I'm sure amazon is happy...i wonder if we'll get some chinese users,not likely tho

Interesting post William..........

Thanks!!!

So , who is in control here???

Fear ....................now what does one have to fear???

thought we already had chinese users?

That's a great book William, I've read all of Asimov's stuff. He's a great writer. The idea is one of the things I am most afraid of. In the book the population is stablised at a certain level, the inhabitants all live in mansions and human contact, including sexual, provokes repulsion. A new child is 'made' by genetic scientists only when an inhabitant dies. I may be mixing two stories together here, haven't read that one for a while, but the implications are the same. I can easily see us get to the state in which human contact becomes the unusal means of contact, rather than the usual. Can't see it going as far as the book but it's still a very depressing thought.

Chinese users, yeah, i'm aware of that...But isnt chinese internet strictly controlled through an intranet type structure.
I remember the old stories of "internet crackdowns" where police would bust internet cafe's and arrest people.

aren't both Estragon and Alien from China?

Originally posted by helen670
So , who is in control here???

Fear

Since when has that ever been different.

All of our basic instincts are driven by fear.
Fear of death.
Fear of starvation.
Fear of darkness.
Fear of cold.
Fear of sickness.
Fear of lonliness.
etc.

Originally posted by William

Originally posted by helen670
So , who is in control here???

Fear

Since when has that ever been different.

All of our basic instincts are driven by fear.
Fear of death.
Fear of starvation.
Fear of darkness.
Fear of cold.
Fear of sickness.
Fear of lonliness.
etc.

You are quite right!
But this time it is different Fear............
There is Fear of anyone that seems to resemble a terrorist!
There is Fear of catching some deadly virus.......which i believe there are many others , but no one knows as yet........
There is Fear of who your talkin to might really be???
There is Fear in the air...............I can feel it .........coming in the air tonight.........sorry........Phill Collins......great song!

No really..........Fear is not new, but it is all around us even more so after many things happening too close to each other to ignore.......

But fear only one................

Originally posted by KKing123
aren't both Estragon and Alien from China?

Estragon is in China but he's not Chinese (He's a Brit I believe.) Alien is a Kiwi, New Zealander.

Estragon is indeed one of Her Majesty's subjects and is currently in the PRC.
Yes, the Chinese internet is strictly controlled -but in practice it's not strictly enforced: e.g. you can't easily get the BBC online but you get the World Service clear as a bell and various "caching" tricks help.
Annotingly, they often forget to "unban".
Still, I doubt if on balance they do much worse than commercial pressure does in the US - AOL, Yahoo etc spike at the drop of a hat.
What drives the Govt. mad occasionally is text-messaging which is the real internet in China -SARS was well known (not by that name of course) last autumn.

People fear what they don't understand.

I dont know what the big deal is.... I buy everything online.

Originally posted by William
Mark this date: 5/22/2003, for it marks an important milestone in the evolution of society.

Why this date?!?!?! What happened?!?!?

Didn't you read the whole post?

International news noticed that fears of offline/realword events (SARS) have driven a society to do more of their daily activities online.

The Internet is now integral, or even vital to society, rather than an intetesting "thing" off to the side.

This brings to mind the dilbert strips about the future and how humanity will die out once virtual reality gets cheaper than dating.

XAOS

What somebody needs to do now is become a door-to-door salesman and start coughing on people when they answer the door, freakin scare them to death.

Originally posted by William
And now, the Digital Revolution has provided the alternative that the fearful need to avoid human contact.

Yes. This is why our world will continue its downward spiral. People have forgotten what it used to be like....when phones were only used when you couldn't find where your friends were and when you were told to send them mail, you needed postage stamps.

Technology replacing humanity.

Laugh if you must, but we've all seen what it can do. People becoming too wrapped up in their online lifes (Like Hkot/Themaster), and often times hurting themselves or others with the pent up frustration it causes them when they find those lifes to be unfulfilling.

In my heaven, there are no computers.

Actually............lack of human contact is not such a bad thing. I actually think ti will be better if humans were more isolated. On the net, humanity is lovely, in person, they are bi pedal cockroaches.