nochiel

Just because an individual is browsing HN does not mean the individual is procrastinating. Please consult a dictionary for an accurate definition of the term.

"The African says: what's electricity?"

That should read "The Africa says, 'What electricity?'"

We certainly know what electricity is; we've heard of it and understand its usefulness; we even use it almost daily. However, as you aptly noted, its availability is sufficiently irregular and inconsistent that we expect it to be off as much as it is on.

"Wow!...It seems obvious now..."

What a vigorous hand-wave! How, pray tell is it obvious?

I am aware of the serious debate on the issue. But that's sort of the point I am trying to make: One approach seeks to recognise individual genius for what it is: the gift of a singular person; another approach seeks to discount those achievements by attributing them to a diffuse, sometimes ancillary but oft ill-defined group.

The latter approach has become prevalent in recent decades (in my opinion). Now, it is fashionable to question the legitimacy of an individual's greatness, to downplay it and instead award yellow stars to everyone who participated, no matter how tangential their contribution.

The new idea is that no one man could be so smart, so gifted or so diligent as to produce all that Shakespeare did; no one man could be so clairvoyant and visionary as to define the face of technology for a decade; no on man could have all that innate power.

I reject that view.

Well. I am in favour of personality cults. I'm an ardent believer in personal responsibility. Personality cults encourage us to focus on our own performance and perfecting our own skills.

So If I'm "falling for the personality cult right there", I'm more than happy to and I encourage more people to.

ps. The debate on whether Apple would be what Apple is today without Jobs' Great Return is long and storied. I won't wade any further into those murky waters (As per the personality cult ethos, I'd wager that Jobs saved Apple and that without him it would have sunk).

"You've fallen for it. Ives is the designer, not Jobs. Woz was the technological wizard, not Jobs."

I don't think I've fallen for anything (in fact, I made strong mention of Ives with respect to industrial design). Being able to conceive good design and being able to guide good design are both signs of design competence; being able to conceive good technology and being able to guide its development are signs of technical proficiency. Jobs in his role as guide (or leader) is an exemplar.

I never claimed (and I don't think anyone else did) that there are no "other talented people doing their jobs".

Your rejoinder, rather than actually arguing against personality cults, is more a reminder that "a witty remark proves nothing."

"I'm extremely uneasy reading things that make any individual such an icon...Please can we let this personality cult dissipate..."

Personality cults are much more important than you realise. The post-modernist approach seems to be to downplay the significance of individual visionaries in favour of diffuse accolades attributed to the group or larger corpus. It's nonsense.

Shakespeare was an individual (not a nebulous, anonymous, amorphous collective) of unique literary gifts. Jobs is a design and technological wizard who single-handedly righted the ship. Tim Cook is a process engineering and business operations mastermind of the like that has never been seen since Carnegie. Ives' industrial design methodologies will blaze the path for decades to come.

Here's a relevant article by MarkCC (PhD, Google), on "The Glorious Horror of TECO". http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2010/11/30/the-glorious...

> Nokia was close to launching N9? Where does that information come from?

The post is written by former Nokia exec, Tomi Ahonen. It might be reasonable to assume he had/has insider information that the public is not privy to.

> You're confusing "quality literature" with "books people like to read."

I'm not confusing anything. The comment I responded to stated that "books have become commodities. They no longer compete on quality but rather with cost."

Assume it is true, as insinuated, that books did compete on quality, then the result of winning that competition is a given book becoming widely read (in other words "books people like to read"). I submitted that line of thinking has a false premise.

That's all I was responding to. No confusion whatsoever.

> They no longer compete on quality but rather with cost.

I'm not certain that books ever competed on quality. A cursory glance at the NY Times best-seller list of the past few years seems to indicate that quality isn't a [major] factor. Unless you somehow consider Harry Potter, Da Vinci Code, Twilight, and so on, to somehow be the paragon of quality literature.

"Math textbooks are not cheap."

Actually, they are free. I am a graduate student in Mathematics and there is no book, on any level of mathematics that I have been unable to find for free download.

Places like www.avaxhome.ws and old.pdfchm.net are chock-full of math textbooks not to mention the torrents which can be found on isohunt.com and thepiratebay.org that consist of collections of thousands upon thousands of graduate level mainstream and esoteric mathematics texts, all high quality scans.

In total, I have many thousands of dollars worth of mathematics books, all of which I have obtained for free (and I feel justified; there's simply no cost-effective way to obtain those books on my side of the planet).

The single-page version of the article is http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2010/12/the-haza...

(My apologies for not linking to it in the first place)

I feel it is instructive that we remember Tim O'Reilly's incisive piece titled "Piracy is progressive taxation"[0].

It makes little sense to claim that an author/musician is losing money through piracy when the likelihood is that the [majority of the] pirated copies would not have otherwise been bought.

Footnotes.

[0] http://tim.oreilly.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html

To be fair, in the article he qualifies his title by saying that, "I think that complexity theory is on the verge of major breakthroughs of all kinds...potentially major advances across the entire spectrum of theory.(emphasis mine throughout)"

Clearly you have a rather unique idea of what "on the brink" might mean, namely that the field is on the verge of providing breakthroughs that have concrete applications. That might be a rather limiting point of view that somewhat cheapens the value of the article.

"Wikileaks is pursuing a remarkably old-school method of releasing these, with the whole centralized distribution point."

Please could you clarify what you mean. According to cablegate.wikileaks.org the distribution is being done via torrent (with an increasingly large number of seeds becoming available quickly).

http://file.wikileaks.org/torrent/cablegate/cablegate-201012...