No need to pay

According to Tom Foremski, as much as we complain about how expensive things are getting, we're surrounded by forces that are making them cheaper. Forty years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it's obesity, for which we have the Green Revolution to thank. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T-shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee Also for toys, gadgets, and commodities of every sort. Even cocaine has pretty much never been cheaper (globalization works in mysterious ways).

It seems to be accurate the notion that Internet devalues everything it touches. Anything that can be converted or made digital. You should notice that we use the word devalue with a materialistic connotation and not in the cultural value sense and that we use the word internet to refer to a class of distributed technologies and applications. The truth is that as you take the friction out of the economic system pricing goes down; Internet remains the ultimate economic lubricant.

Internet made possible the following devaluations:

• The price of a 10 song CD was around $20. Now If you use Lala.com you can pay 10 cents per song for lifetime streaming rights.
• The money spend on buying software application was possible to reduce due to the large percentage of or nearly free applications available online. This trend is likely to continue. Given that companies like Google plan to buy software companies and then offer those products online for free — this instantly devalues competing software applications.
• Telephone communications are much cheaper today thanks to services such as Skype and other VOIP based products. It used to cost $2 a minute to make a transatlantic telephone call but now it’s only about 5 cents.
• Public relations are being devalued because now fewer people can do the work of more people than before and small teams can do the work of the previously used large teams.

Internet allowed depriving from monetary value products and services such as:

• Music by offering it for free (which ended up being really successful for musicians such as Trent Reznor, and the Radiohead band members).
• Online games can be played for free because parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported.
  
• Some newspapers like "The New York Times" since the year 2007 can be read for free (This reminds me of an aphorism from 1984: "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive ... That tension will not go away.")

According to Chris Anderson, the fact that money is not the only scarcity in the world becomes evident now. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we've always known about but have only recently been able to measure properly. The "attention economy" and "reputation economy" are too fuzzy to merit an academic department, but there's something real at the heart of both. Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads). Anything you can consistently convert to cash is a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.

There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

Internet, English and Language

In many languages, Greek and Latin roots constitute an important part of the scientific vocabulary. This is especially true for the terms referring to fields of science. For example, the equivalent words for mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, and genealogy are roughly the same in many languages. As for computer science, numerous words in many languages are from American English, and the vocabulary can evolve very quickly. An exception to this trend is the word referring to computer science itself, which in many European languages is roughly the same as the English informatics: German: Informatik; French: informatique; Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese: informática; Polish: informatyka.

We live in the age of information. It pours upon us from the pages of newspapers and magazines, radio loudspeakers, tv and computer screens. The main part of this information has the form of natural language texts. Even in the area of computers, a larger part of the information they manipulate nowadays has the form of a text. It looks as if a personal computer has mainly turned into a tool to create, proofread, store, manage, and search for text documents. Our ancestors invented natural language many thousands of years ago for the needs of a developing human society. Modern natural languages are developing according to their own laws, in each epoch being an adequate tool for human communication, for expressing human feelings, thoughts, and actions.

For the last two centuries, humanity has successfully coped with the automation of many tasks using mechanical and electrical devices, and these devices faithfully serve people in their everyday life. In the second half of the twentieth century, human attention has turned to the automation of natural language processing. People now want assistance not only in mechanical, but also in intellectual efforts.

We need resources for NLP, the problem is that most of them are in English (such as sentiWordNet and General Enquirer), and only just a few in the other languages. Lexical and ontological resources are fundamental for NLP. This puts non-English speakers in a serious disadvantage.

The most-used language on the Internet according to Wikipedia is English. Although the total number of native English speakers in the world is about 322 millions, which is only around one fifth of the total internet users; the amount of English web content approaches 80%.

Generally speaking, when a language has got the position of a universal language, the position tends to be affirmed and extended by itself. Since "everyone" knows and uses English, people are almost forced to learn English and use it, and learn it better.

Besides the importance of the Internet grows rapidly in all fields of human life, including not only research and education but also marketing and trade as well as entertainment and hobbies. This implies that it becomes more and more important to know how to use Internet services and, as a part of this, to read and write English.

But English is changing fast too. There is no area of the culture that collision's more intensely than that, for the web has changed English more radically than any invention since paper, and much faster. According to Paul Payack, who runs the Global Language Monitor, "there are currently 988,974 words in the English language, with thousands more emerging every month". By his calculation, English will adopt its one millionth word in late November. To put that statistic another way, for every French word, there are now ten in English.

So far from debasing the language, the rapid expansion of English on the web may be enriching the mother tongue. Like Latin, it has developed different forms that bear little relation to one another: a speaker of Hinglish (Hindi-English) would have little to say to a Chinglish speaker. But while the root of Latin took centuries to grow its linguistic branches, modern non-standard English is evolving at fabulous speed. The language of the internet itself, the cyberisms that were once the preserve of a few web boffins, has simultaneous expanded into a new argot of words and idioms: Ancient or Classic Geek has given way to Modern Geek.