Читать книгу The Digital Big Bang - Phil Quade - Страница 48

Chris Inglis, Former NSA Deputy Director

Cyber. Few words enjoy more widespread use across languages and cultures. Used variously as a noun and an adjective, it conveys more meaning in five letters than the vast majority of its counterparts in any language. As a direct consequence of the varied uses of the term, many discussions involving cyber fail in the simplest goal of human communication, namely to ensure that the participants understand or mean the same things in their attempt to communicate.

To that end, this section lays out a foundation for understanding the essential elements of cyber as a literal place—hereafter referred to as cyberspace. Of note, the term cyberspace includes, but is not limited to, the sum of hardware, software, and interconnections that are collectively referred to as the Internet.

One of the most important things that the curiosity-minded pioneers of the Scientific Revolution did was to intellectually (and sometimes literally) peel apart a common thing—a leaf, a parasite, a hillside—to better understand what it was made of and how its parts were connected, trying to understand how each layer worked and helped govern the whole.