What the Internet needs … is not rules and guidelines but a more fully functioning set of community standards. Although laws are certainly necessary for many sorts of things, community standards are better than laws because they are more flexible, more situational, cheaper, less dependent on supposedly objective authorities, and basically decentralized. Community standards are the best way to regulate a commmons. And that’s what the Internet is – a commons.
Using the NII will not be similar to using a telephone system that can be used without much training. It requires sharp minds to develop practical access to information, but also helping people how to utilize it creatively. It is more in the style of setting up an aquarium or learning to play an instrument … Those who are information “literate” will not just survive in this new information environment but will prosper while participating in advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
[High-Performance Computing Communications and networked communication can be key in looking at the Changing Context of NII.] The proposed National Information Infrastructure promises a radical transformation of the way Americans at all levels generate, transmit, access, and use information.
[High-Performance Computing Communications and networked communication can be key in future environmental monitoring.] Environmental monitoring relates to our ability to observe, understand, and predict changes in the environment, both natural and man-made, on scales from seconds to millennia and from local to global. Efforts in this IITA National Challenge area will focus on applying high-performance computing to advance environmental understanding and predictive capabilities, and on integrating multi-agency environmental observing systems (land-based, ocean-based, or satellite-borne) and historical databases using high-speed networks.
[High-Performance Computing Communications and networked communication can be key in future government information delivery.] The subelement supports work in implementing new programs to develop and apply high-performance computing and high-speed networking technologies to vastly improve public access to information generated by Federal, state, and local governments.
[High-Performance Computing Communications and networked communication can be key in future energy management.] This sub-element supports work in managing the nation’s energy resources – supply and demand – in an increasingly complex global environment.
[High-Performance Computing Communications and networked communication can be key in future crisis management.] Crisis management refers to the use of command, control, communications, and intelligence information systems to support decision makers in anticipating threats, formulating plans, and executing these plans through coordinated response.
Neither companies nor their workers really know what the limits are [in regard to employers monitoring employees electronically]. The few rulings in the area seem to be going the employers’ way, but even that trend is not sure to hold.
[High-Performance Computing Communications and networked communication can be key in future health care.] … [Coming are] high-speed networking capabilities for linking health care resources of all kinds to support research and shared-care delivery.
[High-Performance Computing Communications and networked communication can be key in future education, training, and lifelong learning: The sub-element supports work [to make] high-performance computing and communications capabilities a major universal resource for the nation’s education, training, and learning systems at all levels and in all environments.