According to the Design Council Web site, "an e-home will be characterized by the seamless interconnection of virtually anything powered by electricity and a host of new services/applications delivered by the Internet." Name three such services that are being built into some new homes today. Answer: 4. Browse one (or more) of the archives of Urban Legends, and pick out the funniest or most improbable urban legend you can find. Do you think this rumor caused anyone any damage, or was it completely harmless? Why? Are most of the urban legends you saw harmless bits of folklore? Why? Did you see any that looked like they might have been dangerous? Why? Answer: 5. If an e-mail address is important for business reasons, it is not a good idea to abandon that address for any reason. But people who have an e-mail address affiliated with an ISP can feel trapped by their ISP because changing ISPs means dropping an old e-mail address. Why don't ISPs offer e-mail forwarding services to customers who want to switch? Are there any solutions for people who want to switch without disrupting their business? What might some of those solutions be? Answer: 6. Suppose that you have a Web-based mail account that opens and displays graphical file attachments automatically. Do you need to need to worry about macro viruses on this account? Explain your answer. Answer: 7. Using one of the resources described in Chapter 4, find a site where K-12 (Kindergarten through grade 12) teachers can find a lesson plan on the subject of plastics. In your answer, include the resource(s) used and the URL of the site(s) found. Answer: 8. Using one of the resources described in Chapter 4, find a clearinghouse for Internal Revenue Service rulings and tax related information. In your answer, include the resource(s) used and the URL of the site(s) found. Answer: 9. Most of the major search engines accept "paid placements" from commercial business. Visit http://searchenginewatch.com/resources/article.php/2156561 and http://www.pcworld.com/article/97431/article.html to read about this practice. It is suggested that you copy/paste links into your Web Browser using a separate window. What impact is this likely to have on the general public? Are search engines doing anything to protect their integrity as information providers? What (if anything) are they doing? Are there any legal issues surrounding paid placements? What are they? Note: On searchenginewatch.com, only the link entitles "Buying Your Way In: ..." is available to NON-MEMBERS. Don't let this phase you, the article is worth reading. Answer: 10. Explain the difference between "full-text indexing" and "selective-text indexing." Which one does Yahoo!'s search engine use? If you aren't sure, pick a lengthy document in Yahoo!'s database, extract an exact phrase from a paragraph somewhere inside the document and query Yahoo! with that exact phrase to determine whether it can retrieve the document for you. Try this a few times to see if your results are consistent. Include in your answer: i. The URL of the documents used ii. The phrases you selected iii. The results of your experiment answer: