Whatever happened to college freshman facebooks? Oh yeah. The internet.

Insulting important people without their knowledge

Or why smart and powerful people ignore the internet

I was born in 1984. Among other various oddities, I was 13 when AOL Instant Messaging was first released, 17 on 9/11/2001 (and also not able to vote in a presidential election until 3 years after being draft eligible), and obviously, born in Orwell’s magic year. In addition to this destined correlation, I have personally seen the birth and growth of the internet, almost the same way that I was born and grew. The internet grows faster than people, but yet it still follows a similar path. To establish my credentials to talk about technology, I should list a few historical notes. I had the first version of the Diamond Rio MP3 player, about six months after MP3 players first existed. It had a paltry 32MB of storage. I had a Hotmail e-mail account in 1997, about a year after it launched. I knew the differences between DSL and cable before my town was even wired. I could go on about Napster, NetZero, and Web 2.0, but I want to get to my point.

The internet is Cinderella.

I do not particularly care what analogy is used, and any will suffice, but I find it easier to grasp when there is something familiar to hold on to. This analogy is definitely influenced by my girlfriend watching the movie A Cinderella Story last night, but I do not care. The internet has lost its father(s). Those who first invented the internet for the department of defense, those who first built the servers to house it, those who turned it to the public, they are gone. They may not be dead, they may still even contribute to the internet, but their influence over it is no more. This paves the way for others to influence its growth, and is generally good since it encourages creativity and diversity. However, the evil step-mother and the equally evil (or perhaps more so) step-sisters enter the picture. So who are these characters? The step-mother represents those who control, change, or influence the internet without ever using it or understanding it. This group is comprised of Senators, lawyers, policy makers, police, and managers. The step-sisters are those who use and understand the internet, but want to mold it to suit only their purposes. This group consists of companies like AT&T, the RIAA, the MPAA, and Microsoft, Senators, policy makers, police, managers, spammers, political activists, pirates, and individual activists. There are those who are oblivious to the internet, but want to find it (The Prince), those who carry along the innovation (Google, Apple, bloggers, writers – The Mice, The Pumpkin), and those who have dedicated their existence to making the internet better (Wikipedia, Mozilla, Linux, etc – Fairy Godmother). But all of this still serves as background. I have no problem with those who are in the step-sister and Mice category because at least they understand and use the internet, and believing in any amount of capitalism requires at least fundamental allowance for the free market fight. The Fairy Godmothers are necessarily wonderful. Those in the Prince category are not the subject of this article. Which leaves the step-mother problem.

Senator Stevens believes that the internet is a “series of tubes”. Marvin Lewis recently said he never uses the internet. A juror in the recent Minnesota RIAA case said he has never used the internet. A man drove up to his local coffee shop everyday and used the wireless network from his car. A police officer asked him what he was doing, the man confessed, and the police officer arrested him, but only after calling back to the station to inquire as to whether the man was actually breaking the law. Intelligent people everywhere believe (or believed) that DRM would work. Utah creates laws subjecting websites to specifically adhere to impossible statutes.

So why do all these otherwise intelligent, powerful people do not understand or use the internet, and why, in some cases, do they still try to control it?

There are many factors relating to a person’s avoidance of the internet. Fear of embarrassment is a likely first symptom. It is difficult to undertake any new venture, especially one of such magnitude and prevalence as the internet, for the first time. Let’s say Bob has never used the internet, but is an otherwise well educated, college graduate, who is over 50. Bob tries to go on the internet for the first time. He doesn’t know what a browser is, he doesn’t know what an address is, he does not know the difference between IM and e-mail, he cannot possibly comprehend the breadth of the internet, and he shuts down because there are too many choices. There are class and programs which could help Bob, and he could always ask his children for help, but for someone powerful and proud, this is a daunting prospect. So, Bob never tries and never gets on the internet. The next factor in avoiding the internet is the ubiquity of “new”. Everything online is new all the time, and caters to those who can keep up. As soon as we mastered IE6, e-mail, IM, and downloading music, then Firefox, video, VoIP, and torrents popped up. While it is exciting to see new stuff online, we all eventually accept that we cannot keep up with the internet. Niches are carved and we bookmark a few websites and go back to them everyday, but let the rest slide. So otherwise smart people are overwhelmed by the internet and they avoid it. This would generally be fine, except that those very same people are often the ones regulating the internet, making corporate decisions regarding the internet, and generally causing law to not keep up with technology.

It is going to come down to either thepiratebay.org or *.kids. On the one hand you have a company registered in Sweden with servers all over the world, with strong national support, a willing and able admininstration team, and the luck to be the world’s self proclaimed largest torrent search site. On the other hand you have a domain designed by those very same people who do not understand the internet in the first place. The *.kids domain was started to be a safe haven for kids on the internet at a trusted governmentally protected content which is extremely easily filtered. However, no kid wants what the government approves for them, most parents cannot really understand domains anyway, and the whole thing never got off the ground. There you have the future of the internet. Technology trumps regulation when it moves faster than the law can comprehend. Anarchy wins over control, and the eventual state of the internet will devolve into those websites popular over the free market, and those abandoned sites that no one has gone to in years.

I have no more to say.

Enablement and the Temporal Paradox

Tell me the first three things that come into mind when you hear that phrase.
For me, it’s first a wife who allows her husband’s habit to continue, despite strange misgivings of lost time. The second idea I have is that it is simply a science fiction story about making a time machine and the potential issues arising from the endeavor, perhaps as a sort of faux manuscript or instruction manual for making a time machine. Finally, it sounds like something out of a book where the author tries too hard, names characters after adjectives, and consults the thesaurus one too many times. Like a children’s book that could just be renamed to Timmy and the Time Problem, about a little boy who cannot tell time. But if I didn’t read it right there on page 295, I would never have thought it was about United States Patents.

Seattle at Green Bay

Watching NFL football now is becoming difficult for me. It's the playoffs, so one would think that there would be only quality football, quality refereeing, and quality announcing. Two of those are present, one of those is brutally missing. And it's not the refs. The art of announcing has deteriorated from the days of Pat Summerall as the star and is in dismay when compared to Howard Cosell's day. There are four networks that broadcast NFL games currently, CBS, NBC, FOX, and NFLNETWORK. While there are some strengths to the top six announcing teams (two for CBS and FOX each, one for NBC and NFLN), there is no announcing team that can beat any big city radio pair. To prove how bad announcers are, I am going to note their mistakes and gaffs for the 2007 Divisional Playoff round (played in 2008).

The first game is Seattle at Green Bay, and the announcing team is Kenny Albert and Daryl Johnston with Tony Siragusa.
- After Seattle's quick 7-0 lead, after Green Bay fumbles again, Johnston notes that Seattle quarterback Matt Hasselbeck had expressed confidence in the running game, which Johnston says he cannot imagine how Seattle can possibly run against this Green Bay defense. Seattle then scores again.
- Johnston later says when Seattle is up 14-7, that Seattle running back Shawn Alexander is having an excellent game.
- Albert says that "we've had two weird third down plays today". However, he then talks about a challenge of a spot and a 4th down penalty.
- The announcers discuss whether they think Green Bay coach Mike Sherman considered taking starting running back Ryan Grant out of the lineup after he fumbled twice. Nevermind that the announcing team earlier said that Grant was the second leading rusher in the NFL in the second half of the season
- Tony Siragusa should never be allowed to talk. He jumps in at confusing times and continues to talk with nothing to add. During a replay he wants to describe how a Green Bay defender broke into the backfield to make a tackle but all he can come up with is, "and the guy breaks through and wraps up the runner". He follows that with, "that's not as easy as it looks, trust me guys." I assume that these networks hire former players for their ability to relate what a player is going through during the game. But using playground defensive language is not relevant to the game. No one cares who you are, just tell us what is going on.
- I never expect announcers to make predictions because that would be too difficult for anyone. All I want is astute observations about the game. It never happens.
- In the 3rd quarter, with the Packers up 35-17, a graphic comes on the screen showing Hasselbeck's numbers for the day. No one mentions that Hasselbeck is having a great game despite the score.
- Dead air is obnoxious. During a penalty, nothing is said about a hold. There are many reasons a hold occurs. Usually it is out of frustration for failing to make a block. No mention of that, instead we get a comment from Tony Siragusa about someone being a pick-pocket. Irrelevant. More dead air.
- Attributing designed plays to Brett Favre is fatuous. The coaches call the play, the quarterback executes it. Even if the quarterback switches the play, it is still designed by the coach. Give credit where credit is due.
- Mentioning the weather is prudent, but describing how it will affect the game would be much better.
- Seattle has an option on 4th down to kick a field goal or go for the first down when they are down 35-17. The announcers discuss which option Seattle should take. By discuss, I mean they say take the field goal and wait for the decision to be made by Seattle to tell us why. By tell us why, I mean they say then it would be a 2 possession game.
- If there's one thing you don't need to tell audiences in a football game, it's that there is a lot of snow falling. It's right there on the screen. Tell us about the football. Tell us things we can't possibly know. Tell us about Deion Branch's injury and how it affects the Seahawks play. Tell us about the play calls for Green Bay and whether they're favoring the run or the pass. Tell us about the secondary since it is rarely shown.
- I'm going to dinner. This game is depressingly bad and it's impossible to see. And oh the announcers. Stay tuned for later games and how bad they are as well.

Go Bears!