Facebook now as popular as airline service

[Dark Jaguar]

<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20011080-501465.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+tech_talk+(CBS+News+-+Tech+Talk)&utm_content=Google+Reader">Way to go futurists.</a>

Next people will start realizing that the reason they rate cable TV so low is because no one really needs it any more.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/267112

...I'm starting to think I'm old. If this episode is anything to go by, it really is just a big guestbook. I don't get it.

[lazyfatbum]

Sean Bradshaw and 4 other people Like this post.

[Weltall]

South Park is a perfectly legitimate substitute for actual experience!

[Dark Jaguar]

Sean Bradshaw and 4 other people Like this post.

Which four people? The rest of the regulars on this site?

[Dark Jaguar]

South Park is a perfectly legitimate substitute for actual experience!

Not really, but it makes the point that I'm not alone in my opinion.

[Weltall]

This forum is nothing but a big guestbook with a very nominal amount of exclusivity. I'm not sure what the point of your opinion is.

You can marginalize anything down to "X is just Y". The Internet is just a bunch of computers on a big network, Diamonds are just shiny rocks, cancer is just a few cells having a malfunction, &tc.

[Dark Jaguar]

I wasn't aware opinions had to have a point.

I agree with all your examples.

[Weltall]

It certainly helps.

They are extremely disingenuous examples to agree with.

[Dark Jaguar]

It certainly helps.

What's the point of saying I like lasagna? None really, I just like lasagna.

Diamonds really are just shiny rocks. Certainly nothing worth killing people over. Cancer really is just cells malfunctioning. That's an important point actually because a lot of people misunderstand it. The biggest pain that's resulted from people thinking it's a virus or something like that is people saying "your immune system just needs to be stronger". No matter how rapidly your immune system is able to act, it doesn't matter if it doesn't think cancer is a threat. The immune system doesn't even bother trying to attack cancer, that's the problem, not it being "weakened". It really is worth pointing out that cancer is basically just misfiring cells. The part of it that kills, slowly, is that as they reproduce more and more, they take up more and more of the body's resources, basically starving everything else. The same goes for the internet. When technophobes go on about how the internet may "control us all", or ignorant politicians say the internet should have a "kill switch", it shows ignorance that, in the end, the internet IS just a huge network of computers, and that it's impossible for it to "take over the world" or "be shut down" since there's no central point. I had to explain this to someone recently (it devolved into her claiming that fiber optics were reverse engineered from alien space ships, and wow is it hard to exit gracefully from that level of insanity). The same can be said to anyone who claims that the internet is the solution to all life's problems that will eventually become some super-intelligence all on it's own. It's JUST a big network of machines. It can't just "become" intelligent. That takes a lot of active work on the part of programmers. What's now being realized is just making a massively complex processor does not make anything intelligent, or indeed, capable of any real work. The REAL work comes from software.

In other words, I agree with your examples. Sometimes breaking something down makes a good point.