Comment by pierrefar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pierrefar | Hacker News Reader

Attempting to count every incidence of rubbish he poo-poos:

1. telecommuting workers

2. interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms

3. electronic town meetings (Actually, not sure about this!)

4. virtual communities

5. online database [to] replace your daily newspaper

6. no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher

7. no computer network will change the way government works

8. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers (that was already happening...)

9. reading a book on disc

10. buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet

11. "Too many connectios, try again later." (The predecessor to the fail whale? I kid.)

12. Internet addicts clamor for government reports

13. pushing computers into schools

14. instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals

15. order airline tickets

16. make restaurant reservations

17. negotiate sales contracts

18. trustworthy way to send money over the Internet

19. the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople

The only one he actually got right: "[the internet] lures us to surrender our time on earth".

He alone could have created more than 19 successful companies...

Indeed! It does read like a checklist of what was about to hit.

That was what struck me about the article. He saw problem after problem with existing technology. But rather than trying to fix the problems, he just threw up his hands and said "this is obviously impossible".

Meanwhile, a long list of now-billionaires saw the same problems and decided to address them.

Quick, what are all the problems with the internet today?!

We've been through the internet of documents (Google). Then came the internet of people (Facebook). And the internet of places (Foursquare).

Next up is the internet of objects.

That's odd: I feel like I know exactly what you mean. :-P

as in, an internet of fridges and door locks and cars? good god, the viruses... let's put off the internet of objects until we have a web browser that isn't exploited every other month.

I dunno, when someone gets their front door phished, then maybe normal people will start to care about getting rid of IE6...

That internet of things thing is promising, but imho no one has yet identified which problems the people really want to solve. Ultra-cheap wifi/sensors/little_but_not_too_much_cpu/extensible modules are yet to come, what will happen when 4-5$ modules will be available?

It's simple. Every object should have a URL with its history, owners, manufacturer, components, value etc.

A Facebook of objects. Someone should build it.

This is true! Have you thought a lot about it?

What is to entice people to start using it?

I have had similar ideas for a long time, ever since I was passed the possession of the (defunct) skivsamling.nu. One idea, as a motivator, is for insurance purposes.

I can see a lot of applications, but for it to take off it has to be fun to do it.

Also, do you have an idea of how to identify each object?

Isn't that part of what the Semantic Web is supposed to be?

Sure, but that comment reminds me of slide 7 here: http://www.slideshare.net/gueste94e4c/dropbox-startup-lesson...

oh like I would list them here in a public venue

(switches back to other tab and back to hacking away wildly)

If you do, you could point everyone to this link 10 years down the road and gloat how prescient you actually were.

#7 is accurate so far, but might change.

#6 I believe is just a truth of human nature. OpenCourseWare has no insight into your mistakes or personal leanings. A CD will never teach you kung-fu, or how to correct your poetry failings. General advice is all a book or CD can provide, they can't be personalized for you without the intervention of a human.

The rest have been pretty much disproven.

Maybe not change the way the government "works", but to say that internet didn't help Obama get elected is just simply false. In that sense the government of the USA is working differently because of the internet?

Maybe a stretch, maybe not.

Well, if the internet helped Obama get elected and that counts as changing the way government works, then cartoons have also "changed the way government works" because Eisenhower had an animated campaign ad.

New media creates new ad venues, it doesn't necessarily change what sorts of people are elected to government or what they do once they arrive there.

The internet's ability to change government lies in its ability to connect people, where before you had two guys in a small town with no political power, they can all the sudden become a national force of thousands, two guys in each small town. Hasn't really caused a noticable change in governance yet though, in my opinion. I am young however, so my frame of reference is narrow.

> New media creates new ad venues, it doesn't necessarily change what sorts of people are elected to government or what they do once they arrive there.

My only disagreement would be with this. The people being targeted by these new ad ventures are usually either newly targeted because the venture is newly allowing them to be targeted, or newly targeted because the ad venture allows the targeting of more people for less money.

If new people are being targeted, and more people are voting that wouldn't have before then people are possibly in office that wouldn't have been before these new ad ventures.

I get the feeling that if Obama wouldn't have aggressively gone after my generation (born in the 80's) using means that we understand well (internet) then he wouldn't be in office. But this is purely my gut feeling. I also live in Portland, OR. Which is about as Obama crazy as it gets.

On the flip side though, I'm a "church goin'/Jesus lovin'" dude, and I still don't know anyone my age that didn't vote for Obama. Maybe one.

And for many of the ideas he snubs there was probably a startup that made it happen or helped it along and sold the shovels, and ended up also making somebody rich in the process.

The thing he's railing against is technology-as-panacea, and he's right, except that he overreacts and wants to throw the whole thing out. The Internet will not solve all our problems. It's helping, though.

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