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Text File | 1995-01-01 | 12.4 KB | 436 lines

Plans For The Real Information Highway 01/19/95 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, U.S.A., 1995 JAN 19 (NB) -- Last October, the US Department of Transportation announced a $200 million, seven-year project to automate driving. Dubbed the National Automated Highway System Consortium, the project would be 80 percent taxpayer funded. The idea is that computer-driven cars would be able to move faster and be spaced more closely, thus reducing the need for more roads. Sound crazy? It might be, according to a recent report in the Nov. 28, 1994, Business Week ("Smart Highways, Foolish Choices," by Christina Del Valle, pp. 143-144). The article says many observers say the project would be too costly and impractical, and that it would be better to focus on more achievable goals. "Critics fear this could be another field in which the US pioneers, but others grab the profits," Del Valle writes. She goes on to say that one researcher thinks it might cost $75 billion just to automate 5,000 miles of roadway. Another in-depth look at automated highways appeared in the Nov. 1994 issue of Photonics Spectra ("Smart Cars and Smart Highways" by Mark A. Fischetti, pp. 76-84). Fischetti reports that the US Federal Highway Administration forecasts a 50 percent rise in vehicles by 2005 and is planning to spend $155 billion by 1997 to deal with the situation -- without resorting to additional highway construction. In short, this means coming up with ways to manage traffic more intelligently using computers of all sorts. This solid article explains how this money is being spent and what research and development projects are underway, with a special emphasis on photonic applications for the smart highway. While some researchers maintain the only way to deal with highway crowding is to automate our automobiles, the formidable technological problems may not be solved until 2020 at the earliest, reports Justin Mullins in the Oct. 15, 1994, issue of New Scientist ("Cars That Drive Themselves," pp. 37-40). The technical problems include designing road sensors and computer- controlled systems to control steering, braking, and accelerating. Then there are the knotty legal issues, always a concern in a society teaming with hungry lawyers. And don't forget the interesting problem of how to segregate automated from non-automated cars on future intelligent roadways. "Drastic means have been proposed for removing intruders (from automated highways), including helicopters wielding mechanical grabbers and electromagnetic pulses that bring a delinquent car to a halt by frying its electronic circuits," Mullins writes. This story is republished with permission from the January 1995 Cybernautics Digest, a monthly summary of reports about converging information technologies. (Contact: Terry Hansen, Cybernautics Digest, c/o KFH Publications Inc., 3530 Bagley Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98103; 206-547-4950; Fax: 206-547-5355; E-mail: twhansen@cuix.pscu.com. US subscription rate: $24; $2 sample issue) SPA Targets Internet, International Piracy 01/11/95 WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A., 1995 JAN 11 (NB) -- Software Publishers Association (SPA) says corporate software piracy in the US was down 23 percent in 1994, but other forms of piracy became more secretive and harder to locate. The antipiracy trade organization said it will focus on international piracy and, specifically, piracy on the Internet during 1995. SPA sources said antipiracy hot- line calls came in last year at a rate of nearly 30 per day. These tips led to the SPA taking various types of action against 447 organizations and led to 197 audits and lawsuits. These resulting in the payment of $2.7 million in penalties during 1994, SPA sources said. The organization said cumulative receipts from its continuing antipiracy campaign came to $14 million so far at the end of last year. SPA said that, of all cases brought against suspected offenders, 95 percent were corporate cases. Five of these led to settlements greater than $100,000, the organization said. Money from such settlements goes to fund education programs and future legal actions, the SPA said, but declined to name any of the companies involved. The SPA officially estimates losses to software companies at $1.6 billion annually in the US, and $7.5 billion internationally. It bases its estimates on the number of computers sold in an area, the number of software packages reported sold legitimately in the same area, and statistical reports on the number of key applications run on an average desktop machine. David Trendlay, the SPA's director of research, told Newsbytes the underlying assumptions were reasonable and the resulting estimates should be considered good. Sally Lawrence, the SPA's director of communications, told Newsbytes that piracy law violators have become more active on the Internet, where they are harder to track down. "We have stepped up our monitoring on the Internet dramatically, and are working in cooperation with major American universities where some of this activity is taking place," she said during an interview. "They've come across a number of pirate sites hidden away in unsuspecting host servers. Right now they're monitoring those activities with the intention of prosecuting to the full extent of the law." Lawrence declined to release any further details, other than to confirm that the organization's attentions to the Internet were not confined to activities in the "found" specific sites. Internationally, the SPA has been active in France, Great Britain, Singapore, Ease Asia, South America, and Canada. It has recently developed a Certified Software Manager course that offers certificates upon completion of a test on copyright law, licensing issues, and autoing and software management policies. (Craig Menefee/19950111/Press Contact: Sandra Sellers, director of litigation, ext. 311, or Sally Lawrence, director of communications, ext. 320, both of the Software Publishers Association, 202-452-1600; Reader Contact: Piracy Hotline: 800- 388-7478; SPA fax-back service, 800- 637-6823) Review of - The Internet Yellow Pages, a book 01/06/95 From: Osborne/McGraw-Hill 2600 Tenth St. Berkeley, CA 94710. Price: $27.95. PUMA Rating: 3.7 (4=highest, 1=lowest) Reviewed for Newsbytes by: Ian Stokell 01/06/95 Summary: Useful reference for exploring the Internet. The biggest problem in using the Internet, apart from actually configuring your software and getting up and running via a direct connection from an Internet provider (IP), is figuring out where the good stuff is found. You could flounder around endlessly, moving from site to site racking up online time and searching your life away, or you could sign up with a few Usenet newsgroups that correspond to your areas of interest and get some pointers from other like-minded Internet users. Or, and here is the option that I recommend, you could invest in an Internet reference book/directory or two. The Internet being what it is -- i.e. a sort of living, growing entity -- any reference book will be far from definitive. However, reference books such as "The Internet Yellow Pages," act as excellent starting points for exploring the "Net." The 450-page book actually lists thousands of Net resources along with a separate list of annotated Usenet newsgroups to which users can subscribe. Resources in the main body of the book are listed alphabetically by subject and include mailing lists, newsgroups, anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, Gopher sites, and Telnet addresses. In addition, there is a pretty good index at the back of the book. As mentioned, The Internet Yellow Pages is an excellent starting point for searching the Internet, unless you are actually lucky enough to find a resource straight from the book. Most mainstream topics have a listing or two, and for those more specialized areas, you need to choose something close to your desired subject and start poking around. Reading through the book you really get an idea about what an amazing resource the Internet is, and how diverse! Want something bizarre? How about camel research? Well, there's a mailing list from the Camel Research Center at King Faisal University, Saudia Arabia. The list address is: camel-l@sakfu00.bitnet, with the subscription address at: listserv@sakfu00.bitnet. Did you know the complete texts of many classical works of literature are available on the Internet? I guess the copyright runs out so many years after the author "shuffles off this mortal coil," as Monty Python said. The book doesn't list them all, but it provides quite a few. For example, if you want the complete text of H.G. Wells' novel "War of the Worlds," a great book by the way, it's available via anonymous FTP at nic.funet.fi. The Internet offers more serious subjects too. For example, there is a Usenet newsgroup called alt.missing- kids, designed to help locate missing children, and there is a Gopher site at the National Institute of Health called CancerNet containing information about cancer and cancer research. It's at: gopher.nih.gov. Once there, you choose Health and Clinical Information CancerNet Information. But seriousness aside, the Internet can be great for fun stuff and for catering to the most left- field of interests. Okay, so your life is at a cross- roads! You've been given a number of choices: you've been offered vice president of video game development at Disney, you've also been offered the lead role in Spielberg's Jurassic Park 17, or you can break loose and do what you've always wanted -- be a chinchilla farmer! Whoa! That's convenient, because there's a Usenet newsgroup on that very subject on the Internet, it's at: alt.chinchilla. Enjoy! (Ian Stokell/19950195) Online Publishing Shakes Up Science 12/21/94 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, U.S.A., 1994 DEC 21 (NB) -- Scientists want to know the results of the latest research as soon as possible, so it shouldn't be surprising that research journals are going electronic, leaving many researchers questioning whether paper journals have a future. In "Peer Review in Cyberspace," (Science, Nov. 11, 1994, p. 967) Gary Taubes explains that the fastest growing physics journal is available only on the World Wide Web (http://xxx.lanl.gov/). Since the electronic archive was created by physicist Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos three years ago, "the archives have grown almost exponentially," Taubes writes. "They now include a dozen physics disciplines, plus mathematics, economics, computation, and linguistics, among others; they have more than 20,000 subscribers; and they receive roughly 1,000 new preprints a month. Indeed, they have become so indispensable to physicists that they've left many asking whether traditional journals are necessary anymore." Peer review, a standard function of printed science journals, soon will be added and even improved upon so as to make electronic scientific publishing actually superior in reliability to printed journals. A related article ("Neuroscience on the Net," pp. 994-996) by Peter T. Fox and Jack L. Lancaster in the same issue of Science claims that there are already over 70 fully electronic, peer-reviewed scholarly journals online. The main focus of this article, however, is neuroscience community databasing, another avant garde method of doing virtual community scientific research via the global Internet. The technique promises instant global awareness of the latest research findings to aid in experiment design and interpretation. Another look at electronic journal publishing and what it portends for traditional scientific journals appeared in the Dec. 1994 Scientific American ("The Speed of Write" by Gary Stix, pp. 106-111). This article covers some of the same ground as Taubes' Science story, but provides much additional information and is therefore recommended to those who wish to follow this pivotal trend. "Commercial scientific publishers are feeling the pressure to enter the electronic arena," Stix reports. "Many, however, have yet to determine ways to smooth the transition. Simultaneous print and electronic distribution could, if anything, cause subscription rates to rise." This story is republished with permission from the January 1995 Cybernautics Digest, a monthly summary of reports about converging information technologies. (Contact: Terry Hansen, Cybernautics Digest, c/o KFH Publications Inc., 3530 Bagley Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98103; 206-547-4950; Fax: 206-547-5355; E-mail: twhansen@cuix.pscu.com. U.S. subscription rate: $24; $2 sample issue)