As I sit in the Coffee&Co café in Bratislava (a town I am rather fond of visiting) taking advantage of its offer of free wireless broadband (ah, no more OWLS for me)…
…I am yet again struck by what changes are being wrought by the internet, and what amazing possibilities it opens up.
Although I studied Russian many years ago when the Cold War was steering me in certain directions, that knowledge has long since been flushed by my brain. Yet the other night just before I left London for Slovakia, I was exchanging e-mails with a chap in Moscow, translating (or more accurately transliterating) my Latin script English into Cyrillic Russian via a free on-line system and similarly translating his replies into English.
The results were rather crude and took a bit of smarts to interpret but we were able to conclude our business most satisfactorily. It really did bring home to me that even though we are only at the very start of the communications revolution (and revolution it is), the ways the internet will change everything are incalculable. The social, scientific, economic and political implications are so far reaching that I am sure the world twenty years from now will be hard to recognise.
Perhaps that is just stating the obvious but for me at least it is the very fact I am now so blasé about all the things the internet makes possible for me that makes it is useful to sometimes stand back and marvel at what an astonishing thing it is. Of course just as we take electric light as a given and only appreciate it when the power goes out, I might be unusually appreciative because at the moment I do not have my usual 24/7 broadband access and there is nothing like withdrawal to make you value getting a ‘fix’.
I had a similar experience with someone in the Ukraine with an email exchange. It really is the coolest thing!
Who is the babe with the Dana Scully hair?
I just tried to translate this:
“Regulators should start to do their job. Quickly. Given the pathetic level of transparency, it is quite clear that regulators are not doing their job properly. Regulators in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan should put discipline into the world of black boxes that are called banks in these countries. Serious problems will follow if this doesn’t happen soon enough.”
The result is surprisingly smooth:
“Регуляторы должны начать делать их работу. Быстро. Учитывая патетический уровень прозрачности, весьма ясно, что регуляторы не делают их работы должным образом. Регуляторы в России, Украине и Казахстане должны поместить дисциплину в мир черных ящиков, которые называют банками в этих странах. Серьезные проблемы будут следовать, если это не будет случаться достаточно скоро.”
I’m stunned!
Tim Berners-Lee and all the others who contributed to this wonder are truly a magnificent lot. As I type this my radio is playing the chorus from Messiah with the text wonderful, marvelous and these words apply equally to the internet.
Our brains sure love that juicy data. It’s because it gives us godlike powers. You can look up any information discovered by any human also connected to the network.
Imagine telling someone in the ’50’s that in two minutes you could have their phone number, address, ariel photography of their address, the proof to Fermat’s last theorem and the price of coffee in a canadian coffeehouse within 2 minutes.
You would be treated as an all-knowing god, but today we take that power for granted as a website called google.
Dana Scully indeed.. more like Lady Deadlock&load!
I’m just fascinated by the fact that Samizdata keeps humming along despite you being in Bratislava! 🙂
When I first installed Skype though I got a call from a Ukrainian las in Berlin who wanted to practice her English. Brilliant!
I use that site for most of my Russian-English-Russian translation (when my brain is not up to the task and my Russian friends are not logged into MSN at any rate).
If there is ever a case for dismissing those who claim that proper spelling and grammar are not important provided others understand the meaning, it is translating stuff into foreign languages. I was corresponding a Ukrainian girl for a while, and I was getting extremely frustrated that the translation site you linked to kept struggling to translate what she was writing.
Turned out her spelling and grammar were appalling, and hence the translation site wasn’t able to perform. She was damned good looking though.
Woah! I had no idea one the editors was a total babe!
Idont think that she is an editor…just random girl in the Cffe&Co caffe in Bratislava on Obchodna street…:)