A Deluge of Digits

摘要

Everywhere you turn these days the air is heavy with invisible batches of bits. A brief sampling of what filled the airwaves over America last month: In Pueblo, Colo. cops on the beat zapped police reports back to headquarters. In Chantilly, Va. a beer distributor tested new chips implanted in cases of Budweiser; linked to cell phone towers, the chips notify the office the instant the beer reaches the store. In Los Angeles a cell phone user zapped a text message to Google to ask for the name of a good pizza joint; seconds later Google zapped back three nearby options. At the Cincinnati airport law professor Glenn Reynolds took out his laptop, up- linked to the Internet and dashed off a quick update to his popular Web log; a speed test that day showed his connection humming at a blazing 483,000 bits per second. Elsewhere, miniaturized TV shows, songs and myriad other streams of digital bits zipped through the ether.