"Racial ravine" divides Net users

While the number of Americans using computers and the Internet has increased sharply, far more whites are embracing the new technologies than black and Hispanic Americans, raising concerns that the widening gap will develop into an unbridgeable "racial ravine," the government reported Thursday. One of the report_s most troubling findings is that the disparities in connectivity can_t be blamed solely on differences in income. Among families earning $15,000 to $35,000, for example, more than 33 percent of whites owned computers, but only 19 percent of blacks did - and that gap has widened nearly 62 percent since 1994 despite plunging computer prices.