Slashdot Mirror

Maybe it costs you more because of the
asymmetric nature of internet interconnection. Telstra probably has much higher expenses than ISPs in the US and Europe.

In a CNN interview on 9 March 2000, Al Gore claimed "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Was Al Gore really the "Father of the Internet"? Well, no. Albert Gore, Junior, was not elected to Congress until 1976, although his father Albert Gore, Senior, was previously a Senator. Junior represented Tennesee's Fourth District in the House of Representatives, then was elected to the US Senate in 1984. (Source: "Current Biography Yearbook 1987", page 213, edited by Charles Moritz, published by The H.H. Wilson Company, NY, copyright 1987 and 1988.) The Pentagon funded the original development of the Internet, and the military contracting company Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) began constructing it in 1969. (Source: see the Internet history FAQ pages listed below.) It was originally called ARPAnet, since the agency that funded it was named ARPA. By 1973 it was a modest success.

Wired News does a nice job of debunking Gore's claim.

The CNN interview in which Al Gore claimed that he created the Internet:

• CNN transcript of Gore interview
• RealAudio audio-video file of Gore CNN interview

Internet history FAQ pages:

• The History of the Internet
• Internet Society (ISOC) All About the Internet
• Evolution of the Internet

Hell, they KEPT DOCUMENTS FROM THEIR OWN PRESIDENT, and he eventually quit.

Karl Auerbach was elected to the Board of Directors (At-Large Representative for Canada and the United States), he was not the president.

Karl did win his case with support from the EFF.

Stuart Lynn is President and CEO of ICANN. He is the one that is attempting to control ICANN through both day-to-day operations as President, and the Board as CEO. Stuart seems very intent in increases his power, and his domain of power, the role and responsibilities of ICANN.

I am miffed that IANA was assigned by the US Dept. of Commerce to ICANN, and not the Internet Society / Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF)

The root DNS servers point to the top-level domains (TLDs) such as the Country Code TLD (ccTLD) and generic TLD (gTLD).

So the root server points to the servers for the 'org' domain (or subdomain), which are now handled by Internet Society and Public Interest Registry that operate several DNS authoritative DNS servers for the ORG domain. These then point to the authortative servers for slashdot.org, and we (or our ISP on our behalf) do yet another DNS request, this time to one of the authoratitive slashdot.org DNS servers, and lookup the IP address of www.slashdot.org or slashdot.org.

To reduce the number of requests, our ISP DNS server will normally cache answers for both the TLDs servers, and specific subdomains, such as slashdot.org and specific hostnames such as www.slashdot.org.

Do they mean the Internet Society or the Internet society in general?

Hackers BUILT the Internet, you moron.


Ummmm.... actually, I'm pretty sure it was the DARPA (US military) that built the internet

more from me...

if you read the second paragraph in the article and follow the first link Section 5 then you may find more answers.
I think parts of the site may be suffering mildly from the /. effect though....

A reply on the same thread: For geeks, you slashdot kids display an embarrassing lack of knowledge about a principal subject of geekdom. Kleinrock is indeed considered one of a handful of people who literally and truly invented the Internet. Others were Vint Cerf, Jon Postel, Bob Kahn, and Lawrence Roberts. The Internet didn't come from a vacuum: buy a book, take an hour, and learn about its history.

Hey, so lots of large companies are members of the Internet Society. Could this possibly be because they're involved in the Internet and want to have input into Internet policy? Perhaps they want to take part in the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is part of ISOC. This isn't a scandal or a conspiracy. Thousands of people in over a hundred countries are members; being a member of ISOC costs me US $ 75 a year, but you can join for free. Why aren't you a member?

Hey, so lots of large companies are members of the Internet Society. Could this possibly be because they're involved in the Internet and want to have input into Internet policy? Perhaps they want to take part in the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is part of ISOC. This isn't a scandal or a conspiracy. Thousands of people in over a hundred countries are members; being a member of ISOC costs me US $ 75 a year, but you can join for free. Why aren't you a member?

Well, somebody has to post it...

ISOC's membership page lists Microsoft as one of the founding and highest ranking members.

I'll just sit back and watch the fireworks.

-

Jon is indeed spinning in his grave.

Coincidentally Vint Cerf, currently the ICANN Board of Directors chairman, is a WorldCom Vice President.

.. Here [ps.gz] published in NDSS '02.

Gilmore is a true Internet pioneer and activist, a dedicated supporter of free speech. A short list of his accomplishments is available here, including being one of the first employees at Sun and helping found the EFF. In addition he was an early activist in getting the Usenet alt. groups going as an alternative to the rest of the hierarchy where tight controls were in place. He has been active in supporting free access to cryptography, helping found the Cypherpunks and participating in a number of law suits and FOIA actions to get the government to reduce restrictions on crypto. He has funded the FreeSwan effort to build transparent point to point crypto into the Linux kernel.

He also founded Cygnus Support, probably the first company to prove that you could make money off of open source software. The company was sold to Red Hat in 1999 for $674 million.

John Gilmore was fighting for free speech and the right to communicate before most of us had ever heard of the Internet. If his actions seem out of step with an increasingly paranoid and closed Internet community, I suggest that we not be so quick to assume that everyone else is right and Gilmore is wrong. History has shown him to be a far sighted thinker who has been on the right side of virtually every issue.

However, I wouldn't mark this particular moderator down. Your post was a list of complaints about what other people are doing to solve a real problem with no solution of your own to offer or any reason why its not a problem. Personally I wouldn't mark it as a troll but I think it's borderline.

See, this is what you should have put in the original post.

If I recall correctly, at inet2001 there was a panel about web site catering for disable people. The Sydney Olympic web site was named for going against IOC rules and Australian laws that specify that such public web site should cater for people with disabilities. I think some associations sued the IOC on the subject but it was too late.

The issue was particulary bad knowing that after the olympics there are the para-olympics

I don't know where the Salt Lake 2002 web site stands on this issue and if it goes against IOC rules and US laws...

Franck

If my memory serves me right, the Internet is the bigger grandson of ARPAnet, which was originally developed for secure voice and teletype transmissions.

I say "Bring it on!" Not for a hacking standpoint, because really, what's the point? I think that GOVNET will eventually become another arm of the Internet eventually. It only makes sense that at least one department (Office of Homeland Security comes to mind) will want a direct link to the Internet to make work easier, and then another and then another, and finally, the GOVNET will just be another section of the internet, the same way WAIS and GOPHER are today. I wouldn't worry.

BTW, my thought that ARPAnet was the start of it all is sort of correct. You can check it all out right here.

It seems to me that this is the key to the current problem, and illustrates that fixing the current problem - the incompatibility betwen RAND licensing and open source software - won't fix the underlying problem and this sort of hting will keep on occurring.

This raises a number of questions for me:

• What is the justification for having a W3C separate from the IETF?
• If it's reasonable to have two standards-setting bodies for the net, why not three?
• Why should we, as people explicitly excluded from the W3C's processes, treat W3C as authoritative?
• What if anything is W3C going to do about expanding its constituency?

this is not what 802.11 is intended for
oh come on, focus your brain and think back to what the internet was intended for...a world wide pr0n stash? a business network? history
geeks have always took cool technology and adapted it thats why we have such cool toys to play with.

And on re-reading the paper, I found that the stream generator uses a packet key of IVk, in other words, it uses one of 2^64 or 2^128 cipher streams, not just 2^24 as suggested by Zeinfeld. (IMHO?)

The flaky IV generation could be handled by a software upgrade, I imagine. This would then spread the IVs out more evenly over the 2^24 number space, and reduce the probability of stream re-use. The IV size is still too low for very high traffic. But I don't know by how much improving the generation would increase the amount of traffic required for a crack - 2^24 ÷ 4 million ?

The cipher stream might be made less amenable to this attack by using RC4(cf(IVk)k), where cf() is some cryptographic function, possibly RC4 again, but you'd need to be an expert to sort this out!

This all goes to show that you should have your protocol design and key management audited by an independent expert in the field. A firm I worked with used to use Donald Davies. Sadly he died last year.

There is a real issue here, though:

Who pays for the transport, i.e., the backbone? In the early post-ARPA days, the National Science Foundation paid for the backbone, through a project called NFSNET. However, because NSF didn't feel it was appropriate for the government (yes, the same government so many /.ers love to hate) to pay for the bandwidth for commercial intents, the backbone was transferred to private operation. I think this was a huge mistake. A global information network is fundamentally a public good, and ultimate control of it should reside with the public, not private enterprise. People looking to make money should pay to use a public medium to do so, but control of the medium should belong to the public, much like the FCC licensing bandwidth.

If we really are in a free market (which I doubt, because they don't exist), then as long as there's a substantive demand for free information, someone should want to sell it to us. But I do think it will be hard for anyone to match the kind of money that media giants or B2B powerhouses can throw at having routing done their way.

This brief history of the Internet is good reading. It includes a definition of the word Internet. Perhaps there could be publicly controlled routers managed by wiki?

Yes. Thank god they didn't spend any tax money trying to network those computers back in the '60's. Silly nerds and their esoteric research...

People won't pay because they're angry.

(Warning: this post will break the long-lived social belief that opinions should be entirely devoid of human emotion lest those opinions lose their credibility. If you happen to be someone who believes this adage to be true, then you shouldn't read this post; and instead should please yourself watching the bevy of security camera footage tapes that I'm sure exist. The rest of us human beings can read on.)

That's right, angry... and for a whole lot of reasons, too.

See, when I want a new shirt, I can go to the store, look at it, try it on, ogle at how it looks on me in a mirror, and decide whether or not I want to purchase.

When I want a new car, I can go to a dealership, drive the car around town, inspect every part of it, and make up my mind as to whether or not I really like it.

When I want an apple, I can pick the one I think looks, feels, and even smells the best out of a huge stack of apples at the grocer or at one of many farmer's markets around town. (At the markets, in fact, I'm encouraged by the mom-and-pop vendors to taste the product. But I wouldn't really recommend putting produce up to your nose and smelling it in public.)

However, suddenly, when the product I'm interested in happens to fall into the "information" category, I'm now expected to pay to even find out if a bit of information I want is even available, much less find out what the quality of that data is.

If I want to know what a particular band sounds like, I'm told (by the artists, on more then one occasion) that I should "buy the CD and find out." (A CD costs anywhere from $15-$20 brand new; that much money routinely feeds me nutritiously for a week. I refuse to spend a week's worth of food money only to find out that a certain group's latest offering sounds like crap.

When I want to know whether or not Word XP will fill my word processing needs, I have to not only buy the CD's, but also call Microsoft to get permission to USE the farking things. And that permission only lasts a year or two! (Just when you thought that only shareware was time limited...)

And yes, there are ways around all these problems - but you utilize these methods at risk of being branded a criminal (and possibly persecuted as one) by greedy people with too much free time©.

If a department store hired bouncers and enforced a cover charge at every door - so you'd have to pay ten bucks before even being allowed to go in and see if there are any clothes you might want - how long do you think they would stay in business?

If you bought a book, but were told that several armed police officers would come to your door after a year or two and arrest you if you hadn't paid for that book again by that time... how many bookstores would stay in business?

If your only choice of produce were limited to several small, online pictures and word-of-mouth reputation vouchers, how long do you think it would be before your online-only grocery store went out of business? (Oh, wait... we know the answer to that one already.)

As a people, we're angry. Angry that someone went out there went and changed the established, customer-is-always-right, service-with-a-smile rules around. Angry that the new system of commercialism is based on blind purchases, leaps of faith, zero-privacy, and other, similar systems designed from the ground-up to screw the customer at every turn. Angry that a group of well-funded, shiny-toothed suits have decided to try and turn what was designed to be a free system of communication into yet another way to make money. And angry that anyone who thinks this is a total crock and peacefully subverts this mockery of a system (even for perfectly legitamate reasons) is branded a criminal and consequently sent to jail and/or robbed of their (legally purchased) equipment.

At this point, it's a wonder people aren't routinely sacking and pillaging the nearest Virgin Records Megastore. I know for me, on a personal note, if Anger were People, I'd be China.

--WorLord

Seriously, though, ICANN was created by a few folks back before most country codes were even used, and may have outgrown itself.

I was using the Internet with a .uk address in 1985, which is to say seventeen years before ICANN was founded. It was created (as I've detailed in another post) following an extensive open international consultation process in which I took part - and you could have, too, if you'd been bothered. Certainly it's a mess; certainly it needs to be changed. Join ISOC and campaign!

...as I understand it, ICANN was just sort of created by the Commerce Department without regards to any outside opinions.

This is untrue. There was an extended process of consultation, involving meetings in Geneva (which I attended), Singapore, and Buenos Aires.

It seems like the Commerce Department is extending governmental rights to ICANN since the Commerce Department pretty much goes along with whatever they say.

Well, and what else are they going to do? If the United States Government tried to control Internet governance, the rest of the world would not be very pleased, to put it mildly. Face it, the Internet changes things, and makes national governments less and less relevent. We have to develop new ways to govern the Internet, and ICANN is an experiment. Personally I preferred it's predecessor, and I agree that the current lawyer-driven ICANN is a bit of a mess. But we're learning.

Perhaps we, as Internet users, should petition the Commerce Department for changes we want to top-level domains and other naming issues. To this end, I think we should question the foundation of ICANN.

What has the government of one nation got to do with it? How can the United States government change things? If you want to change things, join ISOC and come to Stockholm next week. If you come to my tutorials, I'll even stand you a beer!

...as I understand it, ICANN was just sort of created by the Commerce Department without regards to any outside opinions.

This is untrue. There was an extended process of consultation, involving meetings in Geneva (which I attended), Singapore, and Buenos Aires.

It seems like the Commerce Department is extending governmental rights to ICANN since the Commerce Department pretty much goes along with whatever they say.

Well, and what else are they going to do? If the United States Government tried to control Internet governance, the rest of the world would not be very pleased, to put it mildly. Face it, the Internet changes things, and makes national governments less and less relevent. We have to develop new ways to govern the Internet, and ICANN is an experiment. Personally I preferred it's predecessor, and I agree that the current lawyer-driven ICANN is a bit of a mess. But we're learning.

Perhaps we, as Internet users, should petition the Commerce Department for changes we want to top-level domains and other naming issues. To this end, I think we should question the foundation of ICANN.

What has the government of one nation got to do with it? How can the United States government change things? If you want to change things, join ISOC and come to Stockholm next week. If you come to my tutorials, I'll even stand you a beer!

...as I understand it, ICANN was just sort of created by the Commerce Department without regards to any outside opinions.

This is untrue. There was an extended process of consultation, involving meetings in Geneva (which I attended), Singapore, and Buenos Aires.

It seems like the Commerce Department is extending governmental rights to ICANN since the Commerce Department pretty much goes along with whatever they say.

Well, and what else are they going to do? If the United States Government tried to control Internet governance, the rest of the world would not be very pleased, to put it mildly. Face it, the Internet changes things, and makes national governments less and less relevent. We have to develop new ways to govern the Internet, and ICANN is an experiment. Personally I preferred it's predecessor, and I agree that the current lawyer-driven ICANN is a bit of a mess. But we're learning.

Perhaps we, as Internet users, should petition the Commerce Department for changes we want to top-level domains and other naming issues. To this end, I think we should question the foundation of ICANN.

What has the government of one nation got to do with it? How can the United States government change things? If you want to change things, join ISOC and come to Stockholm next week. If you come to my tutorials, I'll even stand you a beer!

...as I understand it, ICANN was just sort of created by the Commerce Department without regards to any outside opinions.

This is untrue. There was an extended process of consultation, involving meetings in Geneva (which I attended), Singapore, and Buenos Aires.

It seems like the Commerce Department is extending governmental rights to ICANN since the Commerce Department pretty much goes along with whatever they say.

Well, and what else are they going to do? If the United States Government tried to control Internet governance, the rest of the world would not be very pleased, to put it mildly. Face it, the Internet changes things, and makes national governments less and less relevent. We have to develop new ways to govern the Internet, and ICANN is an experiment. Personally I preferred it's predecessor, and I agree that the current lawyer-driven ICANN is a bit of a mess. But we're learning.

Perhaps we, as Internet users, should petition the Commerce Department for changes we want to top-level domains and other naming issues. To this end, I think we should question the foundation of ICANN.

What has the government of one nation got to do with it? How can the United States government change things? If you want to change things, join ISOC and come to Stockholm next week. If you come to my tutorials, I'll even stand you a beer!

what happened in my case is that the internet gave me a fifteen second attention span. i mean at least tv made me sit there now i cant even focus on tv for that long. because here im only a single click away from another interesting distracting bit of information, halfway through an article.

The rub lies in the companies who provide the actual physical circuits -- the MCIs and Sprints of the world.

Get real, will you? I knew Jon Postel - I had a beer with him in Geneva the year he died - and I knew his long and close friendship with Vint Cerf, whom I also know. And Vint is now Senior Vice President for Technology at MCI WorldCom.

One of the things that tied Vint and Jon together (apart from being close friends for thirty years) was that both of them cared passionately about a free and open Internet. Vint still does. You only need to look at his page on Social, Economic and Regulatory Issues to see that. ISOC's slogan 'The Internet is for Everyone' is very much his slogan.

I think everyone agrees that ICANN is a mess - but it's a mess brought about by lawyers (mainly American lawyers), not by the Internet pioneers. Also, and this is what makes me most worried about articles like this one, is that the people who are doing most to damage the concept of a free, open Internet for everyone are not the pioneers - they're the get-rich-quick sleazoids who come in on the back of the pioneer's work and try to grab a chunk of the territory for themselves. We can all see that people who register patents for old and obvious ideas just by tagging 'Internet' onto the end of them are sleazoids. Can you not see that alternate TLD registrar wannabes are also sleazoids?

Yes, ICANN stinks. Yes, we need a more open, democratic authority controlling the top-level domains. But the Internet pioneers are not the enemy, and MCI is not the enemy. And in my opinion, the second thing that needs doing to ICANN (after making it democratic) is to move it out of American legal jurisdiction.

The rub lies in the companies who provide the actual physical circuits -- the MCIs and Sprints of the world.

Get real, will you? I knew Jon Postel - I had a beer with him in Geneva the year he died - and I knew his long and close friendship with Vint Cerf, whom I also know. And Vint is now Senior Vice President for Technology at MCI WorldCom.

One of the things that tied Vint and Jon together (apart from being close friends for thirty years) was that both of them cared passionately about a free and open Internet. Vint still does. You only need to look at his page on Social, Economic and Regulatory Issues to see that. ISOC's slogan 'The Internet is for Everyone' is very much his slogan.

I think everyone agrees that ICANN is a mess - but it's a mess brought about by lawyers (mainly American lawyers), not by the Internet pioneers. Also, and this is what makes me most worried about articles like this one, is that the people who are doing most to damage the concept of a free, open Internet for everyone are not the pioneers - they're the get-rich-quick sleazoids who come in on the back of the pioneer's work and try to grab a chunk of the territory for themselves. We can all see that people who register patents for old and obvious ideas just by tagging 'Internet' onto the end of them are sleazoids. Can you not see that alternate TLD registrar wannabes are also sleazoids?

Yes, ICANN stinks. Yes, we need a more open, democratic authority controlling the top-level domains. But the Internet pioneers are not the enemy, and MCI is not the enemy. And in my opinion, the second thing that needs doing to ICANN (after making it democratic) is to move it out of American legal jurisdiction.

So, that was enough of text you can read in any internet hype aricle.

The article closes out with a musing about whether pioniers of the Internet like Tomlinson will go down in history with inventors like Morse, Marconi and Bell.

Now I frankly think that Tomlinson is not destined for many history books, and moreover that many of the ARPANET engineers will never become known as heroes the way Morse & co. are, but I think it was quite appropriate when the death of Jon Postel two years ago precipitated a wave of mourning throughout the Internet. To be sure, most Internet users never heard of him, not to mention the general public, but if you have any familiarity at all with the Internet's ascendancy, you'll know that Postel's contributions were crucial to its current success. Domain names, IP addressing, many of the basic TCP services such as chargen and echo, the Telnet protocol, FTP reply codes, the MIME standard -- Postel had a hand in developing numerous basic building blocks that now make up our everyday networking life.

Try searching for the author name Postel among the RFC's -- you get 232 hits. And I daresay that RFC authorship is a good deal more significant than authorship of a program like SENDMSG, since it's the open standards that made the Internet's success possible.

The Internet society has a page about him here.

[ Source: Internet Society: "A Brief History of the Internet" ]

A few notes...

The Internet Society probably isn't too happy about this. They released a statement on November 8th encouraging NSI to back off and let the IETF IDN WG do its job.

Also, there are companies that are already currently operating in this market, including WALID, which is taking registrations for Arabic domain names (AND RESOLVING THEM), and will soon be adding Hindi, Tamil, and two Chinese scripts before moving into other markets.

A few notes...

The Internet Society probably isn't too happy about this. They released a statement on November 8th encouraging NSI to back off and let the IETF IDN WG do its job.

Also, there are companies that are already currently operating in this market, including WALID, which is taking registrations for Arabic domain names (AND RESOLVING THEM), and will soon be adding Hindi, Tamil, and two Chinese scripts before moving into other markets.

So I could say scan the card into a computer terminal and buy/sell with the money I have on the card and build something similar to a trust rating (karma points) based on the id I had on the card but there'd be no way to track my identity back to who I was irl from that card even if I had done business with you in person.

This type of scenario would call for something known as anonymous digital cash. The protocol that allows for authenticated but untraceable messages is somewhat complicated, but it is nicely outlined in Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier in section 6.4. Those wishing to explore this can start here. A couple of interesting things to note about Digital Cash:

1. It would be possible to commit the perfect crime with such a tool. Truly untraceable money???

2. A Dutch company, DigiCash, owns most of the digital cash patents and has implemented digital cash protocols in working products.

3. Elizabeth Hurley is HOT. OK -that's off topic, but I just saw the remake of Bedazzled, and wow!

This statement is patently false. Vint Cerf stated in an email to MSNBC: As far back as 1986, he was holding hearings on this subject (supercomputing, fiber networks...) and asking about their promise and what could be done to realize them. Bob Kahn... participated in several hearings held by then-Senator Gore Which shows that he was holding hearing on the internet in 1986 and the Internet Timeline shows that in 1991, the US High Performance Computing Act (Gore 1) establishes the National Research and Education Network (NREN) was passed. All of this is well before the mid-1990's.

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet

The full phrasing is important because the statement clearly is talking about what he did as a congressperson. He took the initiative over other Congresspeople to create the internet. (I never stated that he the quote meant a legistlative "initiative". Just that he took the Congressional initiative in creating the internet). There may have been many other people who had taken initiative to create the internet, but Gore took the inititive as a congress person.

According to the Internet Timeline, in 1986 the NSFNET was just created with a backbone of 56Kbps, but Vint Cerf acknowledged that "As far back as 1986, [Gore] was holding hearings on this subject (supercomputing, fiber networks...) and asking about their promise and what could be done to realize them. Bob Kahn, with whom I worked to develop the Internet design in 1973, participated in several hearings held by then-Senator Gore". In 1986, the internet was far from done. It was still being created. It can be said that it is still being created, but it can eaily be said that Al Gore played an important part in creating the internet. Not the first internet, but the internet, the one you are using right now.

I'll probably be moderated down again for stating this opinion, but I really don't care. I am rather sick of the media falsifying and cut quoting statements by Gore. For a longer disection of many Gore "lies," there is another good article on snopes.

He said that that he "took the initative". You don't "take" a "Congressional initative". Clearly, that phrase is meant in the nonlegistlative sense. Moreover, you cannot create what already exists. The Internet Timeline shows that his legistlative work was in 1991, but Vint Cerf acknowledged that "the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983". And that is discounting all the work beginning in the 60s. Gore himself did not even start talking about the Internet until 1987. In other words, Gore was not even in picture when the Internet was being created, and was active only years later.

In short, Gore's problem is an ontological one: you cannot initiate what has already started, and you cannot create what already exists. Yet this is precisely what Gore claimed, a claim that is so obviously undefendable. Unfortunately, he seemingly cannot stop pulling stuff out of the thin air, even when unpressured. Even at the first debate, he was claiming a nonexistent trip FEMA trip or lack of funding for a well-funded school.

The fact is, one will be hard pressed to defend a lifetime of lies, especially when that entails numerous documented fibs in his own words. The evidence is overwhelming, despite the feeble efforts of his defenders. Gore and Clinton are in a league of their own. What makes Gore worse is that while Clinton lies for self-preservation, Gore unnecessarily lies for self-aggrandization.

The lack of logic in this argument should be painfully obvious even to the most casual observer.

Fact is, Algore voted to fund a (at the time, really fast) backbone for internetworking super computers. One bill (albeit very important), at one point in time, along the evolution of the internet. What's not mentioned in the original post (and something I think is a serious issue) is Algores lack of self confidence to stand on his beliefs alone without "extending" himself into every situation in an effort to convince the listener that he's a player on the topic (when he's really just a punk).

The simplified version of the original poster question would be:
Why does Algore want to filter what he invented?

FICTION: Al Gore said he was the first to discover the Love Canal nuclear accident.
FACT: The incident was already discovered, being investigated, and covered widely in the press for many months before Gore was aware of it.

Al Gore said in a speech to a group of high school students in New Hampshire that he "called for a congressional investigation and a hearing" regarding toxic waste problems in Toone, TN. During the course of the hearings, he said he started looking for other towns that had similar difficulties, which is how he came across Love Canal. I refer you to He's No Pinnochio, an article featured in The Washington Monthly, describing the actual quote, the circumstances surrounding its misinterpretation, and the utter refusal of most media outlets to apologize for the mistake.

FICTION: Al Gore claimed the book "Love Story" was based on his life and Tipper's.
FACT: Author Erich Segal called a press conference to deny his claim. (Couldn't he at least lie about a love story where his sweetheart doesn't die?)

It's true that the female lead in the story wasn't based on Tipper. However, The New York Times reported (December 14, 1997) that Erich Segal based male lead of the story was based on two people: Al Gore, and Gore's roommate (actor Tommy Lee Jones). So, you're right: although Al and Tipper weren't the basis for the male and female leads, Al and Tommy were the inspiration for the male lead, which kinda makes the whole scandal seem a little silly. Check the same article for citations.

I'm not saying that I find Gore to be particularly trustworthy or even credible on all of the issues. (I'm still considering a vote for Nader, the author of the previous post's favorite.) But if there's one thing I can't stand, it's when people accuse others of lying without being in full posession of the facts. Austad: do yourself a favor and provide better (ie: any) citations next time, or just keep your mouth shut.

By the way: Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet. Chris Lehane: "[Gore] was the leader in Congress on the connections between data transmission and computing power, what we call information technology. And those efforts helped to create the Internet that we know today." And the "widespread use by government and educational institutions since the early 1970's." line is bullshit. According to Jon Postel, Vint Cerf, and a host of other members of the ISOC, ARPANET didn't reach broad usage until the early 80s, and wasn't even using TCP/IP until the mid-eighties. I refer you to their document, A Brief History of the Internet.

FICTION: Al Gore said he was the first to discover the Love Canal nuclear accident.
FACT: The incident was already discovered, being investigated, and covered widely in the press for many months before Gore was aware of it.

Al Gore said in a speech to a group of high school students in New Hampshire that he "called for a congressional investigation and a hearing" regarding toxic waste problems in Toone, TN. During the course of the hearings, he said he started looking for other towns that had similar difficulties, which is how he came across Love Canal. I refer you to He's No Pinnochio, an article featured in The Washington Monthly, describing the actual quote, the circumstances surrounding its misinterpretation, and the utter refusal of most media outlets to apologize for the mistake.

FICTION: Al Gore claimed the book "Love Story" was based on his life and Tipper's.
FACT: Author Erich Segal called a press conference to deny his claim. (Couldn't he at least lie about a love story where his sweetheart doesn't die?)

It's true that the female lead in the story wasn't based on Tipper. However, The New York Times reported (December 14, 1997) that Erich Segal based male lead of the story was based on two people: Al Gore, and Gore's roommate (actor Tommy Lee Jones). So, you're right: although Al and Tipper weren't the basis for the male and female leads, Al and Tommy were the inspiration for the male lead, which kinda makes the whole scandal seem a little silly. Check the same article for citations.

I'm not saying that I find Gore to be particularly trustworthy or even credible on all of the issues. (I'm still considering a vote for Nader, the author of the previous post's favorite.) But if there's one thing I can't stand, it's when people accuse others of lying without being in full posession of the facts. Austad: do yourself a favor and provide better (ie: any) citations next time, or just keep your mouth shut.

By the way: Gore never claimed to have invented the Internet. Chris Lehane: "[Gore] was the leader in Congress on the connections between data transmission and computing power, what we call information technology. And those efforts helped to create the Internet that we know today." And the "widespread use by government and educational institutions since the early 1970's." line is bullshit. According to Jon Postel, Vint Cerf, and a host of other members of the ISOC, ARPANET didn't reach broad usage until the early 80s, and wasn't even using TCP/IP until the mid-eighties. I refer you to their document, A Brief History of the Internet.

the bill that Al Gore sponsored in Congress created something very specific, with a particular name... now, what was that name?

NSFNet. Gore's bill, the Supercomputer Network Act of 1986, established the NSFNet in 1986.
The Internet was born four years earlier, without Mr. Gore's assistance. (See http://www.isoc.org/gu est /zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html)

Steven E. Ehrbar

Hmmm The only mention of Algore in Hobbes internet timeline is the one in 1993 when whitehouse.gov went on-line.

Why sell 100M/sec for ~$20 a month into the home when you can sell it for ~$200 a month to a business.

You're leaving money on the table, and that's a bad business model. If you consider that Arpanet had ~56k truck lines (costing thousands) to connect computers in the late 70s and 80s, and today businesses are giving away 56k conectivity for "free", things move on.

Processor power and bandwidth make incrimental increaces in the marketplace, and have for 3 decades now, and I don't forsee a "leapfrogging" technology that makes it worth the investment. Remember, it's not just the speed of the fibre, it's the router/load ballance/server that has to keep up as well. By definition, internetoworking means "we're all in this together" so what good does paying through the nose for 100x jump in bandwidth if nothing else it's connected too can keep up.

The past 30+ years of computing has shown that Bandwidth and proccessor power are incrimental, and any jump in either has a limited life, before it's obsolete.

To MPAA, RIAA, lawyers and politicians everywhere: Someday you're gonna die and stink just like everyone else. What will your legacy be?

Consider this:
Communications Network Impact ...
" A real-time conversation involves two (or more) people with terminals carrying on an exchange. Such a conversation could easily last for hours. Or two computers could be co-operating on a problem, with the same duration of contact. Such usage could, in the face of a million users, tie up large portions of phone company equipment all out of proportion to the numbers using the system. "

Wouldn't it have been amazing if apple was at the leading edge of networking in the 1980s and included BITNET with their little mac instead of pouring all those resources into their own networking thing? Imagine where we'de be today with the world "discovering" the net 15 years earlier?