Gore's Costly High-Wire Act

His plan to plug classes into the Internet was a hit until critics started calling it the Gore Tax

What keeps Al Gore up at night? A few months ago, the Vice President was literally jolted awake at 3 a.m. by the idea of a continuous, live Internet image of this planet, an all-earth-all-the-time website. Within weeks, NASA was scrambling to put up the satellites to make his dream come true. Last July 4 he skipped the fireworks so he could stare for five hours into his office computer as it downloaded Pathfinder's first images from the surface of Mars. Another Gore brainchild--he calls it "digital earth"--would allow students with computers to zoom in on any spot of an onscreen...

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