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11% of Americans don’t use the internet

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Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#141

Post by toomanybeersies »

pixelmonkey wrote: post #55

This is a shockingly small number. For comparison, Pew reports that 24% of Americans have not read a single book, in whole or in part, in 2017. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/23/who-doesnt-r...

I didn't read a book for probably 2 years at some point.

That doesn't mean I'm poorly educated or ignorant. I was reading a lot, I was just reading articles rather than books.

I still don't read a lot of books. I just don't enjoy them that much. I'll read short fiction and poems, but I just don't really like novels.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#142

Post by mikec3010 »

mmirate wrote: post #113
mikec3010 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is better, actually. If it's proven for that many years why mess with it? Why assume that older is unilaterally worse?

Ecliptic Curve cryptography. In-tree driver modules for last year's 10Gb Ethernet cards. Python 2.7, let alone 3. Official support for kernel 4.x. I've barely been in the industry for 90 days and I've already had to deal with the lack of the above in RHEL6. (Indirectly, mind you; but I believe that the transition between RHEL6 and CentOS6 is negligible for the current topic.)

Hypothetically, if you needed python couldn't you either compile it to binary or just install the runtime ? I don't see how a language would be coupled to the version of Linux.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#143

Post by reaperducer »

xvector wrote: post #60
SamUK96 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even as a ~20-30 year old, libraries and them acting as community "hubs" seems so foreign already. Part of me worries about the growing individualist and transactional nature of our social lives that the internet is causing [citation needed, I know]. Part of me thinks that the easy way now where we can do IRS forms (and everything) online and to our door of our houses, will make us weak. There is some old Roman bit a…

> part of me worries about the growing individualist and transactional nature of our social lives that the internet is causing And yet we are growing closer together every day because of the internet. Technologies like Skype, Hangouts, and FaceTime enable human interaction like never before. As VR becomes mainstream, along with eye and face tracking, we can expect interaction over the internet to feel 99% as authenti…

And yet we are growing closer together every day because of the internet. Technologies like Skype, Hangouts, and FaceTime enable human interaction like never before.

I don't find looking at a person on a screen makes me feel "close" to them anymore than watching a person on a television show.

The people I feel "close" to are people I see in real life. But maybe I have a different definition of "close" than other people.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#144

Post by reaperducer »

walrus01 wrote: post #74
guildenstern wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the connection between reading books and the internet, aside from literacy? They’re such different things, I’m not clear on the connection between reading and the internet.

There's a shockingly high percentage of people age 60+ who get all their news from local/cable/satellite TV and never read books.

Not shocking at all when you consider what age does to the eyes.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#145

Post by KC8ZKF »

DavidAdams wrote: post #59
pnloyd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of jobs now have internet only application processes.

This is just one of many reasons why public libraries are so important. It's a major part of the mandate for modern libraries and librarians to offer a place where people with low incomes, low educational attainment, low tech literacy, and even plain old low literacy can get some help navigating occasional requirements like an online job application or trying to enroll in some kind of assistance program.

My local library in $SMALL_MIDWEST_TOWN lends Verizon portable hotspots for free.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#146

Post by reaperducer »

LaikaF wrote: post #67

My Grandfather is one of those 11%. However I suspect he's a bit different from the others. Up until the late 90s he was programming Fortran and COBOL. He started during the Korean War or just after I believe. Towards the end he was mostly doing contract work as one of the few people who could still work on them. But after he retired technology stopped for him. The latest innovation he'll use is a DVD player. The onl…

I think your grandfather and I are kindred spirits.

When I retire, I don't plan to ever use a computer again if I don't have to. There's nothing on the internet that can compete with the fulfillment available from my wife, my dog, and my actual real life friends.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#147

Post by AgentOrange1234 »

adamweld wrote: post #27
soneil wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's over-simplifying the issue to blame children for that. I mean, when I was 12 we built a little fort in the woods. My parents didn't mind letting us disappear with hammer, nails, saw and sandwiches for the weekend, as long as they knew we weren't going alone. Now there's places where the parent can get in trouble just for letting their kid walk to school. So the kids end up building their fort in minecraf…

The children shouldn't take any of the blame - that falls on the parents and society that have allowed things to come to this point. We are faced with technology that is designed to be as addictive as possible, and unleashing it on the developing brains of our children without limits. Personally I think it's absolutely terrifying the effects that we'll be seeing down the road from this.

Who is unleashing this on kids without limits? It’s quite easy to limit screen time. (Not talking about any parental controls stuff, just “turn that off.”)

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#148

Post by Deinos »

reaperducer wrote: post #137
cm2187 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is interesting is that it seems to have more to do with age than intellectual capacity. I know very smart 60yo+ doctors with a lifetime of scientific achievements, who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser, and who just refuse to learn it. They might learn just how to use it but have no curiosity on how it works.

I know very smart 60yo+ doctors with a lifetime of scientific achievements, who understands concepts way more complicated than the IP protocol or a browser, and who just refuse to learn it. I know a woman who until recently worked as a secretary to one of the presidents of a large regional bank. The first thing she did each morning was to print out the president's e-mails, and bring them to him on paper. He would the…

You read my mind with that last sentence. As I read your anecdote, I was marveling at how much relief she probably created by circumventing the email/slack/txt/messenger treadmill the rest of us are forced to run on during a workday.

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#149

Post by Godel_unicode »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #127
mmirate wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ecliptic Curve cryptography. In-tree driver modules for last year's 10Gb Ethernet cards. Python 2.7, let alone 3. Official support for kernel 4.x. I've barely been in the industry for 90 days and I've already had to deal with the lack of the above in RHEL6. (Indirectly, mind you; but I believe that the transition between RHEL6 and CentOS6 is negligible for the current topic.)

Hardware appliances would generally be one place none of these things matter - you know if your gray box ships with a 10gbe card or not, customer doesn’t care about userland versions, etc. That said, I also hate working on RHEL 6.

What's better than a relatively impenetrable appliance? One that manifestly doesn't care about security and therefore uses an old kernel and vulnerable userland. If they use an old unsupported OS, what other vulnerable libraries are hiding inside?

Re: 11% of Americans don’t use the internet

#150

Post by pmiller2 »

EGreg wrote: post #131
ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #45

It’s reasonable to assume that 11% of the adult US population is still illiterate [1]. I know this is not unique to the US, and that these people may very well be as happy as anyone else. Still, if we sometimes point out that HN is a bit of a bubble, well there’s a big bubble I can’t wrap my mind around well into the 21st century! I would certainly be surprised if an illiterate person made heavy use of the Internet (…

If literacy involves writing, then most kids are illiterate. Remember the three R’s? Now it’s down to two. Well, maybe one (American kids have long been using calculators). But a deeper question is, what do we actually lose if people can’t write by hand or do arithmetic?

Writing typically refers to composition, not penmanship. I’m not actually sure penmanship has suffered much from ubiquitous computing. It would be interesting to do a study on it.
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