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Clarke, although he is seen as a visionary, has got it wrong before. There's no sign of Hal the dominating computer from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (written by Arthur C Clarke) appearing on the horizon next year to dominate human life. Even so, computers have changed the way that we work and play. The Internet is changing business, seemingly sweeping everything along on an e-tide. The Web will change the way we work — more of us will work from home.
Futurist Ian Pearson sees a convergence between intelligent computers and biotechnology, the advent of implanted chips and enhanced intelligence. Both machines and humans will have access to a global net with instant access to the world' s knowledge. But Pearson also fears that it could divide the world into two classes — those with access to this knowledge and those without access. And obviously there is a risk in losing control of things that think. Pearson expects machines to be as smart as humans by 2015. After that, computers will continue to get smarter.
The trouble with the digital revolution, says MIT Media Lab director Neil Gershenfeld in his book When Things Start to Think, is that computers may have speeded up many of the processes 0f modem life, but they still remain relatively difficult to use. "Most computers are nearly blind, deaf and dumb," says Gershenfeld. "These inert machines channel the richness of human communication through a keyboard and mouse. The speed of the computer is increasingly much less of a concern than the difficulty in telling it what you want it to do, or in understanding what it has done, or in using it where you want to go, rather than where it can go."
What's needed now, he concludes, is digital evolution. The real challenge is how to create systems with many components that can work together and change, merging the physical world with the digital world.
"If we can manage the development so that they (thinking machines) stay our friends, in just a few years we'll see progress in every area of life that makes the preceding millennia look like we've all been asleep."
Evolution is a consequence of interaction, says Gershenfeld. "And information technology is profoundly changing how we interact. Therefore it's not crazy to think about the impact of this on evolution."
From paragraph 4, we can deduce that______.
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So far, inflation is roaring in only a few sectors of the economy. While platinum has soared 121 percent, soybeans have risen 115 percent, and an index of Real Estate Investment Trusts has climbed 42 percent since May 2001, the consumer price index (CPI) has gone up only 4.2 percent during the same period. The challenge is figuring out what happens next.
Astute investors are asking two questions: 1) Will the dollar continue to decline？ 2) Which assets will continue to inflate？
The value of the dollar matters because much of what Americans buy comes from abroad. And in the past two years, the dollar has been slipping badly: down some 25 percent against a basket of foreign currencies, including the euro and the yen. That makes imported goods more expensive. If the dollar falls further, the rise in prices could boost inflation.
And that's exactly what some analysts predict. "This is not a run-of-the-mill problem where the currency corrects 25 percent" then stabilizes, says David Tice, Dallas-based manager of the Prudent Global Income Fund. "We have an economy that's very dependent upon ever-increasing amounts of debt. Look at borrowing in this country for automobiles and housing. At the federal level, we are creating credit as if it is going out of style. Given that, we think the dollar can decline substantially more from here."
That's why Mr. Tice's income fund has invested in government bonds in countries that are major trading partners of the US. These bonds tend to increase in value as the dollar weakens.
There are other ways for investors to protect themselves from inflation. For example: TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities) are US government bonds that increase both principal and interest payments in line with the CPI/U, which measures prices for urban dwellers. Thus, if the price of consumer goods goes up, TIPS owners get a boost in their rate of return. That's a level of inflation protection that most bonds and money-market funds don't provide.
Still, there are no guarantees. If real interest rates rise faster than inflation, TIPS can lose value if they're not held to maturity. "TIPS have generally been less volatile than traditional bonds," but investors have already seen periods when their inflation-protection doesn't match the actual rise in prices, warns Duane Cabrera, head of the personal financial planning group at Vanguard, based in Valley Forge, Pa. For example, the year-over-year change in the CPI/U is running about 1.9 percent, be points out, but college costs have been rising about 5 percent annually.
Investors should also discuss the tax consequences with their investment advisers, Mr. Cabrera notes.
On the stock front, investors can also turn to natural-resource stocks or mutual funds that invest in them. A slightly more exotic option: exchange-traded funds, which act like mutual funds but trade like stocks.
Commodities offer another avenue for profit during inflationary times. Individual investors probably want to avoid commodity trading, often a wild and woolly experience. But certain mutual funds offer share holders a chance to profit when commodity prices go up. The PIMCO Commodity Real Return Fund, for example, provides exposure to the performance of the Dow-Jones AIG Commodity Index while generating income from TIPS. Another option: the Oppenheimer Real Asset Fund, which is actively managed and tracks the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index.
There's no clear winner between these stock funds and the commodities their companies have invested in. When commodity prices are falling, natural-resource firms can protect themselves by hedging their risks, says Kevin Baum, portfolio manager of the Oppenheimer Real Asset Fund. On the other band, hedging may keep them from benefiting when commodity prices rise. And the stocks can be more volatile than the commodities themselves. Gold funds typically are three times more vo
听力原文： Norway has agreed to become the first country outside Africa to try a Rwandan genocide suspect. The United Nations tribunal in Tanzanian town of Arusha is to transfer a senior former Rwandan government official to Norway where his case will be heard. He is Michel Bagaragaza, who was head of the Rwandan tea industry and is accused of organizing his workforce into a militia to attack the Tutsi minority. The chief prosecutor of the Arusha Tribunal Arusha Hassan Jallow told the BBC that Norway was only the first of four European countries to agree to hear some Rwanda's genocide trials. But he declined to name the other three. Mr. Jallow said they were selected for their standard of justice because they did not impose the death penalty, which the tribunal does not allow. This stand has angered Rwanda which has repeatedly demanded that the accused be transferred to its jurisdiction. But since Rwanda will not repeal the death penalty, this has not been acceptable.
Rwanda is not allowed to hear the trial because
实施了违反治安管理行为，主动承认错误并及时改正的，可以从轻或免予处罚。（）
The first challenge of space exploration was developing rockets powerful enough and reliable enough to boost a satellite into orbit. These boosters needed more than brute force, however; they also needed guidance systems to steer them on the proper flight paths to reach their desired orbits. The next challenge was building the satellites themselves. The satellites needed electronic components that were lightweight, yet durable enough to withstand the acceleration and vibration of launch. Creating these components required the world's aerospace engineering facilities to adopt new standards of reliability in manufacturing and testing. On Earth, engineers also had to build tracking stations to maintain radio communications with these artificial "moons" as they circled the planet.
Beginning in the early 1920s, humans launched probes to explore other planets. The distances traveled by these robotic space travelers required travel times measured in months or years. These spacecraft had to be especially reliable to continue functioning for a decade or more. They also had to withstand such hazards as the radiation belts surrounding Jupiter, particles orbiting in the rings of Saturn, and greater extremes in temperature than are faced by spacecraft in the closeness of Earth. Despite their great scientific returns, these missions often came with high price tags. Today the world' s space agencies, such as the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA. and the European Space Agency (ESA), strive to conduct robotic missions more cheaply and efficiently.
It was inevitable that humans would follow their unpiloted creations into space. Piloted space flight introduced a whole new set of difficulties, many Of them concerned with keeping people alive in the hostile environment of space. In addition to the vacuum of space, which requires any piloted spacecraft to carry its own atmosphere, there are other deadly hazards: solar and cosmic radiation, micrometorites (small bits of rock and dus0 that might puncture a spacecraft hull or an astronaut' s pressure suit, and extremes of temperature ranging from frigid darkness to broiling sunlight. It was not enough simply to keep people alive in space — astronauts needed to have a means of accomplishing useful work while they were there. It was necessary to develop tools and techniques for space navigation, and for conducting scientific observations and experiments. Astronauts would have to be protected when they ventured outside the safety of their pressurized spacecraft to work in the vacuum. Missions and hardware would have to be carefully designed to help insure the Safety of space crews in any foreseeable emergency, from liftoff to landing.
The challenges of conducting piloted space flights were great enough for missions that orbited Earth. They became even more daunting for the Apo
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