Race? Class? Gender? Nationality? (Score 2)

Katz's post, like almost all others in Slashdot, seem to forget about the real barriers to information in this world. Factoid, off the bat of my head: more than 75% of the world's population hasn't even seen a telephone.

True, the Net runs the serious danger of getting privatized, but please realize that what wonderfully free information there is or may be, not many people have access to it in the first place. I'm a recent Linux convertee cuz of that (6 months! Painless transition! All I need now is for Adobe to port and a sweet little text editor like NoteTab and I'll never boot Win98 again!)

OSS is one step in creating the information revolution, but one little step that depends on a lot of other more pressing issues. It's funny how often discussions of the Net and WWW - supposedly world wide networkds - always float around a certain sector of the US population: the people who already have access to PCs and the Net (either from home, work or public institutions).

Government regulation, no matter what pseudo-libertarian net heads may say, is not necessarily a bad thing; how many people in North America and Europe would have access to the basic utilities if it wasn't considered a duty of the government to, if not directly provide access, at least to make sure such things aren't completely left to market variables?

Yo, Commander Taco sir, how 'bout a poll on race and nationality? Would be cool, no, to see.