Internet – Harmonia Philosophica

Light. Data. Universe.

The internet is often called the “World Wide Web,” but it’s not actually accessible to residents of a large portion of the world. Today, four billion people are offline, and 1.6 billion of them live in sparsely populated areas around the world. In recent years, a race to solve that problem has emerged among big tech companies like Google, SpaceX and Facebook. Now, Facebook has published research on an unconventional solution: using light to wirelessly transmit internet signals.

Most internet signals today are transmitted at high rates through wired optical fiber networks — which require expensive infrastructure — or at lower rates through wireless radio frequencies, which are limited in bandwidth, subject to regulations and vulnerable to interception.

In a paper published in Optica, researchers from Internet.org’s Connectivity Lab have outlined a new type of light detector that can be used for free-space optical communication, a communication technique that uses light to send data wirelessly. (1)

Data through light.

Look around.

At the sunlight. The grass. The shiny spoon. The TV. The floor. The cat. The door. The small airplane above. The car passing by.

Light is all around you. The story of the cosmos.

Light. From the beginning of time, it has always been there. Transmitted, generated, affected by every single moment of existence.

The story of aeons is here.

The story of the cosmos – past, present and future alike – is before you. Your eyes see it. But your mind is unwilling to watch.

Look!

A car passed by.

Look!

The cosmos was just created!

The age of information is without… “information”.

Should I read the Internet to see what is “important” ?

We supposedly live in the age of information. We have the Internet, the newspapers, Twitter, Facebook etc. We should be informed about everything at levels never before possible.

And yet…

We are in the darkness of ignorance like never before. Overinformation has become worse than no information at all. We are left in the mercy of anyone having a news media or a blog or a Facebook account. Democracy in information sharing has made information practically useless.

You never know which information is right unless you personally experience it.

The Internet gives a voice to everyone experiencing facts – thus making all possible interpretations publicly available. It then gives a voice to a million more people who have not experienced the facts, thus making all possible lies publicly available.

And the worse…

It gives to each and every one of us access to the experiences others have. Experiences which should not affect us. And yet now they do. It gives access in our mind for others to project their own fears, their own will, their own desires.

Primitive people walking in the woods.

With their wives and children.

They seem so… primitive.

But it is only because you cannot see their faces.

Smiling…

e-Justice. Not!

The great e-commerce boom has had an unexpected side effect – the rise of digital courts.

eBay has long relied on its Resolution Centre to solve petty disagreements between buyers and sellers, and the model has become surprisingly popular among others who do business online. So much so, in fact, that one Swedish company has applied it to all kinds of consumer complaints.

Swiftcourt, based in Lund, allows individuals to file small claims. For one client – who wishes to remain anonymous – Swiftcourt turned out to be very handy. After receiving a second-hand motorbike from an online sale, he realised that it was not as described. It was 450cc, not 540cc, and some parts were missing.

Initially, the seller refused a refund, but the two had previously agreed to use Swiftcourt as an arbitrator in the event of a dispute. A few weeks after the arbitration process was started on the Swiftcourt website, both parties were handed a verdict – the plaintiff’s case was upheld and a full refund following return of the bike was arranged. The seller also had to pay both parties’ Swiftcourt fees. (1)

We want justice.
We believe in higher ideas.
We believe that these ideas can be served on their own.
We still believe in God.
We just don’t know where He is hiding…

Quality in the Internet. Garbage in the Internet. The oppression of the (stupid) majority_

Search the Internet for quality content.

Find music “mixes” which are just a concatenation of songs.

With thousands of page-views.

Find good mixes which took hours into the making.

With a mere dozen of page-views.

Say hello to the oppression of majority.

Say good bye to quality.

Meet the “Internet”.

Old people do not use Internet. And that is a good thing!!!

Thanks to a decade of programs geared toward giving people access to the necessary technology, by 2013 some 85% of Americans were surfing the World Wide Web. But how effectively are they using it?

A new survey suggests that the digital divide has been replaced by a gap in digital readiness. It found that nearly 30% of Americans either aren’t digitally literate or don’t trust the Internet. That subgroup tended to be less educated, poorer, and older than the average American.

In contrast, says Eszter Hargittai, a sociologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who was not involved in the study, those with essential Web skills “tend to be the more privileged. And so the overall story … is that it’s the people who are already privileged who are reaping the benefits here.” (1)

Young people tend to be arrogant.
Young people tend to be stupid.
We believe old people do not “know”.
We believe old people lack capabilities we have.

But old people raised us without computers telling them what to do.
Old people did not use Wikipedia to learn things – they opened books instead. (what?!?)
Old people really cared for other people – they did not just “Like” others on FB.

Be careful when you judge others.

An old man who sits silently on a bench…
A young man plays with his iPhone passing by…
Be anachronistic,
If you really wish to progress!