Web 3.0
So apparently the British say there’s a new internet coming, and they’re really defensive on the subject of who invented the old one. They’re in denial — look how hard they try to blame the internet on everybody except Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning eco-agitator Al Gore.
Al Gore jokes aside, they — and here I mean the authours of the article and not the engineers at CERN — appear not to grasp the fundamentals of computer technology. According to this article, the new internet "would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so," as though the only bottleneck on the whole path is the damn phone line. Even assuming there’s a parallel increase in local network speed, you might have a bit of a time finding consumer hardware that appreciates the attempt to force that much data onto a disk in five seconds. By the same token, how will more bandwidth make internet games better, again? I can’t remember the last game I played that was bandwidth-limited. They’re mainly latency-limited, and unless some major upgrades to the speed of light are also part of this package I’m thinking that’s pretty much going to remain the case.
Also notice the part where they say it’ll be available to government agencies and universities, but "is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users." Hey, Euro-socialists, here’s a heads-up for you. Over on this side of the pond you’re hard-pressed to find anything "domestic users" want that remains unavailable. This whole idea of some sort of government-sponsored mega-internet that the common man won’t have access to is fairly quaint. Oh, and what’s with that bit about how personal storage will go obsolete and we’ll all just "entrust it all [all of our data] to the internet?" Maybe privacy and ownership are obsolete in Europe, but I don’t quite see everybody giving up on it right quick-like.
Thanks for getting some mention of the Higgs wedged into your CERN article, though. Even though it sort of looks like it snuck in by mistake. Bit of a non sequitur there.
