Re: FN-FORUM: security notification

date posted 1st January 2004 08:38

The below is explored fully by Scott Adams in one of his Dilbert books......

>
> Actually, from a statistical point of view, all it would take is a small
> number of really incredibly smart people to mean that MORE than 50% of
> people would be dumber that average.
>

Basically each genius that we have REALLY skews the numbers!

I've always felt that the popularisation of the Internet has dumbed it down
amazingly, in terms of the average amount of intelligence exhibited. When I
started using the Internet (through the Imperial College dial ups in the
1980s) there was a hell of a lot more signal than noise.

Systems like WAIS (fore-runner of the WWW) provided navigable information
spaces but to get online to the Internet rather than to the 'closed
services' like CompuServe you still had to either be fairly creative, be
involved in academe or an appropriate business or make use of services
provided (for a fairly hefty subscription) by people like the Well, CIX and
then Demon.


As soon as the browser came along and proved you could do stuff on the Net
easily, it was the thin end of the wedge. So rather than a Knighthood for
Tim Berners-Lee we should cry shame...;-)


Oh...and a Happy New Year. We have snow. In fact, courtesy of my cats, we
have yellow snow....:-)

Joe