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1. Everyone knows that the broadband era will breed a new generation of online services, but this is only half of the story. Like any innovation, broadband will inflict major changes on its environment. It will destroy, once and for all, the egalitarian vision of the Internet.
2. Misery is the stuff of comedy, if one can just live long enough to get over it.
3. The landscape of the Net has changed; that cyberfrontier of the past has become a teeming city of people, transactions, and businesses.
4. The blunt tools of legislation or union power can force a corporation to pay higher wages, but if employees don’t create an equal amount of additional value, there’s no net gain.
5. Scaremongering is an age-old political ritual. There are public officials who have benefited by playing up the ‘hacker threat’ so that they can win approval by cracking down on it.
6. The idea of an e-book has been around since the late 1970s, when researchers at Xerox PARC got on the case. Their prototype used millions of little magnetic particles, black on one side and white on the other, loosely embedded in the surface of a soft sheet of rubber.
7. Merchandise from Wal-Mart has become as ubiquitous as the water supply. Yet, still, the company is rebuked and reviled by anyone claiming a social conscience and is lambasted by legislators as if its bad behavior places it somewhere between investment bankers and the Taliban.
8. At 3-D Imax theaters, audiences have shown they are willing to pay a premium to wear headgear fitted with liquid-crystal lenses synchronized via infrared signals with the movie projector, which runs at twice the normal frame rate. These movie viewers plumb new depths in depth perception — they experience extreme realism.
9. Our information network is much better protected than our railroad network, and someone who cracks a system is able to cause far less human damage than someone who derails a train. Why, then, has ‘computer crime’ caused so much hysteria? Perhaps because the public is so willing — eager, even — to be scared by bogeymen.
10. In the early 1970s, phone phreaks manipulated the long-distance system using blue boxes that they built from sketchy photocopied schematics that were often riddled with errors. Not many had the skill to do this. Phreaking was restricted to a select few.
11. Unsurprisingly, an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) — once a luxury for room-sized computer installations — is now a standard item both in home offices and all the networked tiers above, protecting servers and online service providers, Internet backbones, phone companies, and even cable TV networks.
12. The always-on economy, by definition, depends upon continuous energy.
13. When the International Space Station is finally launched, it will be fitted with special nickel-hydrogen batteries weighing a total of several tons, with a lifetime of just five years, requiring spares to be brought up from Earth at literally astronomical expense.
14. A future at Wal-Mart may sound a less-than-stellar prospect, but it’s a whole lot better than no future at all.
15. As cyberspace matures into a totally immersive experience, I’m betting it will turn out to be fully odor-enabled.
16. I’ve always resented the force of attraction that traps me here on Planet Earth. It makes me feel like a bug stuck to a piece of duct tape. Ever since my teenage years, when I used to read a lot of science fiction and took it much too seriously, I’ve dreamed of somehow reaching escape velocity. I am, you might say, anti-gravity.
17. Watching cold fusion is like watching water boil in slow motion. First, sufficient deuterium has to penetrate the palladium electrode. This can take a few weeks. Then, if excess heat is generated during the next month or two, accurate temperature readings require extreme precautions to exclude environmental effects.
18. Even if major funding is obtained for cold fusion, conceivably the phenomenon could suffer from problems as intractable as those of hot fusion. It may never work reliably or generate enough energy to be commercially viable.
19. When you shop online, wouldn’t you like to sample the bouquet of wines, the aroma of cigars, or the subtle fragrance of flowers before surrendering your credit card number? Surely more companies will want to aromatize their Web presence when they realize there’s a device that can produce genuinely pleasing, authentic fragrances.
20. The public is eager for stories of True Cybercrime, and the media is happy to glamorize the subject. But when teenagers take the bait and live out our fantasies for us, we punish them for frightening us too much.