.... the ability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to understand, in Mind Brains, and Programs. His main argument is that because AI's are computers and computers have no thoughts of their own, they cannot understand. Any actions being performed to simulate behavior are confined by the programs available to the computer. He presents the example of a man linking Chinese characters and appearing to know the language, but in reality the man is just following the instructions given to him ( the program). This example serves well to explain how although a computer can look like it understands a story, it can do no more than "go through the motions." Of cours .....

.... children view on the . The net itself can be very valuable if used as a tool for learning. In the group Families Against Censorship, they understand the concept of parental filtering (Censorship 2000). One of the families uses primarily the to home-school their children. When a child signs on to the web, he or she has almost infinite resources right at the ends of their fingertips. Where else can you maximize the worlds resources from inside the comforts of home. I know that a young teenager can productively use this information. I have been using the net for about eight years for my reports and personal knowledge quests. My father would check on me every now .....

.... that can later be retrieved using optical technology. Although it consumes physical space and requires proper care, non-acidic paper printouts can hold information for centuries. If long-term storage is not of prime concern, magnetic medium can retain tremendous amounts of data and consume less space than a single piece of paper. The magnetic technology used for computer data storage is the same technology used in the various forms of magnetic tape from audiocassette to videocassette recorders. One of the first computer storage devices was the magnetic tape drive. Magnetic tape is a sequential data storage medium. To read data, a tape drive must wind throu .....

.... videos. Something about the combination of sex and computers seems to make children and adults for that matter, a little crazy. In an 18 month study, the team surveyed 917,840 sexually explicit pictures on the internet where pornographic. Trading in explicit imagery is now "one of thelargest recreational applications of users of computer networks." The great majority (71%) of the sexual images on the newsgrouls originate from adult oriented bulletin-board systems (BBS). According to BBS, 98.9% of the consumers of online porn are men. The women hold a 1.1% in chat rooms and on Bulletin boards. Perhaps because hard-core sex pictures are so widely available .....

.... of ideas that Negroponte originally explored in his monthly column for Wired magazaine. But the book is not a mere anthology. Fortunately for us, when compiling these columns, Negroponte deemed it impo rtant to re-examine and -as he says-'repurpose' many of his original ideas in light of what has changed in the short time since he originally wrote many of the Wired pieces. The result is a read that is often insightful, often madenning, and always provoc ative. In the first part he talks about the communication medium, and how information content is so much more important than bandwidth. If we would only transmit better-labelled bits, .....

.... a while. Although Fulton probably foresaw that his invention would be used for war, he hardly could have envisioned it launching projectiles with the capability to level entire countries. However, after a series of innovations in nuclear missile and submarine designs, the submarine-launched ballistic missile has become an integral part of our naval weapons arsenal. To understand the need for the development of nuclear missile submarines, there is a need to examine the political climate of the world in the era after World War II. The realignment of the superpowers after the war resulted in a unique situation. The two major naval powers of the day, Great Brit .....

.... in computing devices to emerge. In 1642, an 18 year old named Blaise Pascal, invented a numerical wheel calculator. This rectangular box was called a Pascaline. It used eight movable dials to add sums up to eight figures long. Pascal's device used a base of ten to accomplish this. When the ten's dial moved one revolution, the dial representing the hundred's place moved one notch and so on. The drawback to the Pascaline, of course, was its limitation to addition. In 1694, a German mathematician named Gottfried Wilhem von Leibniz, improved the Pascaline by creating a machine that could also multiply. Leibniz's mechanical multiplier worked by a system of ge .....

.... is also increasingly being used in other computer applications, such as photographic storage, and the Internet. Computers can also store, transmit and play back sound. When a picture or a sound is stored on a computer it said to be digitized. There are two main ways of digitizing a picture. One is by vector graphics. Here the information in the picture is stored as mathematical equations. Engineering drawing applications such as CAD (computer assisted device) use this method. The other method is by bit mapped graphics. Here the computer actually keeps track of every point in the picture and its description. Paint programs use this technique. .....