From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Date: Mon, 7 Aug 95 07:08:46 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: NYPotpourii
Message-ID: <199508071408.KAA26096@pipe3.nyc.pipeline.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


   Abject beg: it's easier for the 'droid to act on each item
   separately, do please request 1-by-1.


   8-7-95.  NYPaper:


   "A Cyberspace Front in a Multicultural War: Finding
   alternatives to a world where only English is typed."

      With the explosion of worldwide interest in the
      Internet, the dominance of English, stemming from the
      network's beginnings in the United States, has become a
      sensitive matter. A fear is that English, already the
      international language of business and science, is
      becoming the lingua franca of the computer world as
      well, further casting other languages in the shade. And
      some countries, already unhappy with the encroachment of
      American culture are worried that their cultures will be
      further eroded by an American dominance in cyberspace.
      A consortium of American computer companies has
      developed a universal digital code known as Unicode to
      allow computers to represent the letters and characters
      of virtually all the world's languages.        SEZ_who


   "Digital Commerce: 2 plans for watermarks, which can bind
   proof of authorship to electronic works." Denise Caruso's
   column.

      As information becomes currency in the global economy,
      that so-called digital watermark technologies are
      beginning to appear. As with their paper and broadcast
      counterparts, the concept behind digital watermarks is
      to provide a secure means to certify the origin,
      ownership and authenticity of digital works. And by
      doing so, they can provide the first line of defense
      against piracy of digital media like music, photographs,
      film, words and video games.                   MUN_due


   "Windows 95's Big Value May Be as a Lure to Network
   System."

      Is Windows 95 a decoy? For all the attention being paid
      to the Aug. 24 introduction of the Microsoft
      Corporation's updated personal computer operating
      system, some experts think the software's true strategic
      value to Microsoft is not the few billion dollars in
      sales it is expected to bring to the company over the
      next few years. Instead, the long-term value may lie in
      luring customers and software developers into adopting
      the company's other operating system: Windows NT, for
      corporate computer networks.                   COY_ote


   "Selling Virtual Reality, in Indiana: The owners were
   shocked by how few understood the technology."

      "Seeing the potential for educating had an incredible
      impact on me," said John Hammond, an Indianapolis
      businessman who stumbled on Virtually Yours when he and
      his son went to the shopping center for pizza. Mr.
      Hammond wants Virtually Yours to supply expertise and
      equipment to Sunship Ministries, a group of Christian
      business executives developing a design for a school,
      hospital and church complex suited for missionary work
      in developing countries. Mr. Hammond sees virtual
      reality as a marketing tool for getting developing
      countries to welcome them; he sees programs re-creating
      Bible stories as a powerful tool for preaching to
      nonreaders. "You could let people interact with a
      virtual Jesus," Mr. Hammond said.              GIT_rel


   "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bonb." [Book review]

      In the author's view the story of the hydrogen bomb is
      only secondarily a technological one. What mainly drove
      American physicists to design the more powerful bomb was
      the news that the Soviet Union possessed an atom bomb.
      And the reason the Russians had achieved the bomb was
      mainly spying, Mr. Rhodes insists. So his story of the
      H-bomb is not so much technology as the interaction of
      politics, diplomacy, war, espionage, theoretical and
      practical physics and paranoia.                JOX_onu