| roll eyes*
"Why would anyone want more than 640K?"
It's a darn good thing that all these freeways weren't built because America wasn't ready for them. Can you imagine the damage when you unleash a car that can do 70mph to your grandparents who don't know a lot about automobiles but just wanna go to a supermarket?
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There is a difference. State agencies license and enforce laws governing drivers and their ability to actually drive. They also ensure that there is a "firewall" of insurance (minimum coverage) in most states that is covering the driver/car in question. So if Grandma goes 70mph and kills someone, it will be investigated. There is no local, state or federal government agency that actually checks up on whether you have or know how to engage a firewall, check email and not open attachments from strangers or suspect ones even from friends, and avoid malicious code from browsers and peer to peer file sharing utilities, etc. I'm not certain I want one either, except maybe to verify the sender of email, and shut them down for spam or viruses/worms, and only bring them back up if they are complying.
On another front. I'm from PA. I remember this "bill" and the implications that were brought to the attentions of those I worked for at the time. I did not however research the terms ot the agreement, I just got word of mouth from higher ups in my organization at the time what it entailed and what it would do for us, but didn't check the claims with either the government docs or Bell Atlantic cum Verizon.
The way it was presented to us is this: I worked until 2000 For the Carnegie Science Center, part of the Carnegie Museums Of Pittsburgh, and loosely affiliated in this event with CMU and University of PGH, all the other higher learning schools of the area, and the City of PGH government and school systems. The promise was such: In return for the Tax breaks, and opening some right of ways cheaply for the fiber backbones, they would hook up all Schools, Government buildings and larger Non Profits/Libraries to the back bone for mega projects for free (for some unspecified time). And this evolved into a deal where they would partner (by 1998 or 99) with the groups to do things like making Diskless CPU"s in public places able to access data from Diskless CPU's in Schools, so kids could continue research where ever they were without moving physical stuff around as they moved around. They would log in at the next place and their "workspace:" would be preserved as it was when they left the previous one. Eventually the access would be available in homes as well. To put it simply, I don't believe they fully followed through, but last I checked they were all doing IP6 research with CMU using these installed updates to the local (so to speak) back bone in PGH. So they did follow through with what was promised, though I don't know at what bps or Mbps the connections were made, I do know that my replacement/counter part at the old job told me about the major upgrades both in and outside the building to the whole network, shortly after I left. As I didn't care too much, I didn't ask what speeds all the new fiber was running at (previously a mix of mostly 10 and some 100baseT copper).
And that's the truth. :P |
