?? Satire in 8 bits | Main | 4-2-3-1 ??
An electrical pattern of ones and zeroes travels from your computer to a router, gets modulated to fit on a broadband coaxial system, then finds its way to a central office. From there it's demodulated, transformed to an equivalent signal in photons and transmitted along a fiberoptic trunk, through various routers, to an air-conditioned data center with redundant power supplies. The photons are converted back to electrons and the resulting pattern is transmitted via ethernet to a host computer. There the signal is interpreted to be an HTTP GET, and handed to a web daemon. The characters in the query string are processed by an ASP script, and a SQL call is made to a database of current conditions. The process is more or less repeated in reverse, until you get your answer. All without opening a window.
