race by allowing armed citizens onto aircraft. It's not a political point but a logical one.
I agree that popular sentiment tends to reach a bit hastily for the generational label. The justification - such as it may be - comes from observing the effect of some characteristically disruptive event on a particular generation. The postwar baby boom is an obvious, and fairly credible, example.
Now along comes the Internet or the Web (in popular culture these are nearly synonymous) whose advent, someone is bound to suggest, might have produced a generational paradigm shift. Well, before we get too carried away with talking about generational effects, the first task would be to look into whether such a shift has in fact occurred, and to what extent.
I don't see much evidence for a distinctive paradigm shift, though I have to admit that my vantage point is biased from having seen the whole thing progress quite gradually over two human generations. As disruptive events go, it feels if anything like an excruciatingly slow one. For example, in my current job in IT infrastructure, I'm strictly forbidden to work from home. This is not a matter of technology, hasn't been for twenty years when I was happily running an X Terminal from home.
We can of course agree that the prevailing culture is loathe to let go of its old ways. But what culture has ever been otherwise? As you point out, a culture is seldom composed of one distinctive technological generation, and our present culture seems to be no exception. It somewhat begs the question to present a debate about what this hypothetical generation must be like.
In the rare case of a hijacking attempt, I hope you don't suppose that having random citizens discharging firearms in a pressurized aircraft is the best way to control the hijackers?
There's no such thing as one optimal point of view when it comes to understanding the universe or creating artifacts or inquiring into the human condition, just to cite a few examples.
Each generation has its peculiar fashions and prejudices. Each generation is imaginative. New generations tend to bring a refreshing skepticism of preexisting paradigms - and this is good, or anyway better than complacency - but there's no guarantee that what they come up with will be any better than what came before. Less experience is not intrinsically an advantage over more experience; it stands to reason that more often the converse is true.
One certainty is that, as the volume of human knowledge grows, its surface area increases also. It's at this surface that genuinely new discoveries and new ideas can take place. Unless it turns out that we're living in a bounded space, it's not the case that we're in any danger of running out of new material. And new generations do tend to be especially comfortable at this surface, because their life experience is all about new discoveries and new ideas - at least, discoveries and ideas which are new to them.
It doesn't follow that all new discoveries and new ideas are revolutionary, or even necessarily very interesting. Most aren't, in my experience. Most are either prosaically obvious or shallowly misguided. I'm old enough to have seen a dozen generations of computer hardware come and go. Certainly there's been much incremental evolution along the way, but of all the hundreds of shiny new technologies that were supposed to be revolutionary, only a handful have actually stood the test of time. I'm happy to see anyone, young or old, propose a new one. But please, let's dispense with the hubris.
Adding to this, I'd observe that most of the time, especially when starting out, you'll find that you have to work within the prevailing procedures and resources and organizational culture that define your workplace. If they do waterfall, guess what? You do waterfall.
It's great to end up somewhere that wants you to lead the way forward, but even then you have to develop the social skill of bringing people along with you by earning their respect and trust. Most people want to see you "do it their way" first in order to prove yourself.
Excellent! What company is this? You seem to have forgotten to share that little detail.
Also, reasonably assuming that they are matters of public record, where are the board minutes in which the corporate decision was taken to engage in lobbying? Otherwise, how can we possibly evaluate your claim that the company is deliberately acting in a way "detrimental to its profits"?
The experts [who] really think that an issue is important [...] can lobby as individuals for that issue
Exactly. The concept of a corporation having credentials to speak on an issue is almost farcical.
When we hear from, let's say, Richard Feynman on the ethics of nuclear armament, or Whitfield Diffie on cryptographic backdoors, we can evaluate not only the evidence and reasoning within the arguments presented but also their qualifications, as human beings, to enlighten a human discussion concerning the human condition.
To the extent that we can imagine a corporation claiming a right to participate in such a discussion, it would be for the purpose of advancing its own interests, which are patently not the same as human interests.
As I said: there can be no 'rebirth' in any meaningful sense of the word without 'soul'
And that's fine. Your views are in accord with classical Buddhism.
To make the point one more time, it's incorrect to take the English word "soul", which has its roots in Abrahamic cultural tradition, and presume that a similar meaning exists in Buddhism. It doesn't. Words like "soul" or "mind" or "Buddha nature" are approximate referents for the same general metaphysical puzzle, expressed famously in the koan of mu. The monk Joshu was asked, "Does a dog have Buddha nature?" His answer was the Japanese word "mu", meaning nothing or emptiness or void or anatta. In other words, the premise that a dog either has or does not have Buddha nature is untenable.
I used to know a little boy who called every motor vehicle a "truck". At the time, he had a limited vocabulary. That was the closest word he knew, and good for him for using it. It doesn't follow that every motor vehicle is in fact a truck, nor that trying to subdivide the universe into "trucks" and "not-trucks" is a meaningful exercise.
Slashdot Mirror
Canada embraced debit card transitions under the name "Interac" long before the US started experimenting with visa debit/check cards.
I got a debit card in Canada in 1984, at the first bank that implemented one without requiring me to consent to a credit check as part of the application process. It's like, dude, it's a debit card. You're only giving me my own money back. We may have been ahead of the States but we're still a bit slow in the head.
Then I moved to Sweden. I was working and motorcycle touring. I got a debit card, no problem. It worked across the entire country at every ATM. It worked at gas pumps even in the middle of the night when the pumps were unattended. It was brilliant.
And Swedish currency? They had already got rid of their one-öre coin and if I recollect were in the process of losing the 5-öre as well. Some things in Sweden were a bit lame but their monetary and postal systems were topnotch.
Yeah, Nova Scotia, good name for a French colony. That's French for what exactly?
These days, it's surveillance systems, all the way down.
Too true. If you want to make network gear for the US market, for example, it must be capable of packet intercept per CALEA.
You're not alone. And I think you're on to something.
Being mortal, we're all going to die after some finite time. If we ask ourselves what is our purpose as human beings, as compared to the many other configurations in which our atoms have found themselves over the past few billion years, it seems reasonable to suppose that this is our time to experience specifically what it is to be human. There's time, but not infinite time, to experience all of the essential aspects of being human, including participation, withdrawal, boredom, transcending boredom, and so on.
Being fully present in whatever you're doing is a basic motif for living a fulfilling life. So when you come to the end of your life, you know that you were really there during all that time, you can regard your life as complete and satisfying.
I agree: unstructured time can work.
The question is, how do you know? The best way I know is to run a calibration test on yourself.
Early in my career, I had the good fortune of working for about a decade in a research lab where there was essentially no supervision. During the first couple of years, I was very diligent about keeping myself to fixed hours. Then I started to relax my schedule, sort of testing the waters of acceptability. After a couple of years of that, with absolutely no reaction pro or con on the part of my colleagues, I recognized that I had completely lost track of whether I was working too little or too much. That bothered me. As a professional, I want the peace of mind of knowing that I'm providing good value, and at the same time I want to be sure that I'm living a balanced, sustainable life.
So my next step - and this I really recommend - was to maintain a log of my working time over several months without tallying the log or making any effort to adjust my behavior. Then I went and tallied up my hours. I was a bit astonished to find that I was right where I wanted to be: around 8.5 hours/day x 5 days/week of actual, effective work. If I had been lower or higher, I would have had to figure out some means of recalibrating myself. Since I didn't need to do that, I can't report on it. I can only say that the measurement exercise proved to be really valuable to my peace of mind.
Even if you're a consultant and tend to think primarily in terms of billable hours, you owe it to yourself to track the non-billable ones as well. Not only does it benefit your own health and peace of mind, and it also provides some clarity about your business model. If we have inherently high overheads, we either have to bill accordingly or recognize the point at which we're operating at a loss.
So true. Looking in on the US from a Canadian perspective, this meme appears ubiquitous. Often with the best of intentions, it's repeated over and over in all walks of life: among my wealthy friends who use it to ease their conscience, and also among disadvantaged people who coach each other with the "You can do it! Just try harder!" message.
The problem is not with the concept of success being related to effort. The problem is when a concept is turned into an ideology. (With our current government in Canada we've been suffering from a rash of this lately. I have to say that it feels very American, particularly the religious fundamentalism that's just beneath the surface.)
The problem with any ideology is that it needs to be rigid and simplistic in order to hold together. It tends to maintain a confirmation bias. It tends to treat its own adherents as normative and everyone else as aberrant. The American Dream ideology doesn't want to acknowledge that in a given population there will be people who are suffering through no fault of their own but simply because of circumstance. It's not that people are callous, just that ideologies offer the illusion of certainty and simplicity. Reality is a lot messier.
On the other hand, reality is inexorable. It eventually catches up and overtakes ideology. What a train wreck that is, when it happens. Canada is a good place to live precisely because we have a strong record of diversity and pluralism. Not that it's perfect. We've had residential schools and internment camps, just to give two recent examples of egregious discrimination. But these examples make us humble, which is a good attitude to take in a complex world. Being humble means not expecting to get rich just because we work hard. Somehow the work has to be its own reward. That's a bit closer to the European attitude.
religion, regardless of what flavor, is predicated on the abandonment of analytical thought at least where one particular idea is concerned
I'll dispute that claim. Can you think of any characteristic reason why a given religion must have this shortcoming? If so, I suspect that we need to examine what is meant by "religion". If you're using a definition of religion that requires explicit belief or faith, the existence of God, or anything else premised on the supernatural, you're excluding some pretty important and diverse world religions such as Buddhism and Taoism.
Certainly many religions are, to varying degrees, incompatible with evidence and logic. But the claim is not universally true, and I find that very interesting. It suggests that a more essential definition of "religion" could be made. I don't know what would be satisfactory, only that what we now have seems to be too vague and circular to do justice to the concept.
Given this general definition, there would then be a special category for those religions which are characteristically incompatible with evidence and reason. And then I think we may be really on to something.
you cannot use logic to counter an argument that was made without logic
Of course you can! Indeed, this is the first step of logical analysis: to determine whether a set of propositions is either (a) self-consistent or (b) self-contradictory. There's no point in entertaining an argument that fails even the basic test of self-consistency. Either the proponent of that argument has to fix it, or it will be dismissed as irrational.
Now, if what you're saying is that proponents of an irrational argument can't be reached through reason, that may be true. But who cares? That was never the point. The point is whether or not we are convinced.
What, washing a coffee cup is "destruction of property"?
It's a question of what constitutes "evidence". In an instance like this, we're pretty close to the dividing line.
Suppose, for example, that a heinous murder has been committed. The murderer has left his fingerprints on a ceramic coffee cup. Someone puts the coffee cup in the dishwasher, and the fingerprints are destroyed.
Is the coffee cup evidence or not?
It comes down to who gets to decide whether or not a specific item is evidence. In the first pass, that task usually falls to the police. Secondarily, it falls to the courts. Dozens of Perry Mason episodes notwithstanding, you can't usually just walk into the courthouse with a coffee cup and say, "This proves that the murderer was at the scene of the crime."
But interesting and significant exceptions do arise. In the case of Robert Dziekanski, a man who died after repeated Tasering while detained by police at Vancouver International Airport, a video shot by a bystander was confiscated by police and only reluctantly returned to its owner after intense media pressure. That video was treated as evidence by the inquiry, as were police emails that eventually surfaced. On the basis of this evidence, the inquiry concluded that officers deliberately misrepresented their actions during investigations into the incident and at the inquiry.
The authenticity of the video was not challenged. Ironically, this may have had something to do with the police having had it for some time in their custody.
Speaking only anecdotally, I've found, on many occasions when installing server applications, that the vendor's installation mechanism breaks the system in some way. These products can't be trusted in their default configuration, yet the nature of software installation entails an elevated degree of trust.
/etc/init.d rather than providing its own standalone script. There's really no excuse for this; it's just a mediocre hack by someone who doesn't know or care to do it the right way. But it's exactly here, where the application is provisioned to the system, that the greatest opportunity lies for breakage.
A characteristic example would be a network service which inserts its own startup behavior into one of the standard Unix scripts in
It's also been my experience that contractors who perform installations on site, as well as vendors acting in that capacity, are generally not motivated to do the installation in a clean manner. Sure, it's nice to have someone to blame when things go wrong, but the kind of things that go wrong are often not encountered until the next system upgrade or patch interacts with whatever the installation broke, by which time the outside party is long gone. So usually the local staff take the blame, and in any case they're the ones who have to identify and fix the issues.
Ideally, the remedy for these scenarios lies with the operating system vendor. If the system provided and enforced its own defensive installation API instead of relying on third parties to play nice, then the system vendor and the application vendor could duke it out on their own turf instead of dragging site administrators into the battle.
Can anyone think of an example where this approach is strictly not possible?
They tried PhotoCD, printer paper, and ink.
Unfortunately, Kodak charted a doomed strategy with PhotoCD by making the format proprietary. Rather than locking customers into the format as Kodak may have intended, the decision created a huge disincentive for the emerging digital image processing industry to go anywhere near it. And it created a perception that Kodak was not a credible player in that industry.
There's all sorts of reasons someone might not spell well. So who cares?
Go to your local library or bookstore some day. See all those things on the shelves there? Those are called "books". Choose one of these books at random and open it. Notice that all the words are spelled correctly?
That's an example of who cares: people who write books, and those who publish them. People, in other words, who we would reasonably regard as literate. The same goes for newspapers, magazines, trade journals and research publications. It's true, really, for almost anything committed to print, with only the occasional embarrassing exception on something like a road sign or a product label.
It's not as necessary, we should concede, for people who read books to be fully literate. Many struggle with reading comprehension. Perhaps such people aren't inclined to notice spelling errors, so we can't categorically state that book readers are all equally concerned with spelling. The weight of evidence, however, is that correct spelling is the universal standard for published materials, and that standard is universally achieved.
The conclusion therefore is that a lot of people care about spelling, and just as important, they are competent spellers. If you're not one of them, fine, that's your own problem, to solve as best you can. But kindly don't project it onto the rest of us.
Finally sadly security can't be solved by tech, well not unless you can cook up something that shocks the shit out of the user and says "WTF are you doing? Stop that!"
I'm responding not to give you personally a hard time but because you've expressed a common misperception that seems peculiar to the personal computer generation.
Certainly security can be solved by tech, for many important classes of security and with many types of technology. What's a bank vault, for example?
In terms of information security, there are again many important classes of security that have been effectively realized. Those of us who grew up with mainframe architectures understand this from firsthand experience. If your only access to a system is through a particular application, your attack surface is limited to the functionality and privileges of that application. The choice of technology can indeed make this system secure. Electric shocks are not required.
Now consider distributed applications. For example, there is a server somewhere waiting for network connections from clients. With respect to the server, your attack surface is again limited to the functionality and privileges of the application, in this case the network service. With reasonable effort, technology can secure this server. The network protocol presents a different target and likewise a different attack surface. If we want to secure the protocol then we have to be concerned with how to reliably identify clients, mitigate denial of service attacks, preserve confidentiality of data in transit, and so on. This is harder than the mainframe problem but, given reasonable criteria, can also be solved technologically.
When we turn to something like a personal computer, a completely different situation prevails. It's easy, almost trivial, to build a fully-functioning personal computer from off-the-shelf components. There is nothing to stop you from building an arbitrarily insecure system. Without exception, all credible DRM schemes are based on functionality baked into one or more of these components, such that you can't build a working system without them. (I'm not an advocate of DRM, just saying that this is the only indefeasible way to implement it.)
See, it all depends on who owns the system. You can't generalize the particular circumstances of personal computer ownership to computing in general, let alone to technology as a whole.
Holding the original question open for a moment, we we might gain some insight into hypertext in general by looking at growth stats for a highly hyperlinked corpus such as Wikipedia.
Some interesting effects are showing up. After an initial exponential burst, growth in terms of pages added is more or less linear, with some expectation that it will eventually level out. Interval between page edits is another interesting measure. After the initial burst it seems to be fairly constant, despite the increase in absolute number of pages over time.
I don't know that we can necessarily take this behavior as a way of bounding other forms such as hypertext literature, but it may help to inform what to look for. If the entire body of hypertext literature is growing at anything close to a linear rate, that would put it in pretty much optimal company. We shouldn't be too surprised if its growth falls short of that measure.
Hmm, let's see...
Tactical nuke? Crossbow? Grenade?
Or do you mean something like a box cutter?
In your haste to dismiss my comment with trivial criticism, you've overlooked its merits, in particular the problem of creating an arms race by allowing armed citizens onto aircraft. It's not a political point but a logical one.
Well said.
I agree that popular sentiment tends to reach a bit hastily for the generational label. The justification - such as it may be - comes from observing the effect of some characteristically disruptive event on a particular generation. The postwar baby boom is an obvious, and fairly credible, example.
Now along comes the Internet or the Web (in popular culture these are nearly synonymous) whose advent, someone is bound to suggest, might have produced a generational paradigm shift. Well, before we get too carried away with talking about generational effects, the first task would be to look into whether such a shift has in fact occurred, and to what extent.
I don't see much evidence for a distinctive paradigm shift, though I have to admit that my vantage point is biased from having seen the whole thing progress quite gradually over two human generations. As disruptive events go, it feels if anything like an excruciatingly slow one. For example, in my current job in IT infrastructure, I'm strictly forbidden to work from home. This is not a matter of technology, hasn't been for twenty years when I was happily running an X Terminal from home.
We can of course agree that the prevailing culture is loathe to let go of its old ways. But what culture has ever been otherwise? As you point out, a culture is seldom composed of one distinctive technological generation, and our present culture seems to be no exception. It somewhat begs the question to present a debate about what this hypothetical generation must be like.
Thus creating conditions similar to countries where firearm deaths are much less frequent than the United States. In terms of general passenger safety, this would seem to be a positive step.
In the rare case of a hijacking attempt, I hope you don't suppose that having random citizens discharging firearms in a pressurized aircraft is the best way to control the hijackers?
There's no such thing as one optimal point of view when it comes to understanding the universe or creating artifacts or inquiring into the human condition, just to cite a few examples.
Each generation has its peculiar fashions and prejudices. Each generation is imaginative. New generations tend to bring a refreshing skepticism of preexisting paradigms - and this is good, or anyway better than complacency - but there's no guarantee that what they come up with will be any better than what came before. Less experience is not intrinsically an advantage over more experience; it stands to reason that more often the converse is true.
One certainty is that, as the volume of human knowledge grows, its surface area increases also. It's at this surface that genuinely new discoveries and new ideas can take place. Unless it turns out that we're living in a bounded space, it's not the case that we're in any danger of running out of new material. And new generations do tend to be especially comfortable at this surface, because their life experience is all about new discoveries and new ideas - at least, discoveries and ideas which are new to them.
It doesn't follow that all new discoveries and new ideas are revolutionary, or even necessarily very interesting. Most aren't, in my experience. Most are either prosaically obvious or shallowly misguided. I'm old enough to have seen a dozen generations of computer hardware come and go. Certainly there's been much incremental evolution along the way, but of all the hundreds of shiny new technologies that were supposed to be revolutionary, only a handful have actually stood the test of time. I'm happy to see anyone, young or old, propose a new one. But please, let's dispense with the hubris.
Cue the cat detector van!
Adding to this, I'd observe that most of the time, especially when starting out, you'll find that you have to work within the prevailing procedures and resources and organizational culture that define your workplace. If they do waterfall, guess what? You do waterfall.
It's great to end up somewhere that wants you to lead the way forward, but even then you have to develop the social skill of bringing people along with you by earning their respect and trust. Most people want to see you "do it their way" first in order to prove yourself.
I *AM* the company
I see. So then, we are to understand that this is purely an exercise of your individual opinion?
Thanks for making my point so compellingly.
My company, lobbying to get rid of SOPA and PIPA.
Excellent! What company is this? You seem to have forgotten to share that little detail.
Also, reasonably assuming that they are matters of public record, where are the board minutes in which the corporate decision was taken to engage in lobbying? Otherwise, how can we possibly evaluate your claim that the company is deliberately acting in a way "detrimental to its profits"?
The experts [who] really think that an issue is important [...] can lobby as individuals for that issue
Exactly. The concept of a corporation having credentials to speak on an issue is almost farcical.
When we hear from, let's say, Richard Feynman on the ethics of nuclear armament, or Whitfield Diffie on cryptographic backdoors, we can evaluate not only the evidence and reasoning within the arguments presented but also their qualifications, as human beings, to enlighten a human discussion concerning the human condition.
To the extent that we can imagine a corporation claiming a right to participate in such a discussion, it would be for the purpose of advancing its own interests, which are patently not the same as human interests.
As I said: there can be no 'rebirth' in any meaningful sense of the word without 'soul'
And that's fine. Your views are in accord with classical Buddhism.
To make the point one more time, it's incorrect to take the English word "soul", which has its roots in Abrahamic cultural tradition, and presume that a similar meaning exists in Buddhism. It doesn't. Words like "soul" or "mind" or "Buddha nature" are approximate referents for the same general metaphysical puzzle, expressed famously in the koan of mu. The monk Joshu was asked, "Does a dog have Buddha nature?" His answer was the Japanese word "mu", meaning nothing or emptiness or void or anatta. In other words, the premise that a dog either has or does not have Buddha nature is untenable.
I used to know a little boy who called every motor vehicle a "truck". At the time, he had a limited vocabulary. That was the closest word he knew, and good for him for using it. It doesn't follow that every motor vehicle is in fact a truck, nor that trying to subdivide the universe into "trucks" and "not-trucks" is a meaningful exercise.