In 1997 NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn and its moons led to heated controversies, because it was fueled by plutonium, a substance that could cause serious environmental and health problems if it were released into the atmosphere.
Still no major U.S. news outlet in broadcasting or print reported in depth on the risks of the Cassini mission. Westinghouse-owned media like CBS and NBC (also partly owned by General Electric) for example had only reported that children were invited to sign a plaque inside Cassini. Not surprisingly Westinghouse and General Electric are two of the largest corporations with defense contracts and nuclear interests.
TEXTBLOCK 1/2 // URL: http://world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611795/100438658646
Founded in 1977, the institute is named for Cato's Letters, libertarian pamphlets that were widely read in the American Colonies since the early 18th century and played a major role in laying the philosophical foundation for the American Revolution. Cato is a public policy research foundation seeking to "broaden the parameters of public policy debate" to allow consideration of more options that are consistent with the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets and a special focus on deregulation issues.
In recent years, the Cato Institute has become one of the most cited and quoted think tanks in the U.S. news media, while also becoming a key resource for Republican leaders. Catos board of directors not only includes John C. Malone - president and CEO of Tele-Communicaitons Inc. (TCI), the largest cable operator in the United States - but, since autumn 1997, also media titan
Official Organizational Status: Independent Institute
Political Orientation: U.S. Conservative/Libertarian
Scope/Research Areas: Catos research areas include development studies, science and technology, economic issues, health and welfare, foreign relations and diplomacy. Priority issues are Social Security privatization, fundamental tax reform, limited constitutional government, free trade and term limits. Recent publications include: Kelley, David A.: Life of One's Own. Individual Rights and the Welfare State. (1998). Ferrara, P.J. and M. D. Tanner: A New Deal for Social Security. (1998).
Funding Sources: 1998 Budget US$ 11 million. Corporate and private donations (especially from corporations and executives in the highly regulated industries of financial services, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals industries) and sales of publications.
TEXTBLOCK 2/2 // URL: http://world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611704/100438658106
Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and
Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many
Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes
According to the Internet domain survey of the
Robot relates to any automatically operated machine that replaces human effort, though it may not resemble human beings in appearance or perform functions in a humanlike manner. The term is derived from the Czech word robota, meaning "forced labor." Modern use of the term stems from the play R.U.R., written in 1920 by the Czech author Karel Capek, which depicts society as having become dependent on mechanical workers called robots that are capable of doing any kind of mental or physical work. Modern robot devices descend through two distinct lines of development--the early