Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
I don't think this means what you think it means. Consider the situation in 36 AB (After Brian):
By the summer of 70 the Romans had breached the walls of Jerusalem, ransacking and burning nearly the entire city...
The Second Temple (the rennovated Herod's Temple) was destroyed on Tisha B'Av (29 or 30 July 70).
Tacitus... notes that those who were besieged in Jerusalem amounted to no fewer than six hundred thousand, that men and women alike and every age engaged in armed resistance, everyone who could pick up a weapon did, both sexes showed equal determination, preferring death to a life that involved expulsion from their country. All three walls were destroyed and in turn so was the Temple, some of whose overturned stones and their place of impact can still be seen...
The famous Arch of Titus still stands in Rome: it depicts Roman legionaries carrying the Temple of Jerusalem's treasuries, including the Menorah, during Titus's triumphal procession in Rome.
Even after crushing the Judean revolt, the Romans provided sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health. But they also destroyed the symbolic center of the Jewish identity.
I guess I have to put too fine a point on it, huh: the bit about the romans was incidental. I was using the character — "Reg" — as a parody of your criticism:
Reg: all right, but apart from originality, innovation, exclusivity, price-point, beauty, the possibility of being influenced by other software tycoons, and minimality of influence by developers, how was Doc Searls at all prescient here?
Searls said "Steve Jobs will do things exactly the same way as he has always done things."
He did a good job of describing those things. I said as much earlier. But he was being observant, not prescient.
Here's prescient: "Steve Jobs will do things exactly the same way as he has always done things, and this time Apple will become bigger, sexier, and more powerful than Microsoft."
Hindsight bias is the inclination to see events that have occurred as more predictable than they in fact were before they took place. Hindsight bias has been demonstrated experimentally in a variety of settings...
Yeah, none of that was lost on me. I wasn't laughing at your expense or trying to invalidate your message. The similarity to that scene was just irresistible.
