This is serious business, and if you consider that it would cost the 40 million Netters about $25 per month to "subscribe" to the Information Rich version of the Internet, that means one thousand million dollars per month going into the hands of the Information Rich at the expense of the Information Poor; we would shortly be up to our virtual ears in a monopoly that would be on the order of the one recently broken up in a major anti-trust and anti-monopoly actions against the hand of the telephone company. Hopefully, if we see it coming we can prevent it now, but it will take far more power than _I_ have. People will tell you "No one can own the Internet!"-- but the fact is that while you may own your computer, you do not "Own the Internet" any more than owning my own telephones or PBX exchanges means I own telephone networks that belong to The Telephone Companies. The corporations that own the physical wires and cabling, they are the ones who own the Internet, and right now that system is being sold to The Telephone Companies, and your "rights" to the Information Superhighway are being sold with them. The goal of giving 10,000 books to everyone on Earth, which we at Project Gutenberg have been trying to do, virtually since the start of the Internet, is in huge danger of becoming just another tool for those we are becoming enslaved by on the Internet, and these books might never get into the high schools: much less the middle schools and grade schools because the Trillion dollars we spend on educations with the rise and fall of every Congress of the United States isn't meant to educate, it is meant for something else. After all-- if a Trillion dollars were really being spent on this process of education every two years, should literacy rates have plummeted to 53% and college level testing scores fallen for many straight years? [Oh yes, I heard yesterday's report the tests were up for the first time in decades. . .but what I did NOT! hear was ANY reference to the fact that the score was "inflated" not only by the "normal" free 200 points a person gets for just being able to sign their names-- but by an additional 22 points for math, 76 verbal.] [Written February 5th, 1995] This kind of "grade inflation" has been going on in a similar, though less official manner, in our schools, for decades. There are schools in which the averages indicate more "A"s are given out than all other grade points combined, not just more "A"s than "B"s or "B"s than "C"s. Some of the most importanted studies were never published, even though they were tax funded. Watch out, the term "grade inflation" is "politically incorrect" to such a degree that it does not appear a single time in any of the encyclopedias I have tried, although it does appear in my Random House Unabridged and College Dictionaries, but not the Merriam-Webster Ninth New College Dictionary, American Heritage or in any other references I have searched. Please tell me if you find it in any.