<Let me compare information to voltage but almost nil amps. Useless because all it can carry is another information, bla, bla, blab. What is information worth without the subject which is amp.? You can have one billion volts and not being able to kill the fly, never mind the bear.
Information now is just another cheap commodity, so I rather choose the heavy weight commodity. >
Marek, I tried stretching the analogy in my previous post to include amperage but my wire broke, so I deleted it and left it at the voltage. The analogy is too industrial-age really.
I'm not quite on your wavelength because I consider knowledge [which includes software and all other brain-type things not to mention images from anywhere, knowledge services such as medical, legal and other skills, money transactions etc etc ] to be the biggest thing going for humans.
The stuff which goes in wheelbarrows is chimpanzee stuff. Sure, it was great for the dark ages and the industrial revolution gave us levers and machines to replace our muscles to produce trains full of stuff rather than wheelbarrows full [which was our limit before machinery]. But the cyberspace revolution is enabling and replacing our brains. That is seriously valuable! It will make the industrial revolution look like the invention of flint axes.
Even the physical side of life is diminishing dramatically. A single 747 can carry 8,000 people to England from New Zealand and the same number back to New Zealand [16,000 total trips] in the same time that it took ships in the early 1970s to carry 400 one way!! Put it another way, there would need to be 40 ships to replace one 747 and people would need to accept being stuck on a ship for weeks at a time.
The 747 exists because of that commodity you call information. You can see that information on how to make and fly 747s is extremely valuable. CDMA patents are information. They are even more valuable. Windows2000 is information. MSFT is the richest company [almost] in human history and $ill IS the richest person.
We are just getting warmed up for this intellectual revolution which will make the industrial revolution look like a stone axe.
Alan Green$pan is right - the internet and new technology are not going to do more than hiccough over the dot.bomb and tech.wreck. We'll be off to the races by the end of the year.
Mqurice
Dow 16,000 Feb 2002
PS: The wonders of cyberspace and information allowed me to find, in 20 seconds, a link to the Fairsky, on which my wife and I travelled to Southampton in England from Wellington in New Zealand early in 1974, taking 6 weeks. I will show my wife!! shipsonparade.com |
