Of more than 18,000 students surveyed, 38 percent said they had lifted material from the Internet for use in papers in the last year. 44 percent said they considered this sampling no big deal.

"I'm not sure it's shifted values yet, but for a lot of students, it's heading in that direction."

In fact, for many people, that shift has already come.

Micropayments, small digital payments of between a quarter and a fraction of a penny, made (yet another) appearance this summer with Scott McCloud's online comic, The Right Number, accompanied by predictions of a rosy future for micropayments.

To read The Right Number, you have to sign up for the BitPass micropayment system; once you have an account, the comic itself costs 25 cents.

BitPass will fail, as FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, and many others have in the decade since Digital Silk Road, the paper that helped launch interest in micropayments. These systems didn't fail because of poor implementation; they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response.

There is much dismay and even despair over the slow pace at which broadband is advancing in the United States. This slow pace is often claimed to be fatally retarding the recovery of the entire IT industry. As a result there are increasing calls for government action, through regulation or even through outright subsidies.

A careful examination shows that broadband is full of puzzles and paradoxes, which suggests caution before taking any drastic action. As one simple example, the basic meaning of broadband is almost universally misunderstood, since by the official definition, we all have broadband courtesy of the postal system. Also, broadband penetration, while generally regarded as disappointingly slow, is actually extremely fast by most standards, faster than cell phone diffusion at a comparable stage. Furthermore, many of the policies proposed for advancing broadband are likely to have perverse effects. There are many opportunities for narrowband services that are not being exploited, some of which might speed up broadband adoption.

Most documents are the product of continual evolution. An essay may undergo dozens of revisions; source code for a computer program may undergo thousands. And as online collaboration becomes increasingly common, we see more and more ever-evolving group-authored texts.

"There is a dramatic gulf now between Iraqis and a lot of other Arabs. Young people here want to move on. In 10 years, this will be a very different place. If I can be a part of it, it will be like Hong Kong or Korea — but with an Iraqi face."

The Pentagon's new terrorism futures market is suddenly a thing of the past.

"It is a very significant mistake."

"This Poindexter program is still a runaway horse that needs to be reined in."

Within the last 150 years, for the first time in human history, it became widely possible to produce more than was demanded and to offer more than was needed. Advertising was a response to surplus.

Mass consumption inspired "more social egalitarianism, more democratic participation and more political freedom." But there were still rampant social inequalities, and the increasing interest in selling products to "segmented" markets -- markets divided by age, income, race and interest -- eventually led to a segmented citizenry. We live in the fractured and privatized society that was a result.

... In 1897 the promise of an Oldsmobile ad was hardly reassuring: "Practically noiseless and impossible to explode." ...