HIGH TECH CORNER: ACCESS TO INTERNET SAID INTERSTATE CALL

The Federal Communications Commission ruled on Thursday that every call you make on the Internet is an interstate call.

So what does this mean to you the casual Internet user? It means that every Internet access you make now comes under new federal telecommunications rules. This now opens all of us Internet users up to the possibility of new federal taxes.

I fear that the hope of maintaining a non-taxed Internet may soon be over. How many times will you check your e-mail if you get hit with a tax every time you log in?

The other scary possibility is that you are taxed on the time you have spent on the Internet looking at Web pages. In today's world of polling the American public on every possible topic, I wish they had done a poll on what we feel about being taxed for Internet access. The day of to $20 a month Internet access may soon be over. Your new ISP may soon be Uncle Sam.

Well it was very disappointing when I contacted Falcon Cable to get the exact skinny on cable modem access in Cape. The company told me how it was going to replace all these miles and miles of copper with fiber.

I started to dream of great Internet band width for Cape with Web pages not slowly painting but simply appearing on my desktop as if by high-speed magic. But, alas, it was all a dream, because the possibility of cable access for Cape Girardeau will not come for years, if ever.

The decision for cable modem access at 10 times or greater the speed of a normal modem has not even been made as something Falcon wants to do. The company will not even decide if it wants to support Internet access until all that fiber is in place.

Yes this is the same fiber that TCI should have put into place as per the original contact with the city of Cape a few years ago, but our City Council let TCI off the hook.

I want to make a plea to the Cape Girardeau City Council. Go to the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show in Las Vegas April 19 through 22. This is the show of shows that displays what the rest of the world is getting in cable access. If you don't go, how will you have a clue what our local cable company is not giving us that the rest of the United States takes for granted.

The Y2K scare is finally starting to hit our federal government. I mentioned in articles a few months ago that the Y2K worry is not simply within our nation's borders. It is all the embedded IC chips that are used by the rest of the world.

The Soviet Union has now agreed to send military officials to the United States to sit with our military on the eve 2000 to make sure nothing goes wrong. What could go wrong is the scary part. With out-of-date computer hardware being run by thousands of unhappy and non-paid Russians does not make this world a safe place.

Single lines of code that jump out of their standard applications at the year 2000 may show a false launch by the United States causing the Russians to launch a counterattack. While all normal people understand that Y2K can cause this, you can believe that there are military people on all sides that feel this might be the perfect excuse to launch because the opposing side will think it's a software glitch and have no time to react.

The bottom line is that even though the cold war is over, the danger of global annihilation is even greater today than in any days in our time.

A quick note on the Microsoft versus DOJ lawsuit. Microsoft should stick to software and stop doing videos. During the trial Microsoft showed on videotape that Internet access was faster on Windows 95/98 than under Windows 3.1.

Microsoft did get caught with its pants down when under extensive cross-examination it came to light that Microsoft had used a 28K modem on Windows 3.1 and a 56K modem on Win95/98. If you are keeping a score card on Microsoft versus the DOJ, I think you will agree that the DOJ is ahead on points. But if the DOJ wins, and Microsoft is broken up, who will win if Windows and apps from Office like WORD don't have the upgrades due to distributed resources? Do you really want to run Windows 98 in the year 2000?

As always, feel free to contact me at (BOLD) DIGITAL@LDD.NET & WWW.DIGITALLABS.COM (UNBOLD

Rich Comeau is an electronics scientist and owner of Digital Labs of Cape Girardeau. E-mail him at digital@ldd.net