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Govt Says: Internet Is Popular
michaeld writes "The U.S. Dept of Commerce reports that more than half of the nation is now online. In
September 2001, 143 million Americans (54%
of population) were using the Internet -- an
increase of 26 million in thirteen months. 2 million more go online each month. Between August 2000 and September 2001, residential
use of high-speed, broadband service doubled--from about
4 to 11 percent of all individuals, and from 11 to 20
percent of Internet users. ZDNet has commentary as does Reuters, while the government has the Full report."
We are some 80% in .se that has used the internet
and some 60% that does it on a regular basis.
Did I tell you we have digital cellnetworks and use
sms ALOT. etc. Been a while since the US was in the techno-fronteir?
This was not a flamebait. This was just to pointout
how utterly uninteresting statistics like that is.
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
I don't know if 80 000 000 people on AOL is really "on line". It's sad to see that as technolgy advances 'the people' remain in obscurity (ie.: in the hands of companies like AOL and MS) and it the comptres are still mystical boxes not to be tampered with. It makes me think that this headline in a dark ages newspaper would be: Church says God is popular.
--Manuel
"I hate quotations, tell me what you think"
The Internet isn't really that popular; someone at Microsoft just got confused about the subject of the poll, and sent out some email to the entire company claiming that the government was trying to measure the popularity of .NET.
The U.S. Dept of Commerce reports that more than half of the nation is now online
;)
No wonder its so damn laggy today
Conclusive proof that the internet is becoming all pervasive. It would also be nice, now, if the government could help facilitate future growth via funded expansion of shared infrastructure. Broadband access is apparently become less readily available and more costly, right at a time when demand for access is increasing. Just as there is a federal highway system, it would be nice to see a federally funded mega-sized inter-state backbone that would ensure bandwidth needs are met in future. The auto industry was the bellweather of the american economy for 50-75 years, but that industry was not responsible for funding the deployment of roads and highways. Similarly, software companies and internet services would greatly benefit from a shared, open infrastructure that ensures all Americans have access. Of course, I'm a Canadian so what do I know? ;)
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
He never claimed to have done so...
Best Slashdot Co
A non-trivial proportion of those people get their internet access via 56k dial-up modems, and certainly their surfing experience would be vastly better with a broadband connection. In addition, 46% of Americans do not yet have access to the internet. While with most forms of technology, not everyone wants to get online, I'd wager that a fair portion of that 46% would like to learn how.
I think there are several things that we as the richest nation on Earth should focus on going forward:
1. Making internet access available to those in the remaining 46% who cannot afford but wish to have access. Perhaps a large campaign to recycle used computers and 56k modems and then donate them along with free monthly access to poor people would be a good start.
2. Improve the broadband experience for those who have gone through it thus far. By this I mean a concerted effort to reduce the delays in getting DSL service and the fiascos related to the @home collapse.
3. Make broadband live up to its claims. Currently, many if not most cable modem users suffer from network congestion and slower-than-advertised download speeds. For me personally, while still much faster than a modem, the frustration I have in the evening when things seem to move at a snail's pace make me yearn for a modem; at least then I can't complain about the service. Probably the best solution is a two-tiered pricing scheme in which light users pay a lower monthly fee but are guaranteed a speed of, say, 768kbps down and in which heavy users (say, over 2 gigs a month) pay a much higher fee. There is little doubt that a small proportion of broadband users slow down cable networks for everyone; and they should have to pay for their heavy usage.
4. Do everything possible to support open standards on the internet. In other words, make web pages browser-agnostic. Avoid using proprietary services such as Microsoft's .NET offerings until the protocols are publicly known and other software vendors (or open source providers) have had a chance to develop products with a compatible feature set.
5. Do not use Microsoft .doc and .xls formats as the basis for document interchange. Not everyone uses Microsoft products, and because of their proprietary nature other software packages cannot offer 100% portability. If a document does not need to be modified, use a PDF file; if it does, use RTF or some other standards-based document type that can be processed by other software. For spreadsheets, use a basic CSV format if it is sufficient or use WK1, which all spreadsheet packages can handle.
Enough rambling. Time for breakfast.
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The person who dubs the internet as any sort of "basic right" probably needs to go without for a few months just so you will find that yes, you can survive without internet access. The internet in no way affects your quality of life.
-- Dan
The internet in no way affects your quality of life.
Of course it affects quality of life (sometimes even negatively). But of course, this alone is not enough to make it a fundamental right. And yes, food, shelter, privacy, right to earn a living, and many other things come first. :)
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Second, unlike, say cable, phone, or electricity, there is a rather large initial cost of ownership that one needs to invest in (the computer) in order to take advantage of the service. The poor to lower-middle classes won't be able to enjoy such services and would be mightly upset to find that they had to pay for that utility despite not using anyway.
Finally, the internet market still has no rules; it's unregulated, and yet it's not hard to find places where monopolistic-type systems are appearing. Some providers that also control other parts of the pipe want to do everything for you (AOLTW envisions >$200 monthly bills for people that use their cable for TV, movies-on-demand, phone, and internet connectivity). Local players are still getting the run-arounds from ILECs in trying to service customers that they are supposed to be able to by law. Let's work out the last mile mess first before we start pushing the idea of a internet connection in every home, otherwise, we could end up with a second MaBell-like monopoly.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I would disagree with your stating the Internet doesn't affect my quality of life. I'm much better informed, more politically active, and make more money becuase of the Internet. I have new friends, and am able to better keep in touch with geographically distant friends and family. I have seen and read things online that I never would have been exposed to had it not been for the Internet.
While it is not a basic right, it does affect the quality of life.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
The story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet has been thoroughly debunked by Phil Agre in http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.Al.Gore. and.the.Inte.html
and
rebutted further later
That meme was a creation of Declan McCullagh, a "reporter" for Wired News who is politically a dogmatic Libertarian so extreme that he managed to get a book chapter using him as a poster-boy for Libertarian ideologues, and a different book chapter using him as Libertarian joke-fodder.
If you think this is flame-bait, the aspect of his fabricated story being a Liberatarian hit-piece on Al Gore was extensively discussed in a debunking by Salon
After Declan McCullagh was repeatedly taken to task for his hatchet-job, over more than year, by everyone who was there, from Dave Farberto Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, Declan finally grudgingly retracted the "story"
But people still repeat it, because urban legends never die.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
In related news, the Government also declared that the Sky is Blue, Bill Gates is Rich, and that Governments spend money on obvious surveys.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
I sat down the other day and thought about the internet and its part in my life and I realised, maybe for the first time, how utterly indispensible its become. I mean, its the first invention or "fad" in my lifetime that has generated interest and worked its way into my life in such a way that I would genuinely have difficulty if it was taken away. Nothing else has done this: not sega game consoles, or compact disks, or satellite tv or whatever.
Its in everypart of my life: I communicate with it, I play on it, I shop on it, I learn from it, I work with it.
It is uniquely useful - you can learn entire programming languages, and probably spoken languages, from deja. The other day I found a page which listed streaming russian tv stations for my homesick wife. Almost any piece of information you can think of is a google search away. And you can even publish your own brand of idiocy for (potentially) every person on the planet to read!! Good god. The idea of life without the internet frightens me...
Is there any wonder its becoming so popular.
http://www.davetansley.com - you proba
This is good to know. This is a number that you need if you're thinking about Doing Something On The Internet - half the US can *possibly* get to you. This is not trivial info, though I doubt we had to wait for the Gummint to tell us this.
Frinstance - you want to open a bookstore. 50% of the people you want to sell to can click into your store. 100% of the people can head thru the door of a meatspace store. Your call. Jeff? Jeff? Anyone? Anyone?
If you hang around techie sites long enough, you'd think everyone who matters has it, and anyone who doesn't is a mouthbreathing fool. T'ain't so. Apparently upwards of 100 million first-world citizens get along just nicely, thank you very much without direct access to the net.
Though I get paid to deal with it on an hourly basis, I can easily see going back to 1970's time by removing my cell, laptop, fax, and voicemail, and pretty much not only living a full life and probably getting more of the 'real' life things done too.
Sounds vaguely luddite, but it's really only a reality check.
Of course, if I weren't online, I'd be muttering all this rant to the cat. Sad. Especially for the poor cat.
And remember - there are more houses with televisions than telephones, cuz you have to pay for the phone once it's in - and ditto^2 online access. Anyone have a good reason why an internet box of any sort would ever move up from third place?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
admittedly phones aren't a basic right currently. I think they should be. When I was 15, my parents got a divorce. My father cut the phone line and it took a couple of days to get the service started again. In that time, our garage caught fire. The closest neighbor I had was a mile away. That is when I thought phones should be a basic right. Maybe not extra features, but I needed to call 911 and couldn't.
Maybe not now but I can see a day when the same thing with the internet will need to happen. Communication should be a basic right. All of our services revolve around it. (i.e. fire deptment) If you base society around a certain technology then that technology becomes a basic right.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Declan McCullagh also lurked in the LiViD newsgroup during its early days, writing a wired story about "rampemt DVD piracy software" with the full knowledge that DeCSS and cssauth were being used to develop a GNU/Linux DVD player and that absolutely no pircacy was going on, anywhere (at that time). This was before burnable DVDs, before DivX, in short, before such piracy was even technically feasable even with easy decryption (without a $4000 DVD burner that could copy DVDs without decrypting them ... unlike later models following the start of the DeCSS court case). His actions were directly responsible for legal troubles by numerous early developers, some of whome were forced to drop out of the project and discontinue their work.
If you do not believe me, feel free to perus the LiViD mailing list archives. The entire ugly incident is well documented in the public record. His behavior was appalling and reprehensible, and very destructive to a number of free software volunteers. Yes, we now have free players galore, but at some great personal cost to a number of volunteers thanks to Declan's yellow journalistic tendencies.
What is even more interesting is the number of articles on slashdot that, when posted, mentioned Declan McCullagh as the author by name (effectively promoting his fame), in direct contrast to nearly every other article posted on slashdot then and now. Clearly, for a time at least, he had a cordial relationship with some influencial folks at slashdot despite his reprehensible behavior vis-avis the LiViD project, and despite posts and emails by myself and others trying to get the word out about his behavior wrt LiViD (and quite likely others). Hopefully this has changed, but for the public record, I feel it is important the free software enthusiasts know about this little chapter in LiViD's history, and the casualties and personal losses that resulted.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy