But funny, brief, and cute. Gimme a night’s sleep, I’ll think of something…

You know, you haven’t really said anything yet.

Maybe not on you, but I heard statistics about a year or two ago (websites like turnitin.com were around in those days too) and the incidence of plagiarism was so high that term papers were totally useless and unfair to the honest students.

I can’t believe that people’s private data isn’t more at risk when the data is in company databases that are accessible through hacking over the internet. Have you heard of hacking? The more people there are who have computers, the more hacking there will be. That doesn’t make computers bad, but it’s another thing against them.

“What the hell is the librarian doing installing video games on public library terminals?”

I mean web based video games. There was some ruling in NY requiring librarians to allow it…or a policy decision or something. I remember from when I used to need to use the computers.

“Are you seriously trying to say that computers cause hate to go on the rise? I’m not even going to bother with the absurdity of that belief. If anything, the global dissemination of information is actually killing off inferior and divisive ideas rather than nurturing them. Welcome to the noosphere.”

I don’t recall if they went on the rise or fall, but I’ve heard in numerous reports that the internet’s influence on hate groups is that it increases membership. I even heard one anti-hate group representative mention your theory and say that it didn’t work out that way. It would be easy to find quotes to this effect from the anti-hate experts, but I didn’t bother looking.

I guess you can say the teachers, the consumers, the librarians, and the gullible are to blame, just as “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Whatever.

As for Windows being safer than Linux, my reference didn’t help with some people, which is one reason I didn’t search for more references for the other issues, and I have nothing more to say about this.

Steward Brand, for example, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and a pioneer in online communities, coined the now familiar mantra, “Information wants to be free.” Lessig, in his books, writes about the Internet as if it were once on its way to being a world of liberatory interchange, free of concerns about property and payment. The open source movement grew out of a similar intellectual atmosphere.

But of course, information doesn’t want to be free; people want it to be free. And organized information – information given shape and meaning – almost never is free.

This also seems to willfully ignore the “free as in speech”/”free as in beer” disctinction. As I recrall the quotation is actually “Information wants to be expenseive … information wants to be free,” (but mentioning that would undermine the rhetoric). Further, my icon Larry Wall added that “Information wants to be valuable” (and in some cases making it free makes it more valuable, e.g., the public domain, the commons). But then again, maybe it’s not willful ignorance, maybe it’s intentionally confused to paint the enemy as freeloading “plunder”ers. The ‘socialist’ card plays a lot better to some crowds than the ‘radical libertarian’ card. Either way, it’s easy to see why the cartels and their corporate mouthpieeces (not that Rothstein is one) would be opposed to either.

http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IWtbF.html

The fact that most Windows/IE proponents like to neglect is that Unix-like operating systems are designed in more discreet modular pieces. Therefore, even if Internet Explorer for Windows has a fewer number of bugs, it doesn’t deal with the issue that an attack on the browser can do much more harm than an attack on a browser sitting on top of the Linux kernel.

Windows is generally one big blob of goop that has holes often reaching through multiple layers of software. Addressing the # of bugs is rather irrelevant. Bugs should be looked at on a case-by-case basis to determine the quality of a piece of software. What each bug causes is what is important to look at – not the quantification of bugs in general. “More” or “less” bugs is hardly a deep investigation when comparing two pieces of software.

As to whether computers and the net are good or not, this is the same kind of argument that arises about any technology. Conservatives say it is bad because it changes productive relations and they’re scared of change, and progressives say it’s good because it changes productive relations and they don’t like the current ones. Cars make such things as drive-bys, traffic accidents and easier flight from police possible. In fact, cars kill more people than all terrorism put together, for example. (Don’t go on the “people kill people” bullshit, people don’t wilfully kill people in traffic, in the general case.) However, I think if someone said that personal automobiles have little social effect, they’d be shot down at once.

Same for computers.

I’m not going to get into the corporate/individual contributions to Linux argument because it’s more complex than I’m willing to write about atm.