Subject: If superhighways were like the internet. <off. to
technophobes>
 
Here's something I got (appropriately) over the net from
someone, who got it from someone, who in turn got it from
somebody else. I have no idea who originally wrote it.
 
"Think of the Internet as a Highway."
 
    There it is again.  Some clueless fool talking about the
    "Information Superhighway."  They don't know didley
about the net.    It's nothing like a superhighway.  That's
a rotten metaphor.
 
  Suppose the metaphor ran in the other direction.
Suppose the   highways were like the net. . .
 
    A highway hundreds of lanes wide.  Most with pitfalls
for potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses.  No
highway patrol.  A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with
broken whistles.  500 member vigilante posses with nuclear
weapons.  A minimum of  237 on ramps at every intersection.
No signs.  Wanna get to  Ensenada?  Holler out the window at
a passing truck to ask directions.  Ad hoc traffic laws.
Some lanes would vote to make  use by a single-occupant-
vehicle a capital offense on Monday  through Friday between
7:00 and 9:00.  Other lanes would just shoot you without a
trial for talking on a car phone.
 
    AOL would be a giant diesel-smoking bus with hundreds of
ebola victims on board throwing dead wombats and rotten
cabbage at the other cars, most of which have been assembled
at home from kits.  Some are built around 2.5 horsepower
lawnmower engines with a top  speed of nine miles an hour.
Others burn nitrogylcerin and idle at 120.
 
 No license plates.  World War II bomber nose art
instead.  Terrifying paintings of huge teeth or vampire
eagles.  Bumper mounted machine guns.  Flip somebody the
finger on this highway and get a white phosphorus grenade up
your tailpipe.  Flatbed trucks cruise around with anti-
aircraft missile batteries to shoot  down the traffic
helicopter.  Little kids on tricycles with squirtguns filled
with hydrochloric acid switch lanes without warning.
 
    NO OFFRAMPS.  None.
 
    Now that's the way to run an Interstate Highway system.