It's official... the Internet's an Institution

It doesn't happen often, but change sometimes catches me by surprise... and when it does, it's usually both entertaining and disturbing. By "change", I'm not talking the various cyclic bits that most people seem to obsess over (language, fashion, music, that sort of thing), but indications that something "new" has taken hold so thoroughly that it likely won't be uprooted in my lifetime. What's triggered this line of thought today? I just got back from a trip to Seattle, which I took by road... where I saw a change to, of all things, the rest areas along the way.

Just about every rest area I saw is now equipped with a WiFi hotspot. Details are here, but it basically boils down to some free road/travel info, plus pay access to the rest of the 'net. The Internet has now gone from a playland for geeks (back when I started playing in 1993) to a resource so important to the minute-to-minute lives of travelers that access points are spaced not more than an hour apart over well-traveled paths... important enough for state government to set up semi-public access (and yes, I'm sure that, in theory, they might get some money back off the deal, but even so...). Business travelers didn't really need it... most that are that crunched for time would fly instead of drive, and/or have cellular-based 'net access of one flavor or another... so that means that WiFi is now perceived as being just that essential to John Q. Public that they can't/won't do without for the length of a freeway drive between cities.

At least they struck a decent balance between public and private on this one... when I saw the first sign, I feared and assumed that it'd be a wide-open access point, ready for a spammy drive-by, or other I'd-rather-this-not-be-traced-back-to-me activity (and considering the number of child porn stories I've seen lately, that's just disturbing)... not that paying to play necessarily stops that. I wonder what sort of Terms of Use they have posted, and whether that includes State Patrol oversight in real-time... I'd tell you, but I couldn't get it to work with my PSP.