Researchers are investigating two main techniques for speeding up the Web: “caching” and optimized protocols. Based on the tests and simulations done so far, both methods will dramatically improve Web response times … but the ideal caching scheme would also store the pages you are most likely to visit, not just the ones you have already seen.
The report would virtually eliminate the doctrine of “fair use.” It would hold content providers such as Prodigy responsible for any copyright infringement found online. And it would make it a crime to distribute devices that circumvent copyright protection … “[It is] a flagrant giveaway, a legal means by which the copyright industries can turn the threat of digital technology into a new opportunity.”
The Net is a tool that will allow us to forge bonds between the Indian nations. The only thing we have right now that facilitates intertribal communication is the powwow circuit … It’s fine as far as it goes, but we need more.
In a completely deregulated environment, no one in business to make money would do anything in the public interest. Abolishing the FCC would represent the triumph of fashion over history. If you think that the bartering of monopolies is going to produce a fair allocation of the public airwaves, then you’ve got another think coming.
We’re at a point where we ought to just liberate the market and let the technologies sort themselves out over the next 10 or 15 years … Then, maybe, we revisit the question of whether you need regulation. In the near future, though, we should be driving for as little regulation as possible.
Digital, connected, decentralized, ubiquitous: a network of networks, controlled by no one, buzzing with competition among innovative individuals and firms of all sizes, but with plenty of room for those who simply want to talk [ – this is how both Al Gore and Newt Gingrich see the future of the Internet].
Sun chief Scott McNealy is a fierce competitor, and his blood lust for Bill Gates has fueled the Java project from the beginning … McNealy even sees the day when disposable word processors and spreadsheets will be delivered over the Web via Java, priced per use. “This blows up Gates’s lock and destroys his model of a shrink-wrapped software that runs only on his platform.”
Java holds the promise of caffeinating the Web, supercharging it with interactive games and animation and thousands of application programs nobody’s even thought of. At the same time, Java offers Sun and other Microsoft foes renewed hope that Bill Gates’s iron grip on the software business can be pried loose. Microsoft rules the desktop, but as networking expands its role, says van Hoff, Java could turn out to be “the DOS of the Internet.”
Twenty years ago, no publisher anticipated that teletype terminals would grow into a portable threat to books, that paper tapes would merge with film into multimedia CD-ROMs, or that telephones would threaten the whole business model of publishing by bringing the Web into your home. The difference in time between loony ideas and shipped products is shrinking so fast that it’s now, oh, about a week.
Noncontact coupling between your body and weak electric fields can be used to create and sense tiny nano-amp currents in your body. Modulating these signals creates Body Net, a personal-area network that communicates through your skin … Your shoe computer can talk to a wrist display and keyboard and heads-up glasses. Activating your body means that everything you touch is potentially digital. A handshake becomes an exchange of digital business cards, a friendly arm on the shoulder provides helpful data, touching a doorknob verifies your identity, and picking up a phone downloads your numbers and voice signature for faithful speech recognition.