Jon Stewart calls out congressional nerd bashing over SOPA

This thread is starting to feel a bit like the Four Yorkshiremen, but it is fascinating to see how people's exposure to/experience of/feelings about the internet vary with even a few years' difference in age.

For my part, I was born in 1973 and got my first computer (a Compaq Deskpro Portable) when I was twelve. I taught myself to program GW-BASIC and later QBASIC, and then pretty much abandoned computers until about 1999, when I abruptly found myself making an internal website for my department in a large corporation. (I've been building web applications for a living ever since.)

I was aware of email and the internet during the 1990s but must confess that I didn't pay much attention. I certainly didn't buy the hype coming from enthusiasts about it heralding this epochal shift that was going to transform how we all live, work, play, socialize, organize and get civilly engaged (oops).

I'm old enough to remember a time before the internet, and as a result, it fascinates me in a way that my teenage son can't really understand because it's just there for him in the same way that telephony was just there for me as a child (though I'm also old enough to remember rotary phones).

But my fascination with the internet goes beyond the fact that I watched it arrive: it fascinates me because it really is transformative in a way that other new technologies that arrived during my childhood were not. When I was growing up, our family got cable TV (remember the brown box "converter" with a line of buttons running from channel 2 to 23?), an Atari 2600 and a VCR. They were all nice consumer appliances, but none of them had anything like the transformative impact of ubiquitous internet connection.

Cable TV is already passé. When I'm consuming media rather than producing it, I prefer a la carte to the all-you-can-eat buffet. I canceled my cable ten years ago and never looked back. The internet is simply a better content delivery system than cable/satellite.

Video games are fun and entertaining, have risen technically and thematically to the level of an art form (on par with literature and film) and may yield some insights that can help us learn and stay motivated. However, the technology doesn't really drive a broader cultural shift. At most it has crowded out board games and is encroaching on TV watching as a more entertaining drop-in replacement. In any case, some of the most compelling video games owe their success as much to their online connectivity (over the internet, of course) as to their intrinsic gameplay.

VHS is not only obsolete in the particulars of the cassette technology, but in the more general sense that physical media are slow, cumbersome and wasteful compared to unlimited broadband access to digital content. The last dedicated physical media player connected to my TV was a DVD player. The next device I'm going to connect to my TV is an internet-connected media server. BluRay is simply a last-ditch effort to double-down on an already-archaic distribution system.

Consider someone who died in 1955 at the age of 70. In their life they saw the introduction of: home electric providers, telephones, radio, movies, automobile, air travel (from nothing to the jet age!), nuclear energy, the polio vaccine, penicillin, color photography, frozen food, and more. There are also less known changes with deep impact: the introduction of municipal garbage service cleaned up our cities and improved health, the vertical filing system revolutionized data management, Linotype made it possible to have newspapers more than 8 pages long, the tractor, artificial fertilizer, and a mass of farm inventions opened up agriculture. Home refrigerators lets people keep fresh food longer and more cheaply than ice boxes could. Modern foods ranging from cornflakes to PEZ were invented during that time.

And you think the cell phone is more fundamental than, say, the widespread deployment of telephones in the first place? Before then, there was no way to have a voice conversation with someone more than a 100 meters away.

When the polio vaccine was invented "church bells were ringing across the country, factories were observing moments of silence, synagogues and churches were holding prayer meetings, and parents and teachers were weeping. One shopkeeper painted a sign on his window: Thank you, Dr. Salk. 'It was as if a war had ended', one observer recalled." (Wikipedia for Jonas Salk.) That vaccine still saves the lives of 100,000s of children every year even when compared to the 1800s. For that matter, before penicillin you could die because of a rose thorn accidentally scratching your mouth, as the sad story of Albert Alexander shows.

Tell me, how is the cell phone a more fundamental change than these?

I'm 53, my parents were teenagers before the end of the European second world war. My Dad would have loved all this stuff. My mum's best friend was a telex operator in a large shipping company the 1950s and they had this thing called operator net. Facebook for 20something sweater girls, it sounds a hoot.

Here is my thought: the Internet (e.g. the IP/TCP protocols and http) can support either large centralised systems (Facebook, Google++, Twitter &c) or atomised individual 'presences' (shivaplug server next to your router and rss as microblogging tool). I suspect we are going in the centralised direction, and that our various governments are happy with that...

"literal dinosaurs" hahaha. Sorry, this is amusing me.

I always liked:

Your supposed to design a 4 lane bridge for a new interstate, you say sure that takes 6 months where do you want it?. After 3 months they decide where they want it and expect the design in 3 more months. You say, that's not going to happen I might be able to pull 5 months though.

So, assuming you know where it's going to be you start pulling in some overtime and get to work. After another month they say, we need a 6 lane bridge, after another they want to add a train. And 2 weeks before the deadline they decide on a tunnel. SO, you end up submitting a 6 lane bridge design that can't handle trains.

Which is why software is always late, and you don't hand them what they want.