Pew study finds one in five Americans still won't go online A hardcore 20 per cent of Americans ain't using the internet and don’t want to neither, according to the latest survey data from the Pew Internet and American Life project. The survey data showed that since 1995 internet use in the US had grown from around 10 per cent to just over 78 per cent in August of last year. The rate …
Maybe they are all sharing a single Wi-Fi connection that some dim-wit (or crusading commie) has left open.
In my experience people who are "short of money" still spend on anything important to them. It is well known that the poor on average spend more on fags, booze and lottery tickets than the well-off.
I have some in-laws who spend all the money they have left over (after buying the cheapest possible food from Lidl) on fags, chain smoked. They could easily afford the Internet on a fraction of what they spend on fags, and they have been offered a free PC. Their response :- "What's the point?" and they light up another fag.
If politicians believe they can get the whole population "connected" it is because they have never been acquainted with any real-world people like these.
Ya'll are thinking about this the wrong way.
This 20% are the bunch of todgers that I've told to get off the net and never get back on for the safety of humankind. Now they sit watching infomercials with credit card in hand, and luckly not replying to the spam that could be in their potental inbox. Their corrupted boxes will not be spreading nasty goo across the nets. They have done the rest of us a favor... KEEP THEM OFF THE NET for our safety.
> 2 per cent can't physically use a computer and 6 per cent live in an area where access
When you're done slagging these guys off spare a thought for those who don't have the option. Though of those 6% who have no access I guess they may have the option to move.
It's also not clear if this includes people who go on line via cafes / libraries but have no home access.
>can't physically use a computer
hmm, I've elderly rellies who could just about USE a computer but couldn't navigate the web too well (visual & dexterity issues) and certainly would have problems keeping AV up to date & taking on board the whole security mindset - they will ring premium rate lines because they've "won" something, what they'd make of a half decent phishing mail I wouldn't like to think.
And this is a US study - .7% of the population is in prison!
Some parts of the USA teaching evolution is banned in schools, which in a democracy I take to mean >50% of the population don't believe in science. (At least I hope so, because any educated person who can sit by and watch science removed from schools because they can't be bothered to vote deserves the theocratic state they are going to get).
So at least 30% of the population use the internet, but think god makes it work.
To my knowledge in no part of the USA is teaching evolution banned in schools. In some parts of the USA it is mandatory to teach whatever bloody nonsense they call it nowadays as an alternative theory.
Oh, and even if it were, banning the teaching of evolution is not the same as removing the entire corpus of "science from schools".
Depends what sort of nonsense. ID is a bit silly - anything science can't currently explain MUST be the work of god. That has been going on since they blamed Thor for thunderstorms, and science doggedly chips away at it. Young earth creationism (earth created 6000 years ago), which I think is taught in some schools, calls into doubt many areas of science (cosmology, nuclear physics, geology etc). But also it refutes the scientific method. That is seriously bad.
The problem is it makes people with limited scientific knowledge think that proven science is "just a theory". Well it is, but not in the sense that anything any idiot makes up is equally valid. So then you get teenage mums, who only have a kid because they were too stupid to use contraception, deciding that their opinion on the safety of MMR is at least as good as that of the entire medical profession. Suddenly measles epidemic, who knew.
"""You won't be laughing when these people are the ones left to save the human race after alien mind-hackers take over the rest of us via the internet and our mobile phones!"""
OK by me - I've got an unlikely quantity of firewalls (displayed in real time and full color on a handy flat screen) and a sweet Nokia smart phone. If movies are anything to go by, I'll run into an action hero and provide questionable technical plot devices while things blow up for no reason. We'll then send the aliens packing, the hero will get the girl, and I'll find a beer. Roll credits.
Kidding about the firewalls, of course, but you'll have to pry my N900 from my cold, dead fingers.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
