Welcome to Wirehead: the final column. Yup, this is it for Wirehead; it's the last issue of The Bucknellian for the semester. President Adams will be handing me a piece of paper and sending me on my way in a few weeks.
Sorry, they'll be no fanfare this week, and unfortunately Bette Midler couldn't make it by to sing me farewell while sprawling herself over my desk. Rather, this week will be just like what you're seeing on TV right now: reruns.
You may notice that I write sort of about the same things every week. It's not because I have a stuttering problem. This whole "new world" of electronic media, virtual things, and Wirehead stuff is all connected together in various and sundry ways. After all, that's why they called it the World Wide Web. There's no one path through all the information. Putting it all together might help it make a little more sense (if not for you, then for me.)
So if you haven't been keeping track, here's the equivalent of Cliff notes for Wirehead Cliff. And if you feel the need to reminisce for some odd reason, check out the Wirehead web page for all the full articles.
Being a Wirehead is more than being a nerd. If information is power, then the Wireheads are in control. They control the flow of information. Of recent, the Internet has become the ultimate tool for finding information. Wireheads control that too.
Internet technology is significant because it combines a lot of wires; it brings the transfer of information into a single media. For example, a typical house today has wires for telephones and cable TV. The Internet will eventually combine these together, as well as carry radio information and still allow you access to the rest of the Internet. All these different forms of media will be combined to utilize the best qualities of each media to communicate information in a way that's easy to use. Someday.
Much of what prevents the Internet of today from becoming a global "information superhighway" is the lack of an intuitive interface. Contrary to popular belief the web was not developed by America Online, but rather by a bunch of Wirehead physicists in Switzerland.
My answer to finding things on the net is QuickFix. QuickFix changes the way you find things on the Internet in a fundamental way. Check it out.
Other people have approached the whole web navigation problem in a different way. Making lists of things that people like seems to be the "in" thing on the Internet. The original Cool Site of the Day was, well, the coolest thing around for awhile. My personal favorite is Pointcom's Top 5% of all web sites award. I have to commend them for constantly rating every web site on the planet and empirically calculating the top five percent. They must stay up pretty late. I wonder if they are in their own top five percent?
Getting into the game, myself, I have empirically calculated and awarded the Wirehead's Top 0.02% of all All Cool Mac Shareware Insofar as Yesterday Awards. Download them all and pay the shareware fees. You may not care now, but an angel told me that every dollar of unpaid shareware fees is another minute in purgatory. If you're one of those atheist Wireheads, or you have already cashed in your soul with Bill Gates, never mind. That's Bill's next project, buy up human souls; with enough he'll be able to compete with The Big Guy up there. He's already got lots of minds: millions of people think that Windows 95 is a great piece of software.
Even darker than Gates' master plan is the day that the Web went black in protest of the Telecommunications law that prevents the electronic transmission of the vaguely termed "indecent" material. Protesters say that it is an attempt to censor The Bible, classic art, and anything else they can find an excuse for. Give me a break; the law was written to ban child pornography, not art.
Laws and commerce on the net have made it more and more complex. But the web's power to liberate information makes it easy for people to obtain, absorb and contribute.
Will the best of the Internet evolve to the top of the Internet food chain? Will freedom allow the smartest and best species to become the standard for all goodness? Ask the dolphins.
Or, if you're bored_ask me, a Wirehead at [email protected]. Buh-bye. :-)