Armchair quarterbacks: How would you spend the budget?

How hard could it be to balance the budget? Judge for yourself by connecting to "How Would You Spend the National Budget" at "http://ux1.cso.uiuc.edu/

kundert/taxes/taxdollar.html" and "Federal Budget Simulator" at "http://garnet.berkeley.edu:3333/budget/budget.html." Neither of these budget simulators poses the truly relevant challenge: balancing the budget and getting elected too.

After you've made a federal budget of your own, click over to a site that gives you the specific numbers and line items of our current federal budget. This easy-to-read source, sponsored by the Institute for Better Education Through Resource Technology, shows how a well-designed Web site can make a complicated issue, such as the budget, readable. Point to "http://ibert.org."

For insight into one of the thornier issues of budget balancing, connect to the Health Care Financing Administration's home page for the basics on Medicaid and Medicare. Link to "http://www.ssa.gov/hcfa/hcfahp2.html," and you'll get an overview of Medicaid and Medicare and HCFA's mission as well as laws, regulations and demonstration projects related to Medicaid and Medicare.

Info Warfare on the Web

Considerable discussion about information warfare is locked behind closed doors and computer firewalls, but plenty of papers and proposals on information warfare are also publicly available on the Internet.

One site, managed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, offers an organized overview of some of the agency's defensive information warfare programs. Point your browser to "http://ftp.arpa.mil/ResearchAreas" and click on the ARPA program entry titled "Information Survivability," dated Nov. 22, 1995. The site lists and explains ARPA's efforts in such areas as high-confidence networking and computing systems and the survivability of large-scale systems.

For links to different essays on the topic of information warfare, connect to "http://fulton.seas.virginia.edu/

de2m/cyber.html." There, you'll get links to mainly government and academic sites, which address information warfare issues.

Still looking for more? Go to the Rand Corp.'s World Wide Web site and read "Keeping Information Warfare in Perspective" by Dave Gompert, director of Rand's National Defense Research Institute. Access that publication at "http://www.rand.org/publications/RRR/RRR.fall95.cyber/perspective.html."

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