The internet

wolram

As the net gathers more and more information, will some of the old stuff
have to be dumped to make room for new stuff?

Anttech

No, there is no hypothetical threshold, where we will run out of storage space. Disks are geting smaller physically and can hold more information. Servers are also getting smaller and take up less room.

Kurdt

I do think there should be a cleanup of all the junk on the net though.

J77

An eradication of porn!

Schrodinger's Dog

If only they had filters that automatically blocked web sites of no relevance or interest to your world view.

How would you propose they do this? People have paid good money for space for their websites, how do you judge what is crap anyway? I have been to web sites that to me were utter bilge but the number of visitors tells me some odd human beings find it compelling. The web is about freedom for me, the freedom to fill up all the corners of interweb with good stuff, indifferent stuff and patently appauling mind rot. You'll be sugesting they get rid of the *cough* ahem more "dubious" web sites next, actually thinking about it that would probably clear up about 95% of the space

EDIT:
Oh junk=porn? I thought he meant crap sites like ww.derangedcreationistrantingwithnoscientificmerit.com

Kurdt

Yeah that would do me. I just hate trauling through page after page of google or similar search engine when I want one specific paper or whatever but I understand that people have a right to put that on the web. I was actually thinking of the following site when I originally posted.

http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/

but hey it mus float somebodies boat!

Evo

The problem is that the information doesn't reside on the internet, it resides on a computer (server) at someone's house or place of business. The "internet" is a means of reaching the millions of computers worldwide that have "stuff" that people make available to be viewed via the internet.

Kurdt

Sorry, my bad language skills. Just a common term as you correctly point out as incorrect, which means anything you can access via the internet is termed as being 'on the net'. Thats what makes regulating content so difficult aswell.

Lisa!

Does that apply to the old members of a forum too?

Kurdt

I did not have that in mind when I posted.

wolram

The net can be a mine field, some of these bad web sites seem to have a
mutitude of keywords to drag in the unsuspecting.

Lisa!

I know!

mattmns

You better be joking

wolram

You could buy mags mattmns

J77

Nah - I think this is one of the worst things about the internet.

Others things include the trivialisation of knowledge. Everyone is suddenly an expert, simply by using Google or Wikipedia. Knowledge requires a lot of ground work, not simply looking up the answer. For example, the way kids are encouraged to learn for exams from revision sites. IME, you can learn much more from a good book.

Another thing I ponder about is the reduction of social interaction. Lots may argue that talking to a lot of people on the internet, and posssibly meeting them has opened their social group. However, again, I don't think you get the same interaction as having grown around friends every day, day-in day-out. Again, I think this may define a new generation who expect friendship as a given - by sending someone a MySpace invite.

In fact, with the information thing, I hope we don't develop a generation who expect everything wrapped up nicely for them - although, in eductaion, I see this happening already.

Internet's good for work though...

fargoth

well, a good book is better, but most of the people won't make time to read it... if the answer is hard to get to, they would just give up.
it's better that they know only the instant answer then non at all.

those who have the mental strength to read a whole book about a subject just for this answer would probably do it anyway - because they realise it's better to know the background and not just the quick answer because the world isn't black and white.

so i don't think making the information available is wrong.

as for porn, you do know that there are good filtes for it right?
look it up in google, you don't have to suffer

J77

Interesting.

Is it really better to be a ''pub-expert'', than to have no knowledge of a subject at all?