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The judge in question is 51 years old. He’s not old enough to be this clueless about basics like the difference between a search engine and a web browser and popular examples of each.
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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I teach a programming class to young adults (18-25, usually) and was flabbergasted last semester when I realized that a couple of them didn't know what a directory hierarchy/file system was.
My suspicion is that the ease of use angle of "just tell me what you want and I'll find it" led to this. Not saying ease of use is bad, but I expected more from people wanting to learn programming.
And I'm over here meticulously organizing my music library into folders by band, album, year, etc...o the humanity.
There's a subgroup of the millennial and gen X that grew up with a sweet spot of computers such that you actually need to know how it works in order to use one effectively. Ease enough to do a lot of fun stuff, hard enough that it encourages learning the technical minutiae. The rise of smart phones and net/chrome books means there is a huge chunk of population that has a superficial and passing relationship with tech. It's big buttons or else it doesn't register with them. It's not their fault, the pursue of usability and fool proofing without actually giving tools to dig deep when necessary means they have less exposure to the underlying tech. Thus are less familiar with how things work. It's an universal phenomenon, I would bet most people have no clue how to raise, grow and process food, but still we don't starve, we go to the grocery and buy what's there already cleaned, processed and packaged. There are huge advantages to understanding the chain of production of food, but I'd guess most people would struggle in an agronomy class about what's a compost bin.
100% agree. Great description that dives into particulars of what I hand waved at.
Imo it's because most of them used crap-ass Chromebooks in school since the US school system is underfunded and allowed Uncle Googs to foot the bill and teach an entire generation the shitty Chrome "OS" is how computers work.
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Kids often don't know the difference between "wifi" and the Internet. It's not an age thing these days.
Since smartphone became a thing it has always been my theory that millenials, and up to a point GenX, would be the only two generations to be forced into being tech-savy. Boomers and GenZ have been overwhelmingly tablet and phone users. Whoever still logging on a PC nowadays will have a vastly different experience than what it used to be.
It is a different world really. I am a huge geek and I have been in tech for a long time now, but I still get confused look at family gathering when I tell them I have no idea how to fix someone's Ipad or what app/settings/touch gesture to do whatever.
Kids often aren’t explained the difference and if they have been they just don’t understand, wifi IS the internet to them.
A 51 year old Judge has a vastly different brain and should be able to retain the difference when explained.
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Lawmakers and judges should not be allowed to make decisions on something they know nothing about. This is a huge problem with people not even wanting to educate themselves, and then deciding how the rest of us get to interact with the internet.
That being said, Firefox is only popular with tech folk. They have just over a 3% market share. I’m a developer and I don’t know anyone but myself that uses it. My mother would think I was talking about a cartoon if I brought it up. A lot of lemmings use it, but o would not call it a popular example.
Experts are supposed to break it down to them. But yeah, this is a flawed system but I fear the honnest take is that most humans know nothing about most things (even if we're tempted to believe otherwise), so you'd be running out of avalaible judges real quick.
That’s a fair point. This case is even more complicated, as either the author of the article doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or a word was missing. The article says the judge wasn’t sure if mozilla was a browser or search engine, and Mozilla is neither.
I still hate the confidently incorrect assertions people in charge are making to negatively impact the way the largest and most complete telecommunications and information system works. Just look at facebooks trial where zuck had to explain how the internet works to the people who were deciding if his company was doing something wrong.
That just...seems so wrong. My mentally declining grandmother used firefox back in the 00s era (though now that I think about it, my uncle is a developer, so maybe he set up the computer). How have we backslid since then to where so few people know/use firefox?
Actually yes. Around 2010 Firefox still had like 60% market share. Now, chrome dominates the market and Firefox is in single digits. Chrome gives you so many conveniences, and only a small amount of people care about what you give up for those conveniences. “My data isn’t important. Who cares about what I do?” Is a common response to data mining and sharing.
Most people don’t want to put the time and effort into researching these things. Most people just don’t have the energy.
But again if you don’t know anything about a topic you are asked to make a decision on, you should recuse yourself. It’s unfortunate that most people making decisions about tech know very little about it.
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I'm 46 and I know the difference.
Yeah but your on lemmy so your a write off (and so am I)
Hey there! Don’t want to nitpick, but it is spelled „you‘re“ in your case. „Your“ is used when you‘re talking about possessive attribution. „Your car“ vs „you‘re (you are) driving a car“.
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Only a few years older than me. Absolutely not yet old enough to be a boomer.
Yet? How would one turn into a boomer?
Use your favorite search engine (mine is called firefox) to browse the google and connect with your friends on a facebook
We don't have Facebook is AltaVista okay?
I was thinking of cancelling my Internet service, I only use the facebooks and sometimes emails I don't use the Internet anymore.
-my mom.
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So we have two options:
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A 52 year old federal judge is somehow tech illiterate in a way that would imply they have absolutely no idea about the fundamentals of modern technology.
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A federal judge is asking a large number of extremely basic questions to get their answers on official records so that the cases parameters are clearly defined. He is taking extra care because there's not a lot of direct precedent on these issues.
I'm heavily leaning towards number 2 here. The internet likes to pretend everyone over the age of 40 has no idea how a computer works. The year is 2023. A middle-aged person today was fairly young when computers started to be incorporated into all aspects of society and is well versed in computer literacy. In some ways they are actually much more tech literate than the younger generations. It's almost certain that he knows the difference between Firefox and Google.
I'm a 53 year old IT person, and I'm leaning towards 1. The level of technology incompetence in the general public is astounding. My wife only knows "Have you tried turning it off and back on again?" And that pretty much makes her a member of the help desk at her job.
My mom uses a computer at her job but confuses the terms computer, internet, browser and email on a regular basis. I wonder what would happen if I restarted the internet as she tells me to sometimes. I could install Linux and she wouldn't tell.
Still better than her father, who had her operate a casette player for him when she was 2.
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Honestly same. The passage of time is weird
People think 52 is like super old.. but really that's just Gen X
Hell you really wanna know how warped our perception of time is?
Most people think 20 years ago Mario was an 8bit platformer that revitalized interest in video games after Atari killed the medium with oversaturation and nonexistent quality control.
What was Mario 20 years ago? An aging mascot with a divisive summer themed pollution game that I loved but others seemed to hate, on a console that only did well with diehard fans... 20 years ago Nintendo wasn't the big man on campus, that was Sony with the PS2 despite it being weaker than GCN and Xbox.
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In the 1990s if you wanted to play a PC game you had install it manually with a CD, typically configure ini files in a text editor and fix irq requests for your peripherals just to play. In the contemporary world a zoomer only needs to tap the install icon on the screen, Gen Z may have more experience usually technology than any previous generation, but the days of asking grandma to fix your computer seem a certainty on the horizon.
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I'm disappointed in arstechnica for only supporting their provocative headline (Judge in US v. Google trial didn’t know if Firefox is a browser or search engine) with this vagueness in the article:
While Cavanaugh delivered his opening statement, Mehta even appeared briefly confused by some of the references to today's tech, unable to keep straight if Mozilla was a browser or a search engine. He also appeared unclear about how SEM works and struggled to understand the options for Microsoft to promote Bing ads outside of Google's SEM tools.
What did he actually say?!
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It would be naive to expect Google to be broken by anti-trust laws, just look how microsoft dodged that in the 2000 and went back to the same practices today . this is a circus show
|unable to keep straight if Mozilla was a browser or a search engine
It is neither. It is a foundation that maintains a browser. It is like asking if Microsoft is a browser or a search engine.
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How can anyone make a judgement about something they know nothing about? We are so doomed.
They do so all the time - do you think judges are experts in every thing? The judge needs to understand the law. It's up to the counsel to ensure they have experts to explain the details.
Judges should specialize in certain areas for this exact reason. They should absolutely understand the material as well as the law.
They don’t need to be an expert. They need to be people that have basic knowledge of how the world around them works, and the ability to learn new things as that world changes. I mean that’s the basic requirement at any job I have ever had, why are they exempt?
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Google trial didn’t know if Firefox is a browser or search engine::Google accused DOJ of aiming to force people to use “inferior” search products.
Google search is an inferior search product.
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I'm not surprised at all. Only people who work in IT are aware or care about anything other then the default apps and operating systems.
When asked about a perceived ignorance in computers, the judge proclaimed, "I'm not ignorant about computers! In fact, just last week I finished Space Quest, and I'm now getting through Leisure Suit Larry!" The judge's report, written using WordPerfect 5.1, is expected to be released soon.
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I really think it's a matter of context; how one was raised, what kind of people one interacts with, interest, etc.
I'm older and i know so much more than most of my age group. I learned a long, long time ago to not be afraid to try things out, my pc is not going to explode; to investigate when i'm stuck with some computer stuff; and i have adult kids who teach me things that i don't know enough about or share their views. Some of the communities i subscribed to are about tech, FOSS, android etc. I'm always really open to boost my knowledge.
Yeah, that's great and all. But this judge shouldn't be ruling over this case if he doesn't know the basics of today's technology.
So I got to wonder, when that judge goes home at night, does his family, and especially his kids, let him know what everyone is saying about him in relation to this article?
And then I wonder how that affects him going into court the next day, when he has to ask more 'dumb' questions, does he actually ask or not.
Tech just isn’t his expertise.
Mehta has been described as an avid fan of hip hop music. In a 2015 copyright case regarding the similarity of two songs, Mehta noted in a footnote that he was "not a ‘lay person’ when it comes to hip-hop music and lyrics,” and noted he has "listened to hip hop for decades". American rappers Jay-Z, Eminem, Kanye West and Canadian rapper Drake are among his favorite artists.
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His job is to ask those questions. If he doesn't do it, his reasoning will be flawed and then the case will restart with a new judge when appealed, wasting everyone's time and money. I gotta imagine that's more embarrassing to a judge than asking these questions.
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I feel like most average people (regardless of age) don't even know alternatives to internet browsers exist, so why would I expect a judge to know? They're obviously not experts in every field, it's up to the attorneys to inform them and persuade them one way or another.
Are people here unable to see that the layman might not know what Firefox is off-hand?
Are people here unable to see that the layman might not know what Firefox is off-hand?
I don't think it's that. I think most people want a judge who's knowledgeable enough on the subject that he/she's actually judging.
Bringing in experts to educate him during the court case is not right, he's supposed to be able to judge if the experts are actually experts and know what they're talking about, by the time the actual case is happening.
The people making decisions often don't know shit about what they're deciding. I used to wonder why huge companies with a shitload of cash make horrible decisions for their products. Hint: It's not because they hire bad engineers.
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