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It used to be that nations were more or less successful in their competition with other nations depending upon the quality of their transportation infrastructure.
过去的情形是一个国家在与其它国家的竞争中取胜的程度取决于其运输基础设施的质量。
The nation with the best deep water ports or the most efficient railroads had a competitive advantage over others.
具有深水良港和高效铁路的国家也拥有战胜其它国家的强大优势。
And we began to think of infrastructure in those terms.
因而我们开始考虑这方面的基础设施。
After WWII when tens of millions of American families first purchased automobiles.
二战时，千万个美国家庭首先购买了汽车，
and thousands of businesses began to rely on trucks every single day.
上千家企业每天都离不开卡车，
we quickly found our network of two lane highway to be hopelessly inadequate.
在此之后，我们很快发现，两车道公路网络是满足不了要求的。
And so we built a network of interstate highways and that contributed enormously to our post war economic dominance of the world.
因而又建造了州际高速公路网络，此举极大地促进了战后我们的经济主导地位。
Today,commerce rolls not just on asphalt highways but along information highways
当今商业动作不仅是在沥青高速公路上，也要在信息高速公路上进行，
and tens of millions of American families and businesses now use computers,
几千万美国家庭和商业目前都使用着计算机，
and find that the two lane information roads built for telephone service are no longer adequate.
并且发现用于电话业务的两道信息公路已远不能满足需求。
It's not that we have a shortage of information.
并不是缺少信息。
Indeed,we often now have a lot more than we know what to do with...
相反，我们所得到的信息多得常常使我们不知所措。
Take just one brief example:the LandSat satellite.
兴一个LanSat卫星的简单的例子。
We're trying to understand the global environment,
我们想探测全球环境，
and the LandSat satellite is capable of taking a complete photograph of the earth surface every eighteen days,
LanSat卫星能每隔18天拍摄一次地表面的完整照片，
and it's been up there for twenty years.
此项任务已经进行了二十年。
And yet 95 per cent of all of the images it has made have never been seen by human eyes...
大约该卫星拍摄的照片有95％是人所从未见过的。
Now,we have an insatiable hunger for knowledge,as we try to find the information we need to solve the challenging problems that confront us.
现在当我们设法找到解决我们所遇到的挑战性问题的信息时我们对知识的渴求永无止境。
And yet in many cases the information just sits rotting away unused.
但是在许多情况下这些信息却是闲置着以至失去价值。
