America's View of the Internet

Alien54 writes "It won't make you dinner or rub your feet, but nearly one in four Americans say that the Internet can serve as a substitute for a significant other for some period of time, according to a new poll released today by 463 Communications and Zogby International. The poll examined views of what role the Internet plays in people's lives and whether government should play a greater role in regulating it. The online survey was conducted Oct. 4-8, 2007, included 9,743 adult respondents nationwide, and carries a margin of error of +/- 1.0 percentage point. From the results blog post: 'More than half of Americans believe that Internet content such as video should be controlled in some way by the government. Only 33% of 18 to 24 year-olds supported government stepping in on content, while 72% of those over 70 years of age support government regulation and ratings. More than one in four Americans has a social networking profile such as MySpace or Facebook. Among 18-24 year-olds, it's almost mandatory - 78% of them report having a social networking profile. Americans may love the Internet, but most are not prepared to implant it into their brain, even if it was safe. Only 11% of respondents said they be willing to safely implant a device that enabled them to use their mind to access the Internet.'"

Re:polls, democracy and republics

[d34thm0nk3y]

Repeat after me: America is not a democracy!

Main Entry: (from Merriam Webster)
democracy Listen to the pronunciation of democracy
Pronunciation:
\di-mä-kr-s\
Function:
noun
Inflected Form(s):
plural democracies
Etymology:
Middle French democratie, from Late Latin democratia, from Greek dmokratia, from dmos + -kratia -cracy
Date:
1576

1 a: government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections

Re:Brain implants?

[eMbry00s]

We know from dreams that the brain can process things quicker where our sense of time passing is not "real time" (ie, a dream that seems to go on for 30 minutes might take place in a MUCH shorter ammount of real time).

This is an old belief, but has been proven wrong by doctor Stephen LaBerge at Stanford. How?

Lucid dreaming is to know that you dream while you dream. In dreams, the eye movements we make are also made with our real eyes. As such, they can be used as a way for dreamers to contact people doing experiments on them. What LaBerge did was to monitor the eye's movements, and instruct a lucid dreamer (lucidity can be trained) to count in his dream, and excecute a certain pattern of movement with his eyes whenever he counted to X (probably ten, can't remember).

It turns out that dream-time is just as fast as wake-time, and that the feeling of experiencing a year in a period of 30 minutes probably works like it does in movies. A man jumps into bed, the scene fades, you see the morning light come in and the man wakes up. In reality, a few seconds passed, but the movie gave you the illusion of a night passing. Now add to that that dreams affect all your senses (or at least have the ability of doing so).

Not so strange, eh? (Also, if you want to spend some time experiencing really surreal things, start doing lucid dreaming. It's awesome.)

Not a good survey

[doublefrost]

This survey was conducted online. That means the average surveyee is an internet user to some extent.