Broadband Becomes A Basic Right
Finland has become the first nation to make internet broadband a fundamental right, promising 1 mbps connectivity on demand and 100 mbps by the year 2015. Though this project will not be subsidized by the Government, it will be a basic low cost connection that will be provided by the internet service providers of Finland to all citizens.
96% of 5.3 million Finns use the internet and 99% of Finland’s homes are wired to receive internet. Singapore too has reportedly wired up 100% of its residential complexes to receive the internet, and the UK has plans to do the same by 2012, when it will offer 2 mbps connection as a basic right. It is expected that after 100% connectivity is achieved, the security, upkeep and monitoring of citizens will also become extremely simple.
Behind the promise of European Governments to provide high speed internet connections to every home in a couple of years is CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), the organization that gave us the World Wide Web. With its Large Hadrons Collider LHC project rapidly gathering momentum, CERN is fast reaching the stage when it can produce 15 million gigabytes a year of information, which is almost 1% of the total digital information on the globe today.
The LHC project that commenced in 2008 is a 27 km long cryogenically controlled atom smashing tunnel under the Swiss French border that aims to replicate the big bang. It has several grid projects, the first of which is the LHC Computing Grid that provides processing power and storage capacity for the experimentation at LHC to facilitate 600 million proton collisions per second in search of the ‘God particle.’
Ever since it started smashing atoms with renewed vigor in March 2010 the LHC at CERN has reached an unbelievable proton smashing frequency of 10 to the power of 30 collisions, in its quest for the God particle. Named after Nobel Prize winning physicist Leon Lederman’s famous question "If the universe was the answer what is the question?", the God particle is that freak moment of science that created the big bang.
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