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Gore Puts Internet For Auction On eBay (Updated)
The folks over at SatireWire have got a pretty amusing article regarding Al Gore's newest fund raising effort. The fund raising in politics these days - sheesh. Updated 6:00 GMT by timothy: AntiNorm writes: "As of 9/17 0538 GMT, the auction is no longer valid." Seems like all the good auctions get pulled.
You mean the French army doesn't get "rooted"? I thought that's why they lost all the time...
Well, the most technically astute president in the last several decades (and perhaps ever) was Jimmy Carter, who was a nuclear engineer. He was also the last man who had a credible claim to being a "Washington outsider," and one of the most honest men who has ever occupied the White House. And he was a mediocre president, at best.
Thus, I'm not necessarily faulting Gore -- he at least knew who to listen to, whether he himself was technically savvy or not. So if I were voting just on the basis of who would most likely be net-friendly (and not just follow corporate interests and the wishes of the national security apparatus), I'd give him the nod. But it's real hard to get much enthusiasm over either of the major candidates.
I wish the politicians would just grow up!
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Guess owning the net does have its downsides.
It ain't done yet, it seems to me.
Some people are still taking the initiative in its continued creation.
Thanks to Al for his contributions in Congress in the eighties and nineties. And thanks to some of you out there who are taking the initiative in other spheres now! - Steve
If we just follow the logical pronounciation:
It's called a router, because it provides the route for packets from A to B. I can't think of what the row-te from A to B is supposed to be!
:-)
As someone who sweated bricks bringing my employer, a community college, onto the Internet in 1993, I knew first hand that it takes a lot more to bring Internet access to students than just bringing it to the front door, including internal wiring, computer purchases, and the biggest part, local desktop computer management.
So when the initiative to wire up every classroom came down, I wondered if they'd also hire the army of techs to take care of it all.
Of course, they didn't.
Instead, locally, we have some poor underpaid state sod who runs around to a dozen or so schools under his watch and re-ghosts the labs and goes away, which makes the computers usable for about half a day until various students, both intentional and accidental, re-trash the install so the computers sit unused again until the poor sod gets back there in a few weeks.
Yeah, there are better ways to do it. We install NT on our classroom desktops with strict ACLs and policies to prevent local changes as much as possible. Of course, NT by design is pretty braindead in this area so you have to have system directories with change access to everyone else it won't work at all (imagine /bin as 1777) so problems do happen, but not as often.
But that's the point, these schools everywhere don't have the resources to develop better solutions to net use in the classroom, so they rely on limited techs doing the impossible while the computers sit unusable for most of the time.
And don't get me started about how the teachers themselves often never got the training to use it.
In a lot of poorer areas, their school's Internet connection is a few PCs in the library and that's it.
But hey, literally it may be true. Every school has Internet access. So we can call it a "success" I guess... :-(
One of my professors said she has a colleague with a big picture of Gore on his office wall. The colleague said that Al Gore stopped by his office (he does distributed computer) in 1994 and spent an hour in there asking questions. I had never heard of the Internet and didn't know the slightest thing about distributed computing at that point, so Gore's at least got some genuine interest in computers and networks.
Right. Just go on beliving in your fanciful little world. In three months, the most powerful man in the world with be the same person it is today. Alan Greenspan.
The internet isn't, and never was intended to be the 'information superhighway' that Gore and others talked about. the IS was supposed to be a way that you could get movies and shit from AT&T. It was always about central, corporate, controlled BS. The same crap as on telivison, but more of it. "Ohh... you could rewind pay-per-view movies, you can't do that with regular cable..."
The internet has been around since the 1960s, and it has always been peer-to-peer. and its been around a lot longer then Gore's tenure in congress. The 'net is decentralized access for everyone, not just the giant media corporations.
That dosn't mean gore didn't try hard to mold the 'net into the IS after everyone got hooked up. Gore pushed hard for the CDA and encryption restriction. Aperantly he didn't really understand what the net was or how it worked. As for wireing up the fediral government? well, thats good I suppose, but accessing government documents isn't really something that lots of people do.
His exact quote was "During my tenure in congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet"
And on the other side, we have 'the dubya', gees, whats the point of getting out of bed this november....
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Try again. Have a look at RFC675. Read the title carefully. Notice the date? December 1974. AFAIK that's the first known occurrence of the word "Internet".
In September 1981, RFCs 791, 792 and 793 appeared, defining IP, ICMP and TCP (note the "I" in "IP") in the final version which is still theirs today (minor options and exceptions nonwithstanding).
There is nothing wrong with having been using the Internet for nearly ten years in 1990.
In fact, even though the word hadn't appeared yet, the "official birthday" of the Internet is generally taken to be April 7, 1969, the day of publication of the very first RFC by Steve Crocker. See "Thirty years of RFCs" for more historical considerations, and also the the Internet timeline.
I thought it was funny when Gore was on Letterman the other night and they were running through a top ten Slogans for the Gore/Leibermann campaign that were discarded. One of them was something like:
"5. I invented the internet, and I can take it away. Think about it."
Gore was a pretty good sport.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
In the late '80s the military insisted on cracking down on "unofficial use." Many schools and contractors wound up having to justify their access, and came up short. Efforts to start member-supported networks, such as CSNET, got a lukewarm reception since they (1) cost too much (no more 100% government subsidy) and (2) did too little (email and limited file transfer only). It took an act of congress to get these folks hooked up again: the ARPANET was split into the MILNET and NSFNET (NSF == National Science Foundation), with the latter offering subsidized access to any academic institution that wanted it and paid its share. And it was after this split that users starting refering to it as just "The Internet" (though from time to time I heard ARPANET referred to as "The ARPA Internet" back in the '80s).
Guess who wrote the bill that funded NSFNET? Or the National Supercomputing Initiative which built its backbone? Or the one somehwat later that lifted restrictions on commercial use? Yup, Smilin' Al (or, rather, one of his staffers wrote the bill and he sponsored it).
When you look at it from a technical perspective, saying that he "created" the Internet is a clear absurdity. But from a legislative and public policy perspective, it's hardly an exaggeration. I'm not convinced that Al "gets" the Internet any more than W does. But he did manage to listen to someone on his staff who "got" it. (And I've been racking my brain to remember the guy's name--I met him briefly while I was working at The RAND Corporation.) It's too bad that so few technophiles go to work as congressional staffers; it leaves me with some doubts as to whether Gore wasn't just "lucky" to be involved with the Internet.
I don't really know why everybody continues to make fun of Gore just because of that one stupid sentence.
Let me guess, you are one of the people who had plenty of fun and jokes at Dan Quayle's expense for the same kind of thing, right? Personally, I think off all the incredibly stupid things Gore has said it's supprising that this one is what is most applied to him.
"A zebra does not change its spots." - Al Gore, attacking President George Bush in 1992.
Finkployd
Hmmm, what kind of idiot would it take to buy something from someone who isn't really Al Gore?
Oh. Oops - I forgot the calibar of people on the net...
Another story for e-crime pundits I guess...
There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
http://www.whattheheck.com/ebay/algore. html
In case you want to bid, the eBay URL is here:
http://cgi.ebay.co m/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=439118853
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
The terms "internet" and "internetworking" have existed from the beginning as names for the technology. But until the MILNET split, no one called the network which used those technologies "The Internet." It was "The ARPANET."
I'm sick of this joke. It was funny for a while, but it's been beaten beyond death. It's taken on a second life as a piece of character assasination. Politics turns jokes into political slogans that are repeated just as mindlessly. It's all this 'bzz bzz' in your ear that hypnotically lulls you out of your senses until you become a malleable voting zombie.
Take off your weisenheimer hat for a moment and try to be fair while considering this.
Marc Andreeson created the Mosaic browser under a government grant to support high performance computing. The grant program was created by legislation authored by Al Gore. Maybe Andreeson would have got alternate funding, or maybe he'd have worked on something else. But Mosaic is clearly a watershed event; Gore didn't write it, but without Gore it might not have been written.
Do a little research:
1986 -- sponsored Supercomputer Network Act (remember back when all the Internet goodies used to come out of NCSA?), and Supercomputer Network Study Act.
1988 -- sponsored the National High Performance Computing Act (which funded Andreeson's work).
1992 -- sponsored the Information Infrastructure and Technology Act
1996 -- worked to support deregulation allowing cable companies to sell Internt service.
I'd call this a pretty good record for a young senator with no personal technical background. It's all the more remarkable in that I doubt very much the good folk back home in Tennesee were clamoring to have the nation's universities hooked up over high speed WANS.
Now, what exactly did Al say about all this? That he "took initiative on creating the Internet." Is there hyperbole here -- sure. It makes it sound like that when he took part in supporting research initiatives and policy changes he knew exactly what it would all turn into. The emphasis on supercomputers shows he was probably off the mark -- aiming to connect researchers to large computing utilities the way people are connected to large power plants.
The fact is nobody knew this computer networking thing would be the driving force in the new economy.
That the thing about technology -- sometimes the seed has to be planted even when you don't know what it's going to grow into. This is where you need government involvement in technology -- to do things which ought to be done but whose commercial fruits are unpredictable.
Now, there's a lot of Al Gore's current positions that make me uncomfortable. The V-chip thing seems quixotic to me. Did you ever see a piece of home technology the parents could work but the kids couldn't? Kids'll be blackmailing adults so they can watch "Survivor". Also, when people start getting up on a soap box about protecting children on the Internet I get a rash. Hint to parents: put the computer in a public place and make it clear there is NO privacy to be expected on the Internet.
So, there are legitimate reasons to be a bit leery of Gore, just like any body who has the particular skills to get himself into the position where he very well might become president.
But, if you are making your evaluation of one of the leading contenders for presidency of the United States on the basis of the "Father of the Internet" joke, you're a joke yourself -- as a citizen.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Considering I'm not even done with my bachelor's degree yet, I doubt very much that I was your freshment English teacher.
:)
OTOH, there was that entire year I can't remember due to too many drugs...
My journal has hot
But when was the last time you heard of a Democrat having to leave office over a scandal?
:)
:)
Good point. It demonstrates just how morally corrupt they are.
BTW--I'm not saying the Republicans don't have their fair share of morally corrput members either. If it were up to me, I'd trash the whole damn morally corrupt government and start over.
My journal has hot
the IP rights to the paper clip soon? :)
Tweet, tweet.
Politicians are always quick to grab the credit for things that weren't their doing; that's what makes them politicians. So of course Al Gore is the father of the internet (or whatever). But even if that isn't really true, we still owe him a debt of gratitude for his advances to computer science. After all, he did invent the Al-Gore-ithm too, right? :-P
They can't auction off the internet. It's on my hard drive. There's a little icon on my desktop that says so.
:)
Once (as the story goes), and I'm not sure how, but I accidentally clicked on something and I got a message saying "Are you sure you want to delete The Internet?" Boy, was I scared. I know a lot of work went into that thing. But I guess if I deleted it, we could all go home.
Tweet, tweet.
When Gore said he "took the initiative in creating the Internet", it was a miswording and political exaggeration, not an outright lie.
;-)
Yes, that's true. The trouble is Gore exaggerates as he breathes:
1) He claimed to be a co-sponsor of the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform bill -- but Feingold and Gore have never been in Congress at the same time. (Kernel of truth: he supported the bill)
2) He claimed to have discovered Love Canal. But his first involvement was a year after Carter declared it a federal disaster area. (Kernel of truth: he sponsored Congressional hearings on Love Canal)
3) He claimed to be the inspiration for "Love Story". (Kernel of truth: he did have contact with the creator of Love Story)
4) He claimed that as a journalist his investigations put people in prison. (Kernel of truth: someoine he investigated was convicted and fined)
5) He claimed that in Vietnam he came under fire. (Kernel of truth: As a military journalist, he did walk some patrols in downtown Saigon, and may have arived on the scene shortly after shooting had stopped)
6) He claimed to have been the initiator of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which was passed before he entered Congress. (Kernel of truth: he did support the EITC in Congress)
The question thus becomes; does Gore exaggerate deliberately or unconsciously? The first answer is very disturbing; the second would betray either a tendency to self-aggrandizement (fairly harmless, esp. for a politician) or to a lack of self-confidence (a potential problem in a crisis situation).
I think it's probably a tendency to self-aggrandizement, which really is a minor character flaw of little importance in a Presidential election. But given that I'm not voting for him anyway, I'd like everybody to think he's deliberately lying to get votes in an act of contempt for the intelligence of the American people
Steven E. Ehrbar
Yep. For a nice comparison of our two candidates, visit Billionaires for Bush (or Gore).
But I'm still voting anti-Bush.In legislative context (e.g. Congress), an "initiative" is a formal step that's part of making something law, before it gets voted on by the entire body. When Gore said he "took the initiative in creating the Internet", it was a miswording and political exaggeration, not an outright lie.
:)
:)
I guess whether or not it's a lie depends on what your definition of "is" is. (Oh wait, that's a different guy...
I have lots to criticize Gore about. Let's not even get started about illegal campaign contributions, selling American nuclear secrets to the Chinese, etc.
That wouldn't be news for nerds, that would be politics for hotheads.
My journal has hot
Some apparently would have us believe that the Internet's creation was completed prior to 1980. Silly stuff. As Vint Cerf said in '93 (http://cpsr.org/cpsr/nii/vinton-cerf -testimony): "In 1982, there were about 100 computers on the ARPANET and a few score others were part of the NSF-sponsored CSNET which also used the Telenet public data network. In 1993 there are over 1.5 million of them."
So what happened between '82 and '93? Well a whole bunch of people took the initiative in a great many spheres... and in Congress no one more so than Big Al. Among his various initiatives, apparently, was a 1986 legislative effort calling for interconnection of the 5 super-computing Centers, with fiber optic technology, including the one in Illinois where Andreesen et al later developed Mosaic.
Gore's sufficiently cognizant of the Internet's history to know that no one person or group of people "invented" it. And it wasn't created at any particular time; it was the creation of many people over many years. And in Congress, the main chap was Al G., right? Or who am I forgetting?
- Steve R.
If you want to make fun of someone, at least stick with the facts. Gore never said "I invented the Internet". What he said as: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.". Of course he didn't invent the Internet and nobody (I hope) is so stupid that they believe that Gore actually thinks he did. What he was talking about was how he, in 1990, before 99% of Slashdot readers even knew about the Internet, introduced bills that would bring "the information superhighway" to ordinary people, schools and businesses.
It's sad that instead of giving the guy some credit, you have to mock him over and over again because of a little exaggeration that happened years ago.
> It would take a LOT of balls for a candidate to get up on some major TV talk show and say "I'm opposed to filtering the Internet -- let the parents monitor their children themselves."
Yeah, that would be too close to supporting genuine family values. What the public wants is censorship under the code name of "family values". (Or "protect the children". Pick your code name on the basis of your political leanings - they both mean the same thing.)
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
He is the chairman of the fedral reserve board. Among other things, the board sets interest rates from the fedral reserve. This means that he basically has control over the supply of US dollars to the world.
Consider that while international politics are a factor, most of what George W. or Al will do will be of minor interest to people outside the US. However, the US economy has a huge influence on the world economy, and to a large extent, Alan Greenspan regulates its growth.
Does E-bay auction entire politicians? Or do they just auction votes on individual bills?
Fight Spammers!
There's an article about it here. I assume it originally ran in Wired, because the author of the article is a Wire columnist.
Not that any of this makes lying any more excusable. But lying about a private blow job isn't in the same league as Watergate or Iran-Contra.
Illegal campaign contributions, FBI files, White Water, Juanita Broderick, hmmm...I'd say clinton lied about FAR MORE than a simple blow job.
Or is this all part of that same "vast right wing conspiracy." Hmph.
My journal has hot
An article about the claim "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" can be read here. The author is a columnist for Wired.
In legislative context (e.g. Congress), an "initiative" is a formal step that's part of making something law, before it gets voted on by the entire body. When Gore said he "took the initiative in creating the Internet", it was a miswording and political exaggeration, not an outright lie. I'd say he "sponsored the initiative to extend the Internet to the general public." Whether or not those initiatives deserve any credit is another point of debate (but I certainly give no credit to the business world, as another poster does).
And he popularized the term "information superhighway", which of course we all find annoying. But he did communicate the concept to a lot of unwired people.
No, I'm not a Democrat, I'm just tired of misinformation. Criticize Gore (and Bush and others) for real problems, not made-up ones. Jokes I have no problem with; I liked the SatireWire article and the Letterman appearance (the first funny Letterman in a while, eh?).
Separated at birth? Dan Quayle & G.W. Bush?
;-)
Now don't go "Nucular" flaming me!
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
As someone who worked in the federal government when Al Gore started all his government wide internet initiatives, I think there's some kind of misunderstanding about how much he did to force negligent federal agencies to get email access in 1994 and put up websites in 1995. "Reinventing Government" and all that. Gore took the lead role in those pushes under the government's plan of the "information superhighway." And the weird way that the rest of the technical public doesn't know about that... well no wonder this is funny to you. If you worked for the federal gov't when Gore was pushing the internet to executive branch agencies his comment "I invented the internet" means ONE THING- the us gov't internet policies came through my efforts. It makes perfect sense to me. why do people think this is funny? It's not that funny. My friends talk like that all the time, that "I invented this" comment was a running gag on Seinfeld. Why do people want to take it literally? stubborness?
--
Hmm... Just a side thought but wouldn't that make him partially responsible (or at least indirectly claiming partial resposibility) in bringing about the world's larget repository (sp?) of porn, violent and offensive information and media including music, videos, books, magazines, images, etc., access to mentioned material and information relating to mentioned material? Wow... Tipper must be proud of him :P
http://dailyne ws.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000915/pl/gore_letterman_dc_3. html describes Gore on Letterman last Thursday, reading the Top 10 Rejected Campaign Slogans. You just stole number 9... number 9... number 9...
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
One republic, pop. 270 million. Populace subdued. Please place bids at:
The Republicrats,
c/o Corporatism, Inc.
Stay tuned for sponsored debates between a rich white guy in his 50s with strong family political connections, and a rich white guy in his 50s with strong family political connections. Debate topics will include whether there should be a prescription drug benefit as part of medicare, or whether medicare should pay for prescription drugs. Also on the table are whether taxes hould be cut, or whether we should cut taxes.
Act now to get your piece of this exciting product! Auction closes in November!
You can get it @ boarders here in the Portland Metro area.
We also got it in Vermillion SD @ USD in the early 90s.
Actually he didn't mispronounce "routers" as "root-ers" as this article suggests. He just used the UK English pronounciation.
It appears that the link does not contain the same description as the Satire wire article... is somebody trying to sell the internet out from under Al Gore? I can't read the ebay item number from the graphic on their website to tell for sure.
If you're quick you can also get an Al Gore voodoo doll. Aparently you can also get Al Gore's driver's license.
I guess Gore's campaign slogan now is,
"I gave you the Internet, and I can take it back"
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Kiro