问答题

Online newspapers are a look into the future and just pondering it raises the question of whether it isn’t nicer getting your daily news curled up in your favorite chair with your ballpoint pen handy to circle items of interest, or scissors ready to snip out articles you want to save. The Gazette Company is betting its subscribers want both electronic and paper options, and so far it seems to be right.
The rest of the world is moving into cyberspace more slowly than the United States, and, in the developing world, the Internet has hardly penetrated at all. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is determined to change this through the United Nations Information Technology Service, which will train large numbers of people to lap into the income-enhancing power of the Interact. Annan is also proposing an Internet health network that will provide state-of-the-art medical knowledge to 10,000 clinics and hospitals in poor countries.
The onrushing Cyber Age has given newfound power to us all, as seen in Jody Williams’s one-woman organization using e-mail to promote a global ban on land mines. Yet, this is but a glimpse of what’s ahead in the minds of those immersed in this great and accelerating transformation.
At Microsoft, Bill Gates predicts that by 2018 major newspapers will "publish their last paper editions and move solely to electronic distribution," and that by 2020 dictionaries will redefine books as "eBook titles read on screen" .