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Learn the Net News--a free weekly service from Learn the Net.com
http://www.learnthenet.comVol. 2, No. 23 -- Week of June 18, 2000
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Welcome to Learn the Net News.
Last week, temperatures in the Bay Area reached record highs, with the mercury in downtown San Francisco peaking at 103 degrees. Is this a result of global warming or just a weather anomaly? Regardless, heat can adversely affect your computer. To keep your had drive humming, find out this week how to maintain a cool machine all summer along.
When I'm not computing, you can often find me eating, or at least thinking about it. For lovers of food, the Web is an electronic cornucopia, serving up an amazing assortment of delicious sites--even for dieters. Join our Web Tour this week for a Trip Through Tasty Territory.
You may have noticed that we've sent out the newsletter a day earlier than usual. Why, you may wonder? Just in case you may have forgotten Father's Day, we offer a second chance to send Dad greetings with our free digital card service. So don't delay. Just click on this link to create an original card:
http://www.learnthenet.com/english/toolbar/cards.htm------------------------------------------------
"Top Ten Things You Can Do on the Net This Week" include:
1. Batter up with America's favorite pastime:
http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi/jp/bball2. Find out the local time in any country:
http://www.worldtimeserver.com/3. Read about alternative arthritis therapies:
http://www.arthritisinsight.com/medical/alternative/4. Go out and identify a shady tree:
http://www.enature.com/guides/select_trees.asp?curGroup=Trees5. Explore the hirsute history of sideburns:
http://www.badburns.bizland.com/main.html6. Watch the fog roll in with the SanFranciscoCam:
http://www.discovery.com/cams/sanfran/sanfran.html7. Listen to the music of Nepal:
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/pulseplanet/ax/index2.html8. Explore the Caribbean island of Haiti:
http://www.care.org/virtual_trip/haiti/index.html?aw9. Adopt a canine companion:
http://www.thepoop.com/search_rescue.asp10. Pick up some needles and learn to crochet:
http://crochet.rpmdp.com/tutorial.htmlHave a site you like? Let us know, please.
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Right now, many transactions, such as getting a mortgage, require a signature on a piece of paper. Although you can apply for a mortgage online, you can't actually finalize the deal until you sign the loan documents, which means going to the bank. All that is about to change. Last week, the U.S. Congress passed a bill that will give legal status to digital signatures. The president has said that he will sign the bill into law. Many other countries are considering similar legislation.
What this law means is that you will soon be able to do transactions from beginning to end over the Internet. The businesses that have backed the bill claim that it will save billions of dollars, costs that will be passed along to consumers. Soon, legal documents will be stored electronically and warehouses full of paper will become relics of the past. In theory, all this is good news--another victory for the digital revolution.
But as I was watching a TV program about film preservation, I realized that few storage media are as permanent as paper. Many movies have been hopelessly lost, because the celluloid has deteriorated beyond repair. The same is true of videotape. Some computer data stored on magnetic media has also decayed and can't be retrieved. On the other hand, centuries old books and documents live on. So I remain skeptical about the permanence of electronic data. No one really knows how long it will last. Will I use digital signatures? Yes. Will I be sure to print and save paper copies of important transactions? You can bet I will.
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Michael Lerner
Publisher
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