Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 19:15:08 -0500
From: Alfredo Elejalde <elejalde@pucp.edu.pe>
Subject: Re: 11.0332 gleanings
Hello
(Sorry about my English...:)
Humanist Discussion Group wrote:
>
> (1) "British team discover's the Internet's holy grail". A team at Essex, in
> conjunction with Canadian researchers, has discovered a means of delivering
> Internet services to the home through the electricity mains (powerlines).
> The new technology isolates, or is able successfully to extract, the
> Internet signals from regular transmission of electrical power. "It will
> enable electricity companies to offer their customers Internet access at
> speeds 30 times greater than today's high-speed modems... and open the way
> to mass marketing of the Internet at prices most families will be able to
> afford."
>
> Once we complained about our activities and interests not being popular.
> Will these become the Good Old Days? Or is the Internet not something
> that the general public will take to? If the technology does become
> universal, will this then offer a means for Europeans finally to have
> access to the Internet without having to pay per-second connect charges,
> and if again so, will the balance of use be shifted away from a
> preponderance by N. Americans? Surely too many contingencies for a
> prediction.
Do not forget Third World Countries... There are universities located in
towns that have no libraries and no bookstores... I wonder how students
can get recent books. If this technology really works, many people could
have access to good scholar material as long as scholars around the
world make their researches available through Internet...
On the other hand, I see Internet as a very free place where I can
publish anything I think, and I try to publish material that not only my
students at the university can use, but school students too. If Internet
II Project separates universities from the rest of the world... How can
we put material on line for school students or for some Third World
Universities that are isolated from book publishing channels?
I am not afraid of american or european preponderance in Internet, but
of poverty. Maybe each language community -or country- should have a
policy on Epublishing cultural, scientific and technological information
in its native tongue, and maybe scholars should organize that data in
order to make it comprehensible to others. There is so much data in
Internet that need to have sense...
Yours
------------------------------------
Alfredo Elejalde F.
elejalde@pucp.edu.pe
http://macareo.pucp.edu.pe/~elejalde
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