Number of internet users

Fig. 2.2 Growth in the Number of Internet Users in the United Kingdom left-hand scale) and Slovakia righl-hand scale) during the period 1998-2008. (Data taken from the BBC News website[4])...

The Internet. According to the United Nations International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the number of Internet users across the world met the two billion mark in January 2011. Much like standard telephone service, the capacity, ease, and speed to the Internet has been greatly increased by the replacement of phone-based modem systems, cable modems, and digital subscriber line (DSL) by fiber-optics wired systems. Although fiber-optic connections directly to homes in the United States are not available in all areas, some companies use fiber-optic systems down major networking lines and then split to traditional copper wiring for houses. 

Table 8.7. The number of internet users, by region (based on Internet World Stats, 2005).

Another way to measure the growth of the Internet is by the increase in the number of Internet protocol (IP) addresses. Devices connected to the Internet are assigned an IP address. The current common form is an IP version 4 address, with 4 billion possible addresses. Because of growth in the number of host computers, routers, and users as well as inefficiencies in how IP addresses were first allocated, some industry analysts estimate all available IPv4 addresses will be allocated sometime in 2005. The number of next generation IPv6 addresses is estimated to be greater than 35 trillion,... 

Country Annual energy consumption (2007) (toe pc) Daily food consumption (2005) (kcal pc) Annual paper consumption (2005) (kg pc) Level of science technology (2003) Share of Internet users (2008) (%) Life expectancy (2010) in years Road traffic (2005) Number of Annual fuel cars (per consumption 100 people) (liters pc) ... 

When can a set of data be regarded as a database Guidelines such as the number of records or the publication medium may not be useful. CODATA values, for example, which are the recommended starting point for any database (or any thermochemical calculation, for that matter), involve only about 150 species. Also, the CODATA reports have been printed in regular scientific journals before the final set was released as a book and later posted on the Internet. Second, we could have distinguished between databases and data compilations. The former involve recalculation of quantities such as standard enthalpies of formation to ensure a consistent set of values (see section 2.5). Databases may also include data assessment, leading to recommended values. Data compilations, on the other hand, are just collections of literature values. Although this distinction is important (see table Bl), a data compilation can be rather useful for the expert user and save many hours of literature search. 

Networks. Idle rise in popularity and use of Internet has dramatically changed the way information is disseminated, internet is a worldwide link of thousands of separately administered computer networks of many sizes and types. Each of these networks is connected lo as many as lens of thousands of computers the total number of individual Internet users is in the millions. 

Ephedra has been the subject of a number of lawsuits in the United States. As users report adverse events, lawyers have started to champion their causes and sue product manufacturers. Some lawyers advertise on the Internet and seek clients who believe that they have been harmed by ephedra. An ephedra lawsuit can gamer a lot of money for a lawyer and a client. 

Another area of concern for the FDA relates to records sent over public networks, dial-up connections, or public phone lines, accessed through extemal/intemal web servers or by database servers. A number of security issues need to be considered in order to keep these records trustworthy. Intranets may face similar security issues if remote users connect to the central network resources through a local link to an Internet, even when password-protected access for the users is provided to just a small portion of a private network. These systems are considered by the agency as Open Systems (Part 11.30)4. For example, the Internet provides a convenient medium to connect to other networks, but it does not provide reliable security features, such as entity authentication, or protection from hostile users or software. 

The WHOIS service searches a database of domain names and provides email addresses, mailing addresses and telephone numbers of people responsible for a particular domain [5]. This information is provided by the Internet Registration service (InterNic). The WHOIS service is accessible by Internet users using telnet, via e-mail, and by the whois command. A limitation of this service is that it only contains information about the top-level domains, but no information about subdomains and individual computers. Moreover there is no cooperation between the distributed WHOIS databases [4],... 

Late 1990s User-friendly software to calculate large numbers of molecular descriptors from 2D structure becomes widely available both commercially and from the Internet (e.g. DRAGON)... 

With the advent of the Internet, a number of databases containing data useful to fusion energy research have become available to the world-wide-web. However, in order to find data in these databases a user must first become familiar with the interface to each database to be searched. This is often a time-consuming activity. 

In January 2001, approximately 168 million people, or 60% of the U.S. population, had access to the Internet at home or work, and 86% of adult users of the Internet accessed health-related information. The number of health-related Web sites available is unknoxvn, but it is believed that the more than 19,000 health sites indexed in May 2001 on Yahoo , Inc. represent only a small fraction of the xmiverse of eHealth sites. Internet use has been lower in populations that are underserved, but the profile of the Internet... 

A number of instrument suppliers as well as engineering specialty houses are able to install in-line NIR hardware in production settings. For up-to-date listings and manufacturers, a newcomer (or even experienced user) should scan the Internet, attend meetings such as PittCon, IFPAC, and more specialized conferences such as the International Diffuse Reflectance Conference... 

The Windows Scripting Host (WSCRIPT. EXE) is a service that allows programmers to write Windows scripts that can perform any number of automated tasks. Unfortunately, because WSCRIPT can also work with Internet Explorer, if it s allowed to run unchecked it is a major security hole that can potentially allow malicious scripts to be run without the user s knowledge. 

Because robotic technology continues to have some magical connotations in relation to laboratory automation, a number of manufacturers and users still use the words robot and robotic indifferently to refer to both robotic stations and workstations. In addition, any instance of automation is also indiscriminately associated with robotics by many. One case in point is the Internet page http //www.lab-robotics.org/manufact.htm, where... 

In the mid-1960s, the first publicly available systems for accessing machine-readable databases appeared. With the explosion of information in the sciences, coupled with the vast number of resources (journals, reports, newspapers, and monographs) in which this information was appearing, the use of computers to store and retrieve information has become an effective means to handle the increasing flow. As a result, computer use has increased exponentially, as evidenced by the growth in number of host computers that store data for use on the Internet. In 1969, four computers held all the information available to users of the nascent World Wide Web , whereas today it is estimated that over 132 million host computers now serve in this capacity. 

Estimates of the growth in the number and proportion of the adult U.S. population who are Internet users are presented in Fig. 3-8. In only 7 years, the percentage of the adult U.S. population who use the Internet grew from 9 to 66 percent. 

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