According to the Design Council Web site, "an e-home will be characterized by the seamless interconnection of virtually anything powered by electricity and a host of new services/applications delivered by the Internet."
Name three such services that are being built into some new homes today.
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4. Browse one (or more) of the archives of Urban Legends, and pick out the funniest or most improbable urban legend you can find.
• Do you think this rumor caused anyone any damage, or was it completely harmless? Why?
• Are most of the urban legends you saw harmless bits of folklore? Why?
Did you see any that looked like they might have been dangerous? Why?
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5. If an e-mail address is important for business reasons, it is not a good idea to abandon that address for any reason. But people who have an e-mail address affiliated with an ISP can feel trapped by their ISP because changing ISPs means dropping an old e-mail address.
• Why don't ISPs offer e-mail forwarding services to customers who want to switch?
Are there any solutions for people who want to switch without disrupting their business? What might some of those solutions be?
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6. Suppose that you have a Web-based mail account that opens and displays graphical file attachments automatically.
• Do you need to need to worry about macro viruses on this account?
Explain your answer.
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7. Using one of the resources described in Chapter 4, find a site where K-12 (Kindergarten through grade 12) teachers can find a lesson plan on the subject of plastics.
• In your answer, include the resource(s) used and the URL of the site(s) found.
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8. Using one of the resources described in Chapter 4, find a clearinghouse for Internal Revenue Service rulings and tax related information.
In your answer, include the resource(s) used and the URL of the site(s) found.
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9. Most of the major search engines accept "paid placements" from commercial business. Visit https://searchenginewatch.com/resources/article.php/2156561 and https://www.pcworld.com/article/97431/article.html to read about this practice.
It is suggested that you copy/paste links into your Web Browser using a separate window.
• What impact is this likely to have on the general public?
• Are search engines doing anything to protect their integrity as information providers? What (if anything) are they doing?
• Are there any legal issues surrounding paid placements? What are they?
Note: On searchenginewatch.com, only the link entitles "Buying Your Way In: ..." is available to NON-MEMBERS. Don't let this phase you, the article is worth reading.
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10. Explain the difference between "full-text indexing" and "selective-text indexing."
• Which one does Yahoo!'s search engine use? If you aren't sure, pick a lengthy document in Yahoo!'s database, extract an exact phrase from a paragraph somewhere inside the document and query Yahoo! with that exact phrase to determine whether it can retrieve the document for you. Try this a few times to see if your results are consistent.
• Include in your answer:
• i. The URL of the documents used
• ii. The phrases you selected
iii. The results of your experiment