You can't do so much about age .

Especially in this case, if you approach the problem as a race/class issue, and there's proof that it's not a factor, then you will accomplish precisely nothing... but I suppose you'll get re-elected doing it. There is a divide, but attack the root of the problem: Education.

Note: it's an excuse when you simply assume those are the causes, it's a valid reason when you have research and logic to back those reasons up... same standards as "the dog ate my homework"!

See, there is a digital divide, but the true divide is between those who are online and those who aren't. That may seem like circular logic at first, but realize this is in stark opposition to the usual opinion on the topic, which insists it's the usual convenient race/gender/class excuses.

"By far the most important factors facilitating or inhibiting Internet access are education and age, and not income—nor race/ethnicity or gender, each of which accounts for less than a 5 percent change in rates of access and is statistically insignificant."

The digital divide is bunk: The article provides a much needed dose of common sense into the debate, but it does overstate its case a bit.

Thank you.

Update: Napster Takes a Nap: "Starting around 7 a.m. PDT Monday, servers and home pages for Napster, a popular service that allows Internet users to exchange MP3 music files, have been unavailable and disconnecting users." Napster's so easy to block it can even happen accidentally Thanks to Lawrence Lee for e-mailing me this link.

Cnet: Can Napster be Stopped? No!: Well, to pick nits, yes, Napster itself can be stopped, as it depends on central servers. Maybe you can't stop it but you can make it as hard to use as it is to find FTP servers with warez, which for someone who is not "in the loop" is quite hard. Gnutella, on the other hand, is virtually provably impossible to block. If the protocol becomes encrypted or compressed, then the data it sends will look just like any other encrypted or compressed data, and the only other clue will be the traffic pattern, which I doubt will remain unique to Gnutella as others come up with perfectly legitimate uses for that protocol, like massive distributed processing.