Word: fi
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...just installed a Wi-Fi network in my home. Wi-Fi, known on Apple computers as Airport and to PC geeks as 802.11b, is an increasingly popular way to get online without being tethered to a cable. The connection hangs in the air as a radio signal, ready to be received within 300 ft. of the transmitter. Plug an Internet cable into a wireless router (I used a $199 DSL router from Belkin), put wireless cards in all your computers (they cost about $100 a pop), and you're ready to surf on the move. So, as I discovered...
...hardly the only provider in town. There are so many Wi-Fi networks in San Francisco these days that I was able to drive through most of the city without ever going out of range (the whole time with a souped-up Pringles can attached to my laptop; more on that later). The practice is called war driving--after the old hacker game of war dialing, which is what Matthew Broderick was doing in War Games but with far fewer unintended consequences. Indeed, many of your neighbors will happily post the location of their network on the Web--effectively inviting...
When skeptical listeners scoff at Kurzweil's sci-fi predictions, saying, "Oh, we won't see that for 100 years," he points out that when it comes to "innovation time," 100 years melts down to about 25. That's because, as he says, "our rate of exponential growth is growing exponentially." Evolution accelerates: it took 100 million years for the human brain to develop, but computing power is expected to surpass it within a generation. "By 2040 or 2050 nonbiological intelligence will be trillions of times more powerful than biological intelligence," he says...
...Fi routers and network cards come with software to walk you through the installation. The steps will vary slightly, depending on each computer's operating system. The older the OS, the trickier it can be; Windows XP is designed to detect and configure a PC card to talk to an existing network, and getting an iBook running Mac OS X to communicate with my Linksys router was a breeze...
...with a clip of him singing “I’m a toll-man” to the tune of the Blues Brothers’ “Soul Man,” focused on a Back To the Future theme, using clips from the 1985 sci-fi thriller to “travel” through the course of his life, from his early days as a child in Brighton housing projects to his career in the state senate...