IPH and the internet
I think the internet, and specifically the World Wide Web, is an absolutely wonderful facility; I could perhaps wish that it had been invented 50 years earlier, but for that to have happened much of the history of the planet would have had to be different; indeed, the history of science and technology in general would have had to have been very different and that would have meant that there would have been a completely different alternative future from whatever point in time the deviation began, and one cannot imagine whether that would have made for a better world.
Alternatively I could have wished that I waa born 50 years later, but looking at the world faced by the seven-year-olds of 2007, it is a pretty scary prospect, and I am not sure that I envy them the future they will have to face. So on the whole I'm content to enjoy the internet and the web from the perspective of late middle age.
Broadly speaking, I share the outlook on the internet of the
first decade of the 21st century expressed by P. Lutus,
author of an extraordinary editor program called