Re: Should we oppose the Data Superhighway/NII?

["Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger@lehman.com>]

Doug Merritt says:
> Counterexamples to Joy's thesis are trivially found in cryptography,
> and less obviously in things like computer generated holography. The latter
> might easily become a GUI standard of the future, and will indeed require
> VAX-MIPS-millenia of computation to compute in real time.
> 
> They would also require similarly astronomical amounts of bandwidth to
> transmit. By today's standards, that's ridiculous to assume. But by the
> standards of 10 years hence, two dimensional video may well appear as
> primitive as 110 baud text transmission does to us today.
> 
> Judging the future by today's standards tends to leave one's predictions
> high and dry.

Three dimensional video would not require bandwidths that would make
fiber optics wince -- even at the limits of human perceptional
capacities. (Holography encapsulates the three dimensional image in a
very high resolution piece of two-dimensional film. A digital analog
would only require a large boost in resolution -- large by our
standards, but not large by the standards of the bandwidth of fiber
optic cable.) Given that even your best scenario for "expensive big
application" comes up short, I don't see what the problem will be.

I can easily envision what I would do with a computer ten thousand
times more powerful than the one I have now. I can't see what I could
do with a communication channel ten thousand times wider than what a
bunch of fiber optics can in theory give me.

Perry