Identity vs. Identification It has become a commonplace observation that the history of modernity has been accompanied by what one might call a general weakening of identity, both as a theoretical concept and as a social and cultural reality. This blurring of identity has come to full fruition in the 20th century. As a theoretical concept, identity has lost its metaphysical foundation of "full correspondence" following the destruction of metaphysics by thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Witgenstein or Davidson. Nietzsche's "dead god", his often-quoted metaphor for the demise of metaphysics, has left western cultures not only with the problem of having to learn how to think without permanent foundations; it has left them with both the liberty of constructing identities, and the structural obligation to do so. The dilemmas arising out of this ambivalent situation have given rise to the comment that "god is dead, and men is not doing so well himself". The new promise of freedom is accompanied by the threat of enslavement. Modern, technologically saturated cultures survive and propagate and emancipate themselves by acting as the gatekeepers of their own technological prisons. On the social and cultural levels, traditional clear-cut identities have become weakened as traditional cultural belonging has been undermined or supplanted by modern socio-technological structures. The question as to "who one is" has become increasingly difficult to answer: hybrid identities are spreading, identities are multiple, temporary, fleeting rather than reflecting an inherited sense of belonging. The war cry of modern culture industry "be yourself" demands the impossible and offers a myriad of tools all outcompeting each other in their promise to fulfil the impossible. For many, identity has become a matter of choice rather than of cultural or biological heritage, although being able to chose may not have been the result of a choice. A large superstructure of purchasable identification objects caters for an audience finding itself propelled into an ever accelerating and vertiginous spiral of identification and estrangement. In the supermarket of identities, what is useful and cool today is the waste of tomorrow. What is offered as the latest advance in helping you to "be yourself" is as ephemeral as your identification with it; it is trash in embryonic form. Identity has become both problematic and trivial, causing modern subjects a sense of thrownness and uprootedness as well as granting them the opportunity of overcoming established authoritarian structures. In modern, technologically saturated societies, the general weakening of identities is a prerequisite for emancipation. The return to "strong" clear-cut "real" identities is the way of new fundamentalism demanding a rehabilitation of "traditional values" and protected zones for metaphysical thought, both of which are to be had only at the price of suppression and violence. It has become difficult to know "who one is", but this difficulty is not merely a private problem. It is also a problem for the exercise of power, for the state and other power institutions also need to know "who you are". With the spread of weak identities, power is exercised in a different manner. Power cannot be exercised without being clear who it addresses; note the dual significance of "subject". A weakened, hybrid undefined subject (in the philosophical sense) cannot be a "good" subject (in the political sense), it is not easy to sub-ject. Without identification, power cannot be exercised. And while identification is itself not a sufficient precondition for authoritarianism, it is certainly a necessary one. Identities are therefore reconstructed using technologies of identification in order to keep the weakened and hence evasive subjects "sub-jected". States have traditionally employed bureaucratic identification techniques and sanctioned those who trying to evade the grip of administration. Carrying several passports has been the privilege of spies and of dubious outlaws, and not possessing an "ID" at all is the fate of millions of refugees fleeing violence or economic destitution. Lack of identification is structurally sanctioned by placelessness. The technisised acceleration of societies and the weakening of identities make identification a complicated matter. On the one hand, bureaucratic identification techniques can be technologically bypassed. Passports and signatures can be forged; data can be manipulated and played with. On the other hand, traditional bureaucratic methods are slow. The requirements resulting from these constraints are met by biometric technology.

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1980s: Artificial Intelligence (AI) - From Lab to Life Following the commercial success of expert systems, which started in the 1970s, also other AI technologies began to make their way into the marketplace. In 1986, U.S. sales of AI-related hardware and software rose to U.S.$ 425 million. Especially expert systems, because of their efficiency, were still in demand. Yet also other fields of AI turned out to be successful in the corporate world. Machine vision systems for example were used for the cameras and computers on assembly lines to perform quality control. By 1985 over a hundred companies offered machine vision systems in the U.S., and sales totaled U.S.$ 80 million. Although there was a breakdown in the market for AI-systems in 1986 - 1987, which led to a cut back in funding, the industry slowly recovered. New technologies were being invented in Japan. Fuzzy logic pioneered in the U.S. and also neural networks were being reconsidered for achieving artificial intelligence. The probably most important development of the 1980s was, that it showed that AI technology had real life uses. AI applications like voice and character recognition systems or steadying camcorders using fuzzy logic were not only made available to business and industry, but also to the average customer.

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The history of propaganda Thinking of propaganda some politicians' names are at once remembered, like Caesar, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin or Saddam Hussein. The history of propaganda has to tell then merely mentioning those names:

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Media Giants Online The following selection does not claim to present an exhaustive listing, but rather picks some of the company's most important assets. Due to the rapid developments in the world of media giants the list is also subject to changes. Broadcasting ABC TV Network with 223 affiliated TV stations covering the entire U.S. ABC Radio Network, with 2,900 affiliated stations throughout the U.S. Owner of 9 VHF TV stations Owner of 11 AM and 10 FM stations Cable TV Systems and Channels/Networks Disney Channel 80 % of ESPN cable TV channel and ESPN International 50 % of Lifetime cable TV channel Internet/Interactive Disney Interactive - entertainment and educational computer software and video games, plus development of content for on-line services. Partnership with 3 phone companies to provide video programming and interactive services. ABC Online TV Production, Movies, Video, Music Disney Television Production studios and Walt Disney Pictures movie studio Buena Vista Television production company Buena Vista Home Video Miramax and Touchstone movie production companies Buena Vista Pictures Distribution and Buena Vista International, distributors for Disney and Touchstone movies Walt Disney Records, and Hollywood Records Publishing 6 daily newspapers About 40 weekly magazines, including: Discover, Women's Wear Daily, Los Angeles and Institutional Investor. Chilton Publications Guilford Publishing Co. Hitchcock Publishing Co. Theme Parks, Resorts, and Travel Disneyland Disney World and Disney World Resort Part owner of Disneyland-Paris and Tokyo Disneyland 12 resort hotels Disney Vacation Club Cruise Lines International TV, Film, and Broadcasting 50 % owner of Tele-München Fernseh GmbH & Co. 50 % owner of RTL Disney Fernseh GmbH & Co. 23 % owner of RTL 2 Fernseh GmbH & Co. 37,5 % owner of TM3 Fernseh GmbH & Co. 20-33 % stake in Eurosport network, Spanish Tesauro SA TV company, and Scandinavian Broadcasting System SA 20 % owner of TVA Other Over 500 Disney Stores, and licensing of Disney products The Mighty Ducks professional hockey team 25 % ownership of California Angels major league baseball team Business Connections with Other Media Companies Joint ventures, equity interests, or major arrangements with Bertelsmann, TCI, Hearst Corp., Kirch, and various other media and telephone companies.

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The North against the South? "Faced with this process of globalization, most governments appear to lack the tools required for facing up to the pressure from important media changes. The new global order is viewed as a daunting challenge, and it most often results in reactions of introversion, withdrawal and narrow assertions of national identity. At the same time, many developing countries seize the opportunity represented by globalization to assert themselves as serious players in the global communications market." (UNESCO, World Communication Report) The big hope of the South is that the Internet will close the education gap and economic gap, by making education easier to achieve. But in reality the gap is impossible to close, because the North is not keeping still, but developing itself further and further all the time; inventing new technologies that produce another gap each. The farmer's boy sitting in the dessert and using a cellular telephone and a computer at the same time is a sarcastic picture - nothing else. Still, the so called developing countries regard modern communication technologies as a tremendous chance - and actually: which other choice is there left?

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Introduction: The Substitution of Human Faculties with Technology: Computers and Robots With the development of modern computing, starting in the 1940s, the substitution of human abilities with technology obtained a new dimension. The focus shifted from the replacement of pure physical power to the substitution of mental faculties. Following the early 1980s personal computers started to attain widespread use in offices and quickly became indispensable tools for office workers. The development of powerful computers combined with progresses in artificial intelligence research also led to the construction of sophisticated robots, which enabled a further rationalization of manufacturing processes.

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Late 1970s - Present: Fourth Generation Computers Following the invention of the first integrated circuits always more and more components could be fitted onto one chip. LSI (Large Scale Integration) was followed by VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) and ULSI (Ultra-Large Scale Integration), which increased the number of components squeezed onto one chip into the millions and helped diminish the size as well as the price of computers. The new chips took the idea of the integrated circuit one step further as they allowed to manufacture one microprocessor which could then be programmed to meet any number of demands. Also, ensuing the introduction of the minicomputer in the mid 1970s by the early 1980s a market for personal computers (PC) was established. As computers had become easier to use and cheaper they were no longer mainly utilized in offices and manufacturing, but also by the average consumer. Therefore the number of personal computers in use more than doubled from 2 million in 1981 to 5.5 million in 1982. Ten years later, 65 million PCs were being used. Further developments included the creation of mobile computers (laptops and palmtops) and especially networking technology. While mainframes shared time with many terminals for many applications, networking allowed individual computers to form electronic co-operations. LANs (Local Area Network) permitted computers to share memory space, information, software and communicate with each other. Although already LANs could reach enormous proportions with the invention of the Internet an information and communication-network on a global basis was established for the first time.

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The Privatization of Censorship According to a still widely held conviction, the global data networks constitute the long desired arena for uncensorable expression. This much is true: Because of the Net it has become increasingly difficult to sustain cultural and legal standards. Geographical proximity and territorial boundaries prove to be less relevant, when it does not affect a document's availability if it is stored on your desktop or on a host some thousand kilometers away. There is no international agreement on non-prohibited contents, so human rights organizations and nazi groups alike can bypass restrictions. No single authority or organization can impose its rules and standards on all others. This is why the Net is public space, a political arena where free expression is possible. This freedom is conditioned by the design of the Net. But the Net's design is not a given, as Lawrence Lessig reminds us. Originally the design of the Net allowed a relatively high degree of privacy and communication was not controlled directly. But now this design is changing and this invisible agora in electronic space is endangered. Governments - even elected ones - and corporations introduce new technologies that allow us to be identified, monitored and tracked, that identify and block content, and that can allow our behaviour to be efficiently controlled. When the World Wide Web was introduced, soon small independent media and human rights organizations began to use this platform for drawing worldwide attention to their publications and causes. It seemed to be the dawning of a new era with authoritarian regimes and multinational media corporations on the looser side. But now the Net's design is changing according to their needs. "In every context that it can, the entertaining industry is trying to force the Internet into its own business model: the perfect control of content. From music (fighting MP3) and film (fighting the portability of DVD) to television, the industry is resisting the Net's original design. It was about the free flow of content; Hollywood wants perfect control instead" (Lawrence Lessig, Cyberspace Prosecutor, in: The Industry Standard, February 2000). In the United States, Hollywood and AT&T, after its merger with MediaOne becoming the biggest US cable service provider, return to their prior positions in the Seventies: the control of content and infrastructure. If most people will access the Net via set up boxes connected to a TV set, it will become a kind of television, at least in the USA. For small independent media it will become very hard to be heard, especially for those offering streaming video and music. Increasingly faster data transmissions just apply to download capacities; upload capacities are much - on the average about eight times - lower than download capacities. As an AT&T executive said in response to criticism: "We haven't built a 56 billion dollar cable network to have the blood sucked from our veins" (Lawrence Lessig, The Law in the Code: How the Net is Regulated, Lecture at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, May 29th, 2000). Consumers, not producers are preferred. For corporations what remains to be done to control the Net is mainly to cope with the fact that because of the Net it has become increasingly difficult to sustain cultural and legal standards. On Nov 11, 1995 the German prosecuting attorney's office searched Compuserve Germany, the branch of an international Internet service provider, because the company was suspected of having offered access to child pornography. Consequently Compuserve blocked access to more than 200 newsgroups, all containing "sex" or "gay" in their names, for all its customers. But a few days later, an instruction for access to these blocked newsgroups via Compuserve came into circulation. On February 26, 1997, Felix Somm, the Chief Executive Officer of Compuserve Germany, was accused of complicity with the distribution of child and animal pornography in newsgroups. In May 1998 he received a prison sentence for two years. This sentence was suspended against a bail of about 51.000 Euro. The sentence was justified by pointing to the fact that Compuserve Germany offered access to its US parent company's servers hosting child pornography. Felix Somm was held responsible for access to forbidden content he could not know of. (For further information (in German) click here.) Also in 1995, as an attack on US Vice-President Al Gore's intention to supply all public schools with Internet access, Republican Senator Charles Grassley warned of the lurking dangers for children on the Net. By referring to a Time magazine cover story by Philip Elmer-Dewitt from July 3 on pornography on the Net, he pointed out that 83,5% of all images online are pornographic. But Elmer-Dewitt was wrong. Obviously unaware of the difference between Bulletin Board Systems and the Net, he referred misleadingly to Marty Rimm's article Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway, published in the prestigious Georgetown Law Journal (vol. 83, June 1995, pp. 1849-1935). Rimm knew of this difference, of course, and stated it clearly. (For further information see Hoffman & Novak, The Cyberporn debate, http://ecommerce.vanderbilt.edu/cyberporn.debate.html and Franz Wegener, Cyberpornographie: Chronologie einer Hexenjagd; http://www.intro-online.de/c6.html) Almost inevitably anxieties accompany the introduction of new technologies. In the 19th century it was said that traveling by train is bad for health. The debate produced by Time magazine's cover story and Senator Grassley's attack caused the impression that the Net has multiplied possible dangers for children. The global communication networks seem to be a inexhaustible source of mushrooming child pornography. Later would-be bomb recipes found on the Net added to already prevailing anxieties. As even in industrialized countries most people still have little or no first-hand experience with the Net, anxieties about child pornography or terrorist attacks can be stirred up and employed easily. A similar and related debate is going on about the glorification of violence and erotic depictions in media. Pointing to a "toxic popular culture" shaped by media that "distort children's view of reality and even undermine their character growth", US right-wing social welfare organizations and think tanks call for strong media censorship. (See An Appeal to Hollywood, http://www.media-appeal.org/appeal.htm) Media, especially films and videos, are already censored and rated, so it is more censorship that is wanted. The intentions for stimulating a debate on child pornography on the Net were manifold: Inter alia, it served the Republican Party to attack Democrat Al Gore's initiative to supply all public schools with Internet access; additionally, the big media corporations realized that because of the Net they might have to face new competitors and rushed to press for content regulation. Taking all these intentions together, we can say that this still ongoing debate constitutes the first and most well known attempt to impose content regulation on the Net. Consequently, at least in Western countries, governments and media corporations refer to child pornography for justifying legal requirement and the implementation of technologies for the surveillance and monitoring of individuals, the filtering, rating and blocking of content, and the prohibition of anonymous publishing on the Net. In the name of "cleaning" the Net of child pornography, our basic rights are restricted. It is the insistence on unrestricted basic rights that needs to be justified, as it may seem. Underlying the campaign to control the Net are several assumptions. Inter alia: The Net lacks control and needs to be made safe and secure; we may be exposed inadvertently to pornographic content; this content is harmful to children. Remarkably, racism seems to be not an issue. The Net, especially the World Wide Web, is not like television (although it is to be feared this is what it might become like within the next years). Say, little Mary types "Barbie" in a search engine. Click here to see what happens. It is true, sometimes you might have the opportunity to see that pornography is just a few mouse clicks away, but it is not likely that you might be exposed to pornographic content unless you make deliberate mouse clicks. In reaction to these anxieties, but in absence of data how children use the Internet, the US government released the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in 1996. In consequence the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) launched the famous Blue Ribbon Campaign and, among others, America Online and Microsoft Corporation supported a lawsuit of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against this Act. On June 26, 1997, the US Supreme Court ruled the CDA as unconstitutional under the provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution: The Communications Decency Act violated the basic right to free expression. After a summit with the US government industry leaders announced the using of existing rating and blocking systems and the development of new ones for "inappropriate" online resources. So, after the failing of the CDA the US government has shifted its responsibility to the industry by inviting corporations to taking on governmental tasks. Bearing in the mind the CompuServe case and its possible consequences, the industry welcomed this decision and was quick to call this newly assumed responsibility "self-regulation". Strictly speaking, "self-regulation" as meant by the industry does not amount to the regulation of the behaviour of corporations by themselves. On the opposite, "self-regulation" is to be understood as the regulation of users' behaviour by the rating, filtering and blocking of Internet content considered being inappropriate. The Internet industry tries to show that technical solutions are more favourable than legislation und wants to be sure, not being held responsible and liable for illegal, offensive or harmful content. A new CompuServe case and a new Communications Decency Act shall be averted. In the Memorandum Self-regulation of Internet Content released in late 1999 by the Bertelsmann Foundation it is recommended that the Internet industry joins forces with governmental institutions for enforcing codes of conduct and encouraging the implementation of filters and ratings systems. For further details on the Memorandum see the study by the Center for Democracy and Technology, An Analysis of the Bertelsmann Foundation Memorandum on Self-Regulation of Internet Content: Concerns from a User Empowerment Perspective. In fact, the "self-regulation" of the Internet industry is privatized censorship performed by corporations and right-wing NGOs. Censorship has become a business. "Crucially, the lifting of restrictions on market competition hasn't advanced the cause of freedom of expression at all. On the contrary, the privatisation of cyberspace seems to be taking place alongside the introduction of heavy censorship." (Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology) While trying to convince us that its technical solutions are appropriate alternatives to government regulation, the Internet industry cannot dispense of governmental backing to enforce the proposed measures. This adds to and enforces the censorship measures already undertaken by governments. We are encouraged to use today's information and communication technologies, while the flow of information is restricted. According to a report by Reporters Sans Frontières, quoted by Leonard R. Sussman in his essay Censor Dot Gov. The Internet and Press Freedom 2000, the following countries totally or largely control Internet access: Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan, Libya, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

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Changes Still, disinformation and propaganda are nothing magic. They can change things, but supposedly only if those things/meanings/opinions are not fixed completely. Galileo Galilee was not capable of changing people's opinion about the world being flat until some persons got suspicious that this long-believed-in truth was a mistake. The propaganda of his experiments which made him famous was not enough. On the other hand later all the propaganda of his enemies could not turn back the wheel of enlightenment, as people thought it was more logic to believe in a round world than in a flat one. It is never just a single idea that changes. Society is following the changes. Thinking about disinformation brings us to the word truth, of course, and to the doubt that there is no definite truth. And truth can easily be manipulated to another truth. Just present some facts that seem to be logic and there you've got a new truth. And if the facts can supposedly be proved by empirical studies then the quality of the truth definitely rises. That's what ideologies do all the time. And the media like to do the same thing - as a game with power or mere presentation of power? But of course there also exist bits of disinformation which are more amusing than evil or dangerous: - the theory of the celestro-centric world/"Hohlwelttheorie" - the story of the German philosopher who invented an Italian philosopher, wrote books about him, even reprinted "his" texts, which had gone lost pretendedly 100 years ago - and finally lost his job and all his career when other scientists found out that everything had been made up.

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Martin Hellman Martin Hellman was Whitfield Diffie's collegue in creating pubylic key cryptography in the 1970s.

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AT&T AT&T Corporation provides voice, data and video communications services to large and small businesses, consumers and government entities. AT&T and its subsidiaries furnish domestic and international long distance, regional, local and wireless communications services, cable television and Internet communications services. AT&T also provides billing, directory and calling card services to support its communications business. AT&T's primary lines of business are business services, consumer services, broadband services and wireless services. In addition, AT&T's other lines of business include network management and professional services through AT&T Solutions and international operations and ventures. In June 2000, AT&T completed the acquisition of MediaOne Group. With the addition of MediaOne's 5 million cable subscribers, AT&T becomes the country's largest cable operator, with about 16 million customers on the systems it owns and operates, which pass nearly 28 million American homes. (source: Yahoo) Slogan: "It's all within your reach" Business indicators: Sales 1999: $ 62.391 bn (+ 17,2 % from 1998) Market capitalization: $ 104 bn Employees: 107,800 Corporate website: http://www.att.com http://www.att.com/

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Server A server is program, not a computer, as it sometimes said, dedicated to store files, manage printers and network traffic, or process database queries. Web sites, the nodes of the World Wide Web (WWW), e.g., are stored on servers.

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Wide Application Protocol (WAP) The WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a specification for a set of communication protocols to standardize the way that wireless devices, such as cellular telephones and radio transceivers, can be used for Internet access, including e-mail, the World Wide Web, newsgroups, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC). While Internet access has been possible in the past, different manufacturers have used different technologies. In the future, devices and service systems that use WAP will be able to interoperate. Source: Whatis.com

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Expert system Expert systems are advanced computer programs that mimic the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of an expert in a particular discipline. Their creators strive to clone the expertise of one or several human specialists to develop a tool that can be used by the layman to solve difficult or ambiguous problems. Expert systems differ from conventional computer programs as they combine facts with rules that state relations between the facts to achieve a crude form of reasoning analogous to artificial intelligence. The three main elements of expert systems are: (1) an interface which allows interaction between the system and the user, (2) a database (also called the knowledge base) which consists of axioms and rules, and (3) the inference engine, a computer program that executes the inference-making process. The disadvantage of rule-based expert systems is that they cannot handle unanticipated events, as every condition that may be encountered must be described by a rule. They also remain limited to narrow problem domains such as troubleshooting malfunctioning equipment or medical image interpretation, but still have the advantage of being much lower in costs compared with paying an expert or a team of specialists.

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Bertelsmann The firm began in Germany in 1835, when Carl Bertelsmann founded a religious print shop and publishing establishment in the Westphalian town of Gütersloh. The house remained family-owned and grew steadily for the next century, gradually adding literature, popular fiction, and theology to its title list. Bertelsmann was shut down by the Nazis in 1943, and its physical plant was virtually destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945. The quick growth of the Bertelsmann empire after World War II was fueled by the establishment of global networks of book clubs (from 1950) and music circles (1958). By 1998 Bertelsmann AG comprised more than 300 companies concentrated on various aspects of media. During fiscal year 1997-98, Bertelsmann earned more than US$15 billion in revenue and employed 58.000 people, of whom 24.000 worked in Germany.

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Invention According to the WIPO an invention is a "... novel idea which permits in practice the solution of a specific problem in the field of technology." Concerning its protection by law the idea "... must be new in the sense that is has not already been published or publicly used; it must be non-obvious in the sense that it would not have occurred to any specialist in the particular industrial field, had such a specialist been asked to find a solution to the particular problem; and it must be capable of industrial application in the sense that it can be industrially manufactured or used." Protection can be obtained through a patent (granted by a government office) and typically is limited to 20 years.

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Joseph Stalin Joseph Stalin (1879-1953): After Lenin's death he took over and became a dictator without any limits of power. Everyone who dared to talk or act against him or was in suspicion of doing so, got killed. Millions were murdered. His empire was one made out of propaganda and fear. As long as he was in power his picture had to be in every flat and bureau. Soon after his death the cult was stopped and in 1956 the De-Stalination was started, though he was partly rehabilitated in 1970.

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Cutting The cutting of pictures in movies or photographs is highly manipulative: it is easy to produce a new video out of an already existing one. The result is a form of manipulation that is difficult to contradict. A reputation destroyed by this, is nearly impossible to heal.

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Newsgroups Newsgroups are on-line discussion groups on the Usenet. Over 20,000 newsgroups exist, organized by subject into hierarchies. Each subject hierarchy is further broken down into subcategories. Covering an incredible wide area of interests and used intensively every day, they are an important part of the Internet. For more information, click here ( http://www.terena.nl/libr/gnrt/group/usenet.html ). http://www.terena.nl/libr/gnrt/group/usenet.h...

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Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence is concerned with the simulation of human thinking and emotions in information technology. AI develops "intelligent systems" capable, for example, of learning and logical deduction. AI systems are used for creatively handling large amounts of data (as in data mining), as well as in natural speech processing and image recognition. AI is also used as to support decision taking in highly complex environments. Yahoo AI sites: http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Computer_Science/Artificial_Intelligence/ MIT AI lab: http://www.ai.mit.edu/ http://dir.yahoo.com/Science/Computer_Science... http://www.ai.mit.edu/

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Time Warner The largest media and entertainment conglomerate in the world. The corporation resulted from the merger of the publisher Time Inc. and the media conglomerate Warner Communications Inc. in 1989. It acquired the Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS) in 1996. Time Warner Inc.'s products encompass magazines, hardcover books, comic books, recorded music, motion pictures, and broadcast and cable television programming and distribution. The company's headquarters are in New York City. In January 2000 Time Warner merged with AOL (America Online), which owns several online-services like Compuserve, Netscape and Netcenter in a US$ 243,3 billion deal.

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Bandwidth The bandwidth of a transmitted communications signal is a measure of the range of frequencies the signal occupies. The term is also used in reference to the frequency-response characteristics of a communications receiving system. All transmitted signals, whether analog or digital, have a certain bandwidth. The same is true of receiving systems. Generally speaking, bandwidth is directly proportional to the amount of data transmitted or received per unit time. In a qualitative sense, bandwidth is proportional to the complexity of the data for a given level of system performance. For example, it takes more bandwidth to download a photograph in one second than it takes to download a page of text in one second. Large sound files, computer programs, and animated videos require still more bandwidth for acceptable system performance. Virtual reality (VR) and full-length three-dimensional audio/visual presentations require the most bandwidth of all. In digital systems, bandwidth is data speed in bits per second (bps). Source: Whatis.com

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Intellectual property Intellectual property, very generally, relates to the output that result from intellectual activity in the industrial, scientific, literary and artistic fields. Traditionally intellectual property is divided into two branches: 1) industrial property (inventions, marks, industrial designs, unfair competition and geographical indications), and 2) copyright. The protection of intellectual property is guaranteed through a variety of laws, which grant the creators of intellectual goods, and services certain time-limited rights to control the use made of their products.

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Machine vision A branch of artificial intelligence and image processing concerned with the identification of graphic patterns or images that involves both cognition and abstraction. In such a system, a device linked to a computer scans, senses, and transforms images into digital patterns, which in turn are compared with patterns stored in the computer's memory. The computer processes the incoming patterns in rapid succession, isolating relevant features, filtering out unwanted signals, and adding to its memory new patterns that deviate beyond a specified threshold from the old and are thus perceived as new entities.

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ARPAnet ARPAnet was the small network of individual computers connected by leased lines that marked the beginning of today's global data networks. Being an experimental network mainly serving the purpose to test the feasibility of wide area networks, the possibility of remote computing, it was created for resource sharing between research institutions, not for messaging services like E-mail. Although research was sponsored by US military, ARPAnet was not designed for directly martial use but to support military-related research. In 1969 ARPANET went online and links the first two computers, one of them located at the University of California, Los Angeles, the other at the Stanford Research Institute. But ARPAnet has not become widely accepted before it was demonstrated in action to a public of computer experts at the First International Conference on Computers and Communication in Washington, D. C. in 1972. Before it was decommissioned in 1990, NSFnet, a network of scientific and academic computers funded by the National Science Foundation, and a separate new military network went online in 1986. In 1988 the first private Internet service providers offered a general public access to NSFnet. Beginning in 1995, after having become the backbone of the Internet in the USA, NSFnet was turned over to a consortium of commercial backbone providers. This and the launch of the World Wide Web added to the success of the global data network we call the Net. In the USA commercial users already outnumbered military and academic users in 1994. Despite the rapid growth of the Net, most computers linked to it are still located in the United States.

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NATO The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington on 4 April 1949, creating NATO (= North Atlantic Treaty Organization). It was an alliance of 12 independent nations, originally committed to each other's defense. Between 1952 and 1982 four more members were welcomed and in 1999, the first ex-members of COMECON became members of NATO (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland), which makes 19 members now. Around its 50th anniversary NATO changed its goals and tasks by intervening in the Kosovo Crisis.

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