What can the Internet do for me?

If anyone thinks the Internet will still=FREE in the future, then have some green cheese from the Moon on the side. I think the longer you wait the less free options there will be, because BIG BU$INE$$ is not going to sit around and watch their revenue streams disappear. They will be all over controlling all media types either through paid services or lawyers burying competition in court papers. Limewire is the latest, and in a few years it will all be over; the Internet will have a new name, anew game and it will all cost you more money. Go now, go quickly and enjoy while you can.

Ruth,
I get the feeling from your question that you are waiting for an all-in-one service that you don't need to do a lot of equipment hook ups and wires running all over behind your TV. I recommend that you find a knowledgable friend who is using the internet more than you do, and get an idea of what is needed to get where you want to be. Right now, there are internet enabled TV's, game consoles and stand alone boxes that don't take up the space of a computer and give you most of the multimedia functions you might need (i.e. European TV shows, movie streaming and music). If you wait, you will miss out on what is available now, and if you get something now, you will be locked in to whatever technology you decide on. Wireless devices are extremely popular and help to avoid the wire mess, but you will need to choose the types of media you need to have access to in order to pick the right device. If you wait for an total solution single box type of connection, you may be waiting for a long time. One of the reasons for having so many different types of devices is because people want to pick and choose what they want and how they want it presented to them.

I have chosen a bundle package for my cable/internet/phone and it is all hooked up either hardwired or wireless to multiple devices in my home. Each device is built for it's own special purpose, and they all work as advertised. Having Netflix on all my computers, TV and Xbox, lets me enjoy older movies and shows while my cable connection lets me keep up with the current shows and movies. It will be a few years until all content is provided digitally via just an internet connection. The FCC and telecom industry are to blame for the separation of media, even though everything is now digital. Until demand forces the internet and television companies to join forces, you will have at least 2 different data connections to get all the content you are looking for.

Well, I use the internet for everything I can. The information seems to be endless. Study is my main use and also as you say Voip. My daughter is learning art so I can find pictures for her and print them out so she can get the idea of shape etc. She can also watch video on how to paint with oils or acrylics or stretch a canvas.
Download music, movies and if you have the right tools you can make your own DVD collection.
I have just finished my business studies and as I am a busy person the internet is the place where I studied, libraries are great but sometimes dont have the information needed and the web has it all.
Reply by Lesley Ann

Ruth, the things that you mentioned are of entertainment value only. However the Internet is an excellent source of knowledge for lifelong learners like myself. I am completing a Masters degree online and have no regrets that this is the means I chose. Then I will learn something else. I also sort hoax from facts because I want to know. For TV I would invest in one of the knew broadband TVs that extract 1000's of channels from the Internet. There are several brands one of which is Visio. This is early in this technology but prices are bound to come down eventually.

Hi Ruth,

Your post has brought forth quite a bit of attention regarding "What we can do with the internet?". Rightfully so, as the internet has changed all of our lives whether we know it or not. The internet effects our lives in immeasurable ways and is around us in some way wherever we go. At the grocery store where you shop, orders for food are placed and tracked, inventory is monitored, and employee time cards are compiled and paychecks are deposited to the employees bank accounts, all through the internet. When you order a product either over the phone or the internet, you are still using the internet in many ways ranging from the actual call you're making to place the order, to the customer rep taking the order, entering the information into their internet connected computer where the internet takes over and monitors everything from the order to the shipping, tracking, and ultimately the final delivery of your product to your location. The examples are endless.

In today's world, we've made the transition from being "Plugged In" to being "Connected". We're capable of acquiring whatever information we need almost immediately, and manipulating that information to achieve whatever end we desire through a seemingly simple device we carry in a purse or on our hip. Forgot to turn the thermostat down before we left for our vacation? No problem. You're "Connected".

The new wave of this electronic manipulation (not really so new actually) is through wireless communications. We have the technology to do nearly anything you can imagine. To accomplish nearly anything you can dream up. If you can keep up, you have the resources of the world all within the sound of your voice or the touch of your finger. Sounds pretty good doesn't it? But at what cost?

The possibilities of the future seem limitless given the pace of our rapidly advancing technology, and that poses a problem. The simplest way I can describe my feelings about this is the fact that every step forward in this technology is a step backward in human interaction. If you don't believe me, just take a look at how teenagers communicate today. Texting seems preferable to actually calling someone. Try calling a company and actually talking to a human being in English that you can understand. Don't bother going to the grocery store, you can make your order online and have it delivered.

I'm a tech person too. I truly appreciate all of the advances we've made in technology and I agree that many of these leaps forward make our lives easier, simpler, less stressful, and provide a level of convenience our parents never dreamed of. But I know this too. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, you'll never be able to teach your kid to ride a bicycle with it. You'll never be able to hug your child with it. And sometimes a text message that says "I love You" just doesn't cut it.

As I stated before, the things we can do with the internet are only limited by our imagination. If it hasn't been invented yet, just wait a couple of minutes. The tech is there. The only thing that limits us today regarding what we can do with the internet is money. What money you ask? The money that companies believe they're entitled to make for every original idea that was ever conceived. It's really as simple as the reason we don't have cheap renewable energy. If companies can't figure out a way to make a fortune with it, they don't put any money into the research to develop it so it will be affordable to everyone who needs it.

In 1972 I was recording a new record album to my 4 track Teac Reel to Reel system. We did that because record albums inevitably collected dust and scratches that degraded the original sound. Of course that was considered a copyright infringement. I was talking to my friend while recording the album and I predicted that the day would come when all music could be enjoyed in it's original splendor from a simple microchip. He thought I was nuts. Then we watched Star Trek.

So please allow me to make another prediction. Ten years from today it will be common to communicate with anyone in the world, face to face, wirelessly. You will be able to watch any TV program or listen to any song ever recorded on your home TV, stereo, or on your portable phone via a wireless internet connection. Every electronic device in your home will be capable of "Connecting" to your mobile phone. Modern kitchens will be fitted with electronic devices that help you plan your family's meals (including special diets), maintain a shopping list, order food from your local grocer and have it delivered at specific times and dates (which can all be altered by your mobile phone), and walk you through preparing the recipes for your family meals so everything is finished at the precise time you desire. Your schedule will be managed every second of every day, telling you when to fill the car with whatever fuel you may be using, getting your haircut, picking up the kids from soccer practice, and walking you through all of the nuisances of preparing your daughter?s wedding. When to eat. What to eat. Where to eat. When to exercise and for how long. When to take your medicine or give your kids theirs. and so on and so on.

I apologize for hijacking your question and this post to air out some of my frustration with our Brave New World through the Internet. I realize there are other forums for this sort of thing. At the same time, as a guy who's been watching this technology grow throughout the years, sometimes all I really want is a warm, heartfelt hug. No buttons, no commands, no gadgets. Simply the warm touch with another human being.

It's a brave new world Ruth. I guess we just have to hold our breath and hold on.

Best Regards

I use my mobile for every call. I use Penntel. It costs me $8 for the sim card each month. IT costs me 8 cents to phone any lan line in Australia and over 70 countries all untimed. It costs me 10.5 cents per minute timed per second for calls to Australian mobiles. I have a voip line at home connected to three cordless phones. This costs me $5 per month and gives me 80 free 8 cent calls from either my mobile or the voip line. I also get 50 free SMS from the computer. While I have a few issues with Pennytel support I have not had any problems with my mobile calls and I have not had any problems with my voip connections in the past two years. I also get free call to other people wih Pennytel sim cards or voip line 24/7. Calls to 1800 are free and calls to 1300 numbers are charges at 25cents maximum. I believe that Telstra and Optus should be giving older customers who have been paying them for the past fifty years to get ****** all, a free mobile on the Pennytel sytem and all they should be paying for is the calls. After all they are the ones who have made Telstra and the like rich during these years. With the NBN coming soon it will be the time for big changes in the Telephony Industry. If you wish to discuss this any further I can be con tacted on 0412 232815. during the day or 0289869485 after 6.ooPM.

As much or as little as you want it to do Ruth. It connects disparate devices, data, entertainment, etc... Presenting them in a relatively unified way. Any literature, education books, classes, logs and organizes correspondence....

The greatest achievement of last century was enabling EVERYONE ease of access to damn near EVERYTHING.

You can put your recipe collection on a site or your computer, compare it with friends, acquaintances, chefs. Any collection of data. Digital Imagery seems to provide the quickest learning time and grant most immediate enjoyment for many folks.

You can put all the stuff in storage sheds, the barn, spare bedrooms, spare houses on Craigslist and sell it....FOR FREE! (barn, storage sheds...would be me)

You can install Google Earth and amuse yourself for days looking at the world in near real time satellite, road map or combined.

You can get addicted to the info overload. You can see more off the wall and perhaps true conspiracy theory than you knew there were conspiracies available.

Get addresses, maps, show times, make reservations...the internet connects all the data. Does this help?

1. You will never be able to see all TV channels on the internet, so you will still need your cable, or you must be satisfied with what you can get from the internet. Most of all bad quality.
2. Using Skype is very expensive. You better use Voipbuster, which is a sip-account. Buy a router with telephone support, Fritz box, and enter your voipbuster settings. But know that without electricity, or proper internet connection, the whole thing does not work, counts for Skype too. A seperate direct Landline always works. I even hung up a phone, not a dect, on crawling height in the bedroom. So when electricity is down and it is pitch dark and I broke a leg I still can call for a doctor or ambulance. I am not getting any younger on it.

PCH Total Care

internet is being used to save and send by email the translated works from english to tamil.

If, like me,you use broadband via a land line then you can't get rid of that. If by Vodophone 'stick' then I think you could dump your land line. Don't forget Telecom will charge you a heap to reconnect if you want to.

Using Skype is NOT "very expensive".
I downloaded it for free... and could call any Skype user anywhere in the world.
I subscribed for $30/YEAR... and could call any landline/cellular phone in the US.
I paid another $30/year to get a SkypeIN phone number so that any landline/cellular phone could call me on Skype.
You get a 'virtual' 'unlimited' number of minutes... meaning there's some -large- number of minutes you can use (like 10,000/mo) unless you abuse it.
Perhaps... if you do a lot of international calling, THEN... it may get more expensive, but cheaper than a lot of telco plans.

CNET, thank you for returning me to this page after confirming my email, kudos from a first time user. et al, there's too much creative space for conspiracy theories not to be mentioned at some point so I thought I'd go ahead and say even if all this meta crossreferenced code was similar to the 4th (possibly intangible) wall from fahrenheit 451, it doesn't mean it can't be used as a good tool. it's only when you start burning books and raising heck all over the place that it's not ok but that has nothing to do with technology, you can offend someone with a spork if you try hard enough. I don't know, sorry all, anyway, the first thing for efficiency i'd like to see is library 2.0 accelerated at warp speed including open source catalogs databases. I am not currently involved or related to any librarians or have library interests and am not being paid by a library to overadvertise the highly unused full resources of libraries and their keepers. I don't mean cut funding on the libraries I mean hurry up and get the libraries integrated heck set up netlibrarybooks or something witty instead of netflix to keep supporting the local efficiency and well worn/warm books. Anyway whatevers important to you all will happen but that's my two cents, library integration. No I mean like YouTube has a link to library information, maybe let libraries pay cheap for rights to own rentable content like a lot of them do with dvd's vhs etc. Anyway lots can sprout from library research and database functionality with whatever you all go after, especially since open source is going to win. we dont have to build figurative cars and trucks on the internet, if we build the wind and then kites. big as they come, if we want, let's sing a song about it, i mean it.

*MANIC-FREE POST-SYNOPSIS*
*Library 2.0: better advancement and more quality integration, centralized web-based free public resources with easy integration for local libraries' personal websites, integrate more symbioticly with sponsoring sites, otherwise make one of our most efficient and versatile tools as a civilization (organized intelligence and wisdom and compassion, other) more efficient, a tool that primarily serves in various broad and/or specific as tools for its patrons. with the internet, we could play storytime for kids (not a creepo, got 2 kids of my own) through the internet while raising money for the library, tie in with some site that agrees to such as createspace or cafepress or something and let groups of children make their own art books together at the library and online through each library's website and parents/family/etc can order the books online reasonably priced with proceeds to the library, offer the base at cost price instead of fundraising price if anyone wants to donate a copy of their kids book to the library to actually physically have for others to check out. you know how rss feeds and tweets and all these things are really oh phones and tvs, too, all these things are integrating intangibly, that's a new horizon on the way, gang, anyway, how everything's integrating more and more, what about groups themselves being intangible in kind of the same way? have different ways to connect to the groups, could also have things like the standard facebook or google or other big britches (hyuk) groups and the such to also tie in to. also i'd like to see the whole mapquest concept microscosmicly (sp, again?) applied with things such as some type of retail grocery store (i didn't take marketing, i don't know if retail is the right word) to have on their website a grocery list printer and included on the shopping list you can print it has directions on which aisles to go down first either by temperature needs or quickness factor or other things, i don't know, unless you all make a nonprofit grocery store chain i probably won't put a whole lot of thought on that one so you all figure that out if you want or think it's worth it. ahh, it'll come in time some way or another as we cope with absorbing each new step that we can and i'm only fluent enough in technology to be like a simile for knowing enough of a foreign language to accidentally get fought and kicked out of a pub in a relevant country immediately, still haven't figured that one out, i'm no good with computers. anyway, still, i think what should be focused on for sure is efficiency of how to sail these seas we be explorin' since al gore graced us with this place to explore and set up shop. we need to teach each other better, another reason i thank CNET, though I will be heavily ignored due to mania if nothing else of the various things i'm sure someone or another or many others (my momma! my momma like everything i do) which is actually probably for the better, but anyway thanks for having this place that others will bounce ideas and learn and all kinds of wonderful things. More integration and efficent categorization of resources and tools including resources and tools spreading awareness about resources and tools. ok i said my many too many cents, just saying my mind though, sorry if this took up too much space or got you riled up but i wanted to express it all and i'm not sorry about that unless it accidentally hurt someone's feelings or other negative well not sorry depending but anyway a real simple fix is scrolling past this me here and finding more useful comments for your goals rolling eyes, all of its fine by me just good luck on your journeys and may the land ho's never end

There are a number of PC programs that give various levels of access. have you looked at:

http://www.accesscabletvforfree.com/
http://www.ehow.com/how_4821656_cheap-cable-television.html

What you have to be aware of is the bandwidth usage and if it is legal in the country your in at the time. I would not be comfortable in suggestion any particular application as it may not be legal in your country. I will say though that Google is a wonderful search engine.

Ge thanks! The systems is actually a teaching project for security analysis and multiple OS intergration.

Interweb definition: The Internet, typically used in a jocular or sarcastic manner by more experienced Internet users, especially as a mockery of the less experienced ....

The internet can be used for doing research, and downloading softwares, and documents, etc

Aside from TV and phone services as discussed above, I have unlimited usage for the Internet. I have long ago thrown away my dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, grammar book and phone book and use the Internet instead. It is much faster than the printed form. Any information you wanted to know is in the Net. Just Google it. I was able to fix the window mechanism of my car because there is a Youtube showing me how to do it. When my daughter was stricken with ovarian cancer at the age of 8, we searched for a better way to treat it and showed it to her oncologist. She is now 22 and free of the disease. When I have to search for a classmate that we have not seen for years, I found him at Classmates.com. My wife uses it for recipes. When I want to see a place, I use Google Earth. If I want a software or computer tips I go to cNet.com. Some people also use the net to earn a living by writing interesting blogs. There are so much more but it would take a lot of space.

..when you say: "We don't get the Palm Pre+ in Australia as this country doesn't exist."

I see some take umbrage over that remark, but as a Canadian I fully understand. Often US companies seem to ignore that Canada exists, and when they do they treat us as if we are part of the USA. It is much better now than it used to be, even with Microsoft - they and others took a long time to clue in that the Canadian (and other like Australian) markets are a lucrative pursuit.

You give a good idea to Ruth M. and others what can be done within the home respecting internet usage. Ignore the naysayers, they are just jealous..... but then, so am I of your setup..