Just how real is the Net?

[Sigfried Hunin]

I'm confused. Is a hub a "web site" or the physical object used to jack into the Net? Or is it a physical object used to jack into a particular "web site?" I pictured it more that a person would jack into their virtual city for work, but could change where the jack took them by entering a new destination (searching for a website) in the real world.

A hub, as far as we've been speaking about it so far, is an actual physical item that works like, exactly like those chairs in the matrix where a big ass thing gets put into your brain via an implant.

I don't know if we have a term for each "page" or even how one navigates the Net yet. I was behind like a futurama kinda deal where it's just a big city and you can go into like "shops" and those are the sites, OR having like a direct connect thing.

I would think that creating one's own "web site" would be like real world web design; someone who doesn't know what they're doing and tries to code it themselves will end up with a piece of shit. While creating one's own hub might be possible, it would take technical skill to make it halfway decent. And with the tech being experimental, there may be dire consequences if an amateur plugs into a buggy web site.

I share these opinions.

I would think too that the technology, being new and experimental, would make people's own hubs rather expensive and difficult to maintain. I could see people paying for these services much like a web design/host company, but it wouldn't come cheap due to the difficulty and fragility of such technology.

Also in the way that the Net is described, I don't see a lot of bending the rules ala Matrix. At least not just with one's will when they are jacked in. It might be possible to run code or scripts that allow certain, normally impossible actions (eg. flight), but I would think this would be tightly regulated.

Those are the thoughts I have for the time being.

I think that you'd be right about somebody attempting to build their own chair and or "site" or whatever we're gonna call them. I think that a self-built chair could be very dangerous. I think that a self-built site would be all wonky and also possibly dangerous.

I also think that one of the big draws is that each site would allow you to "break the rules," like a modern day video game might but with absolute clarity and realism (minus sensation). That's probably part of the big draw, right?