| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
10 Jan 2004 03:05:36 PM |
| Object: |
OT: Always time for a change |
Always time for a change
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1115481,00.html
John Naughton
Sunday January 4, 2004
The Observer
In the long run, said Keynes, we are all dead. Quite. But that is no
excuse for our chronic nearsightedness in relation to technology. Let
us therefore use the end of the year to put its events in a
longer-term context. To do this, we need to bear three principles in
mind.
First principle: we overestimate the short-term impacts of technology
while underestimating long-term effects. Last year marked the 10th
birthday of the World Wide Web. So think back to 1993. John Major was
Prime Minister. The Tories were a serious political party. Tony Blair
still looked like Bambi. Nobody had an email address. A URL was a
wacky thing that geeks knew about. Amazon was the name of a river in
Latin America. Ryanair was an obscure Irish airline and the words
eBay, Google and Napster hadn't been coined.
John Naughton
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=18510aff.0311300238.35bfa859%40posting.google.com
A Blueprint for the Future
http://tinyurl.com/9vga
.
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| User: "Christopher A. Lee" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Always time for a change |
10 Jan 2004 04:04:25 PM |
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On 10 Jan 2004 13:05:36 -0800, (maff) wrote:
Always time for a change
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1115481,00.html
John Naughton
Sunday January 4, 2004
The Observer
In the long run, said Keynes, we are all dead. Quite. But that is no
excuse for our chronic nearsightedness in relation to technology. Let
us therefore use the end of the year to put its events in a
longer-term context. To do this, we need to bear three principles in
mind.
First principle: we overestimate the short-term impacts of technology
while underestimating long-term effects. Last year marked the 10th
birthday of the World Wide Web. So think back to 1993. John Major was
Prime Minister. The Tories were a serious political party. Tony Blair
still looked like Bambi. Nobody had an email address. A URL was a
I did. On a UK network called JANET.
But to reach people on other nets we had to deliberately route
messages via bridges between them.
And if you chose the wrong one you got a snottygram because that was
THEIR machine.
wacky thing that geeks knew about. Amazon was the name of a river in
Latin America. Ryanair was an obscure Irish airline and the words
eBay, Google and Napster hadn't been coined.
John Naughton
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=18510aff.0311300238.35bfa859%40posting.google.com
A Blueprint for the Future
http://tinyurl.com/9vga
.
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