from the shiny-objects-trump-shiny-thoughts dept.
An anonymous reader sends this quote from an opinion piece in the NY Times:"If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it's not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don't care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can't instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé. ... There is the eclipse of the public intellectual in the general media by the pundit who substitutes outrageousness for thoughtfulness, and the concomitant decline of the essay in general-interest magazines. And there is the rise of an increasingly visual culture, especially among the young — a form in which ideas are more difficult to express. But these factors, which began decades ago, were more likely harbingers of an approaching post-idea world than the chief causes of it."
. How? Google complained this week that Microsoft had no right to show the Android source code to an expert witness in one of those many patent battles being waged on the mobile front. If the Android code were in fact open source, there could be no such restriction on showing the code -- it would be available to anyone. That's what open source means.
