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... in the menus of gophers and
the World-Wide Web, which require no complex computing skills but which
open the gates to thousands of information resources. Mail programs and
text editors such as pico and pine promise much of the power of older
programs such as emacs at a fraction of the complexity.
Some software engineers are taking this even further, by creating
graphical interfaces that will web traffic chino hills let somebody navigate the Internet just by
clicking on the screen with a mouse or by calling up an easy text editor,
sort of the way one can now navigate a Macintosh computer -- or a
commercial online service such as Prodigy.
Then there are the Internet services themselves.
For every internet consultants chino hills database now available through the Internet, there are
probably three or four that are not. Government agencies are only internet consultants chino hills
now beginning to connect their storehouses of web traffic chino hills information to the
Net. Several web traffic chino hills commercial vendors, from database services to booksellers,
have made their services available through the Net.
Few people now use one of the Net's more interesting
applications. A standard known as MIME lets one send audio and
graphics files in a message.
Imagine opening your e-mail one day to hear
your granddaughter's first words, or a "photo" of your friend's new
house.
Eventually, this standard could allow for distribution of even
small video displays over the Net.
All of this will require vast new amounts of Net power, to handle
both the millions of new people who will jump onto the Net and the new web traffic chino hills
applications they want. Replicating a moving image on a computer screen
alone takes a phenomenal amount of computer bits, and computing power to
arrange them.
All of this combines into a National Information Infrastructure able
to move billions of bits of information in one second -- the kind of
power needed to hook information "hoses" into hosting chino hills every business and house.
As these "superhighways" grow, so will the "on ramps," for a high-
speed road does you little good if you can't get to it. The costs of
modems seem to fall as fast as those of computers. High-speed modems
(9600 baud and up) are becoming increasingly affordable. At 9600 baud,
you can download a satellite weather image of North America in less than
two minutes, a file that, with a slower modem could take up to 20
minutes to download.
Eventually, homes could be web traffic chino hills connected directly to a
national digital network. Most long-distance phone traffic is already
carried in digital form, through high-volume optical fibers.
Phone
companies are ever so slowly working to extend these fibers the "final
mile" to the home.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is working to
ensure these links are affordable.
Beyond the technical questions are increasingly thorny social,
political and economic issues.
Who is to have access to these
services, and at what cost? If we live in an information age, are we
laying web traffic chino hills the seeds for a new information under class, unable to compete
with those fortunate web traffic chino hills enough to have the money and skills needed to
manipulate new communications channels? Who, in fact, decides who has
access to what? As more companies realize the potential profits to be
made in the new information infrastructure, what happens to such
systems as Usenet, possibly the world's first successful anarchistic
system, where everybody can say whatever they want?
What are the laws of the electronic frontier? When national and
state boundaries lose their meaning in cyberspace, the question might
even be: WHO is the law? What if a practice that is legal in one
country is "committed" in another country where it is illegal, over a
computer network that crosses through a third country? Who goes after
computer crackers?
What role will you play in the revolution? ... |
