This package is a (currently) simple interface to the 
libcurl functionality.  This is an extensive and well
tested library that takes care of so many details that
we would have to mimic (probably incompletely and poorly)
if we were to write this in the R language directly.

You will need to have libcurl installed on your machine.
You can obtain the source and binaries for numerous operating
systems from 
              http://curl.haxx.se