That's Us!
Editorial
Wi-Fi and the Cities
No fewer than 300 cities and towns around the nation have taken wireless Internet access, or Wi-Fi, to the people. San Francisco's aim is to make the entire city a hot spot, Chicago plans to blanket the city with access, and large parts of Philadelphia are to go wireless soon. But New York, which should be leading the way, is dragging. A plan to offer free Wi-Fi access in city parks has been moving slowly, and a larger vision has yet to take shape.
Wide dissemination of Wi-Fi is not the future. It is now, needed by businesses, educators and especially the underserved populations on the wrong side of the digital divide. Rural communities have known for a while that going wireless is cheaper, more reliable and allows even the most remote areas to log in. It spares the expense of laying down extensive networks of cables, not to mention the work and time involved.
Local governments are filling a leadership void at the federal and state levels, and they are going directly to providers to negotiate Wi-Fi deals. San Francisco's mayor has turned to Earthlink and Google. Earthlink, based in Atlanta, is also helping Philadelphia. In some of these deals, lower-speed connections are free, with higher speeds available at a price. The providers also hope to make money off advertising.
Surfing the net in the parks is a modest goal for New York, where some smaller parks have already been hooked up by agreement between independent groups managing those parks and NYC Wireless, a nonprofit organization. The city needs to get moving to get the larger parks online, but it also has to get serious about wider access. The minimal goal — pressed with energy in the City Council by Gale Brewer of Manhattan — should be free or low-cost access in its densely populated, poor neighborhoods in all the boroughs. That is where cable and phone line options are out of financial reach, and where education especially suffers as a result.
Leapa is ringing an alarm here and now. Banning will not work. Before it's too late, let's try something that will work. Start with education.
File: orthodox jews and internet
jews internet
posted by Leapa at 6/06/2006 01:18:00 PM
3 Comments:
Leapa has given the best advice at the end of the editorial. Education not ban. When will our gedolim realize that banning anything only causes the oilam to go ahead and do it anyway. The only one's who listen are the one's who aren't interested or can't. The only answer to any abuses of Internet accessing is to educate everybody, from teenagers up to grandparents, of the pitfalls of the internet and what they can do to a person's yiddishkeit. Yes, let us have asifos, constantly, to remind klal yisroel of it's place in the world. Our place is kedusha and if we all understand that and feel the need to have kedusha in our lives, accessing the Internet will never be a problem.
The internet is here to stay, plain and simple. Banning it would have the same effect as banning the telephone.
pro-ban
perhaps the satan has used his wily ways upon you. He has convinced you that is your duty to fight for the truth against all the misguided people on the internet. and so by this tortured logic he has ensared you also to use his new weapon in his modern arsenal of technology.
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