I'm kidding in the sense that this is not likely to be adopted and hence civilization is likely to fail. More likely is the scenario where net assets are "taxed" via clan-based protection rackets under warlords that arise from the mess. The rates will be much higher then.
Renting pixels is a clear demonstration of land value taxation's basis in economic rent. The same principle should be applied to tax domain names and IP addresses to fund ICANN and the government(s) that enforce domain name property rights. It applies also to things like spectrum and orbital slots for communications satellites.
Ultimately this principle applies to taxing net assets in general.
Since the primary function of government is the protection of non-subsistence property rights, it is sensible to charge a use fee for those rights. Note, I said "non-subsistence" property rights. The point here is that house and tools of the trade are protected from confiscation under bankruptcy law precisely because they are subsistence assets. Where government does not exist, subsistence properties are typically defended by the occupant, whose life is sustained by those assets. Government brings precisely the property rights we associate with civilization -- assets beyond home and tools of the trade.
Given the relatively liquid nature of civilization, it makes sense to define "subsistence" in some dollar value of assets. Various ways of defining the dollar value are all approximately equal:
The median price of housing a person plus the median price of capitalizing a job.
The threshold used by the SEC for "qualified investor".
The level of savings insured by the FDIC.
Or, for the historically inclined: The market price of 20 arable acres in the Confederate south, a mule, a plow and a small house on such land.
Until a citizen accumulates the subsistence net asset level, they should pay no tax and then pay tax only on the net assets they own above subsistence.
Assessment should be by the owner, thereby establishing a "fair market value" for the exercise of eminent domain. Net assets only would be taxed and would be calculated by subtracting the fair market value of debts against the estate from the self-assessment of the occupant.
Other forms of taxation could be eliminated in a revenue neutral way if net assets, in excess of subsistence levels, were taxed at the risk free interest rate (approximately the interest rate on the national debt).
Indeed, given the centralization of asset ownership that has resulted from the subsidy of non-subsistence property, a subsidy inherent in civilization, it may be the failure to use this tax base is the ultimate cause of the repeated decay of civilizations from ancient times.
Maybe someone will solve the fabrication problem but these articles haven't even talked about it. Until someone makes the transition from the statistical mechanics of photolithography to the molecuar mechanics posited by nanotechnology devices, the fact that feature sizes of electronics devices are on the order of nanometers is insufficient justification to claim that we're on the verge of the nanotechnology revolution.
When are all these paleolithic types going to recognize that loss of manufacturing is progress to a services economy -- that deficits don't matter and that there is a Santa Claus?
Dvorak is onto something: Open standards allow competitive implementations. M$ is cash rich. They can buy stuff. If I were in Ray Ozzie's shoes I would apply something like the C-Prize to the entirety of MS's application software offering based on open standards for the GUI's as well as the interchange formats. Let the contest anneal for a while, and adopt the language used by the winner as the next standard language for web-based software: put a dynamic compiler for it into the MS browser and submit it to W3C. From the resulting compressed code, I'd reduce the OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform. For backward compatibility with existing web standards, port the rest of the code into a maximally succinct but complete JS implementation of those standards -- I like TIBET(tm) but then I'm not objective about that.
If job security for existing MS programmers is an issue, just given them all a yearly decreasing proportion of their current salaries for the next 5 years: 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, 20% -- and during that time let them find financing to compete.
I hadn't done this search for a while but just now I re-did it and discovered that the Mercury compiler now has XSB-style tabling. This is an important advance for practical logic programming.
Prolog has the wrong semantics for a specification language due to the way unification screws up for recursion, among other things. It was a hack for the PDP-10 over 20 years ago and shouldn't be confused with a serious attempt at predicate-oriented programming.
XSB is closer but for a more serious treatment of the predicate-oriented approach see my prior/. comments regarding subsuming exception handling and "OO" programming within a predicate formalism.
Ultimately you want to dispense with the SQL database altogether and leverage the fact that predication is relational so you eliminate an entire layer of semantic noise.
The idea of the Rails specification (and any program generator including compilers) is to express yourself at a higher level so as to avoid redundancy by closing the gap between program specification and code. Avoiding redundancy is otherwise known as succinctness, factoring and even compression.
While working with the corporate software process group at SAIC (I was managing the automated ordnance inspection software department at the time) it became apparent to me that most of the software process is reducable to a human-mediated build/compilation process where the "source" language is the formalism used for specification. Since the highest level language for specification is predication (largely of pre and post conditions of the system's operations) it became apparent that predicate calculus tools -- not necessarily direct execution thereof -- could be very important for automating large portions of the software process.
Since Rails isn't high enough level, its specification language is inadequate and the resulting code generated must be edited directly. But it is a step in the right direction.
Zombie Java May Finally Unanimate?
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 0
in 1999 I predicted Javascript employment would beat Java employment by 2003 but I didn't count on the third world paper mills being pushed so hard to churn out Java programmers sucker punching buzzword compliant CTOs. Sun's perversion probably cost the world economy a trillion dollars but things seem to finally be turning around.
I was initially as cynical about Michael Griffin as I was about Dan Goldin when he took the helm with grand plans to "reform" NASA. This is sounding like a new NASA and it indeed may be in the offing in response to the public pressure generated by the Shuttle failures combined with the popularity of the Ansar X-Prize. Seminal figures in the
technological advances that lead to basic advances in transportation technology
were conducted by private individuals competing for privately funded prize
awards. These included the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford and Charles
Lindbergh.
This sort of incentives-based policy is in the tradition of
American values. It should be no surprise that such values are being eroded as
the 'nation of immigrants' changes from pioneering independence to bureaucratic
dependence. The use of a socialist
bureaucracy to explore space is a fundamentally different experiment that other
proven American approaches to expanding the resource base available to
humanity.
In
1989 I was working on grassroots legislation to reform NASA's launch
services policies. This led to the passage of P. L. 101-611, The
Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 which required NASA to procure
launch services from private vendors whenever possible. This is common
sense if proper boundaries between public and private functions are to be
maintained. As radical as this may sound to many who see NASA as a space
transportation company, it was, in fact, Presidential policy at the time and the
legislation was therefore, in fact, redundant, but bureaucratic inertia demanded
separate acts by the Legislative branch to reinforce the Executive's own command
structure. This legislative effort started out as an attempt to
passsomething along the lines of the Kelly Act of 1925 (which formed the
basis for Jerry
Pournelle's recommendations first put forth by his Citizen's Advisory
Council for Space Policyin 1980), but compromised when it became clear
that resistance from NASA, and its contractors, to citizen involvement in space
policy was so intense that serious reform would be impractical.
My
testimony before Congress legislative follow-up to P.L. 101-611
made recommendations for a focus onincentives for commercial investment,
rather than plans or "programs". An example of incentives-based
legislation, applied to fusion energy policy, was recommended
for passage by Bussard, R. W., one of the founders of the US fusion
program in a letter confessing some of the subterfuge to which
technical leaders resorted. It is still quite relevant today given
the reliance on Middle Eastern oil and problems with fission
energy.
The point here is that incentives are more effective
in general than governmental programs.
The first settlers in America experienced enormous causalities
their first years they were in America. Entire colonies were lost. The
original colonies included a substantial variety of fundamentally
differing approaches to settling North America.
America's frontier wasn't built by a centrally controlled
bureaucracy -- and there is no reason to expect such a bureaucracy will take
Americans to their next frontier.
Space policy is a touchstone of American values since
Americans are spiritually a pioneering culture. Let's not forget who
settled the frontier, how those "immigrants" differed from later
immigrants, and what sort of "program" they had to settle the new
frontier.
If Michael Griffin is for real about this he may just reawaken the very pioneering character of Americans. We must hope he is not just sincere but will be successful doing so.
One of the drop-off points in the Portland area goes by the name of "Fisher's Landing", which is at "164th and highway 14". Google Transit doesn't recognize either.
First we have the Old Testament's "Ten Commandments" then the New Testament's "The Golden Rule". Now we have Google's "Ten Golden Rules". Since the Guttenberg Press was what gave rise to the Protestants and the Protestants are what gave rise to the counter-reformation's Jesuit order, it seems we have something like a new Jesuit order arising in response to the new Guttenberg revolution. Like the Jesuits the goal is to subvert and recentralize control of media lest something really nasty happen like a new Enlightenment with science and all manner of Heresy.
Silly people. The book of Genesis is largely derived from the Epic of Gilgamesh. So if some "Rabbis" (if you want to call Moses a "Rabbi") wrote it down, it was probably copied from some Sumerian legend.
This comment couldn't have been written in the seventies for several reasons.
Actually, I recall the first place I ran across the scaling law favoring huge Tokamaks was in Robert Hirsch's critique of the Tokamak program published in AAAS "Science" in the mid-70s, which is why I made the comment I made. I don't recall the entire content of the article but it tried to presume the strongest case for the Tokamak at that time. The technical challenges of economically building and operating a reactor of that size are enormous. That's why when Bussard left the government program (around the same time) to work with private capital, his approach was to look for scaling laws that favored smaller, disposable devices which was obviously a good strategy from the standpoint of development costs and risk.
People who lie and breath for a living are generally considered oxygen theives, not workers.
I suppose the fact that he was the only Republican candidate to win on a write-in vote in recent history doesn't cut him any slack with guys like you since he's guilty by association with a pariah like me.
But then there's always Robert Bussard, who gave my organization credit for the legislation he submitted to Congress along with his expose letter. Oops.. there again, we can, with great aplomb circularly reason our way out of this by virtue of the fact that he is guilty by association with me.
In fact that arguement can apply to anyone who claimed I accomplished anything real.:)
Your message could have been written in the mid 1970s of the Tokamak program as it was then.
Doesn't it make sense that government project managers would portray their technology as something that requires enormous scale and many years? They'll be retired with a fat pension by the time they are proven wrong -- if anything can be "proven" in an environment of politically volatile funding from year to year. They can always claim that they just weren't given enough money -- just like NASA does with the Shuttle disasters.
Diving into the system the way I did -- giving it the the benefit of the doubt -- and coming to conclusions deserves a bit more respect than someone sitting around behind a semi-anonymous persona and a keyboard calling "whack jobs" people who have done real work.
Back when the cold fusion brouhaha hit, I ran across an intriguing idea of achieving p-B11 (p=proteum=Hydrogen-1 and B11 =Boron-11) fusion using artificial ball lightning, called the Plasmak. No adequate explanation of ball-lightning has yet been concocted resuling in reproducible free-floating plasmoids, and the guy (Paul Koloc) doing the work seemed to have a somewhat plausible idea. (And he did have background with the Spheromak group at the University of Maryland.) Most importantly there were actual photographs of these plasmoids floating in the open air without continuous power input! So I looked into it seriously for a while. During this time I also ran across others who were looking into a variety of p-B11 technologies including one of the founders of the US Tokamak program, Robert W. Bussard with his resurrection of Philo Farnsworth's inertial electrostatic confinement device sometimes called the Farnsworth Fusor.
Given:
all the foment in the air.
the fact that the Tokamak was to fusion as the Shuttle was to cheap access to space.
...as the, then, Chairman of the Coalition for Science and Commerce (that had been successful in passing the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990, requiring NASA to buy commercial launch services whenever possible) I decided to go around to the various fusion contenders and come up with a set of about 10 milestones they all agreed would be worthy of prize awards, and came up with some legislation that would have awarded a series of $100M prizes, each for acheivement of one of those milestones.
The DoE committment to very large fusion concepts (the giant magnetic
tokamak) ensures only the need for very large budgets; and that is what
the program has been about for the past 15 years - a defense-of-budget
program - not a fusion-achievement program. As one of three people who
created this program in the early 1970's (when I was an Asst. Dir. of
the AEC's Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction Division) I know this to be
true; we raised the budget in order to take 20% off the top of the
larger funding, to try all of the hopeful new things that the mainline
labs would not try.
Each of us left soon thereafter, and the second generation
management thought the big program was real; it was not. Ever since
then, the ERDA/DoE has rolled Congress to increase and/or continue
big-budget support. This worked so long as various Democratic Senators
and Congressmen could see the funding as helpful in their districts.
But fear of undermining their budget position also made DoE bureaucrats
very autocratic and resistant to any kind of new approach, whether
inside DoE or out in industry. This led DoE to fight industry wherever
a non-DoE hopful new idea appeared.
Five years later, after working with Koloc and recovering the original images, I discovered that the photographs of the Plasmak plasmoids were almost certainly an artifact of the way CCD arrays shift their images out: The plasma discharge is time symmetric which, combined with the shifting of the image out of the CCD array, produced the illusion of a prolate spheroid. The discharge was so bright it overcame the CCD mask and exposed the image as the image was being shifted out of the array.
This was highly disappointing to but it, along with Bussard's disclosure, shows how deceptive these things can be and why a prize system is superior to providing government funding for polit
Corporations are the kiss of death for these things.
In the beginning there was the PLATO network which had a working prototype designed for mass-market which would have amortized itself within 5 years easily at $40/month service, including the rental of a bit-mapped graphics, touch screen, plasma displays. It had realtime multiuser games, even some multiuser 3D first person shooter games, as well as email, discussion fora (the origin of Ozzie's "Notes") and the ability for anyone to write programs for anyone else to run via the network. A single Cyber 760 benchmarked out at several thousand simultaneous users with 1/4 second response time. "Management" decided to focus on the higher profit margin corporate education market.
So I left PLATO and took up position as architect for the authoring system for the mass-market videotex experiment conducted by AT&T and Knight-Ridder News called "Viewtron" -- a service
of the joint-venture company, Viewdata Corporation of America. They had done market research which showed that the thing people most wanted was discussion. Having been from PLATO this was no surprise and indeed it was obvious to me people wanted to be able to provide publications and software services to the public. But when I presented an architecture whose primary discipline was to treat the desktop computer as the host system nearest the user (ie: P2P in 1982) I was told by a decision-maker that "we see videotex as 'we the institutions providing you the consumer with information and services'" Yes that was what he said. He may have been trying to get my goat but that is in fact the direction they took things. In any event I was about to be told by the corporate authorities that my P2P telecomputing architecture, which would have provided a dynamically downloaded Forth graphics protocol in 1983 evolving into a distributed Smalltalk-like environment beginning around 1985, would be abandoned due to a corporate commitment to stick with Tandem Computers as the mainframe vendor -- a choice which I had asserted would not be adequate. (At least Postscript survived.) I was subsequently offered the head telecomputing software position at Prodigy by IBM and turned it down when they indicated they would not support my architecture either, due to a committment to limit merchant access to their network to only those who had a special status with the service provider (IBM/CBS/Sears). The distributed Smalltalk system was specifically designed to allow the sort of grassroots commerce now emerging in the world wide web. (Now that via AJAX people recognize JavaScript is similar to the Self programming language and the Common Lisp Object System there is some resurrection of the original vision.) But this wasn't in keeping with IBM's philosophy at that time since they had yet to be humbled by Bill Gates coup but already Gates had locked in his position as the bottleneck between Moore's Law and software by retaining ownership of MS DOS while it was being distributed on IBM's hardware.
Lest people think the government is the ultimate savior in all this -- I did make a run at developing this sort of service on my own nickle using PC hardware but was squashed by the U.S. government when it provided UUCP/Usenet service, via MILnet, to a XENIX-based competitor in San Diego and would not offer me the same subsidy. MILnet was, by law, not for public access. Rather it was exclusively for military use. My complaints to DoD investigators resulted in continual "We're looking into it." replies. By that time Usenet was taking off and I couldn't get a seed market to finance any further work.
What Berners-Lee did was admirable in that he aimed lower -- for the low hanging fruit of simple document presentation. The sacrifice of P2P was, however a bit much to sacrifice. I still think that should have remained the "primary discipline". Things are slowly recovering though.
Expressive, safe programming languages, such as Java and C#.
First of all, safe is implied by expressive. Side-effects like buffer overflows result from the language semantics not being expressive. For example, you virtually never intend for an array allocation to result in an object whose semantics are to walk all over other data structures that happen to have been declared in proximity.
Secondly, with that fact firmly in mind, you want to focus on expressivity so that your language helps you say precisely what you mean -- and you never mean "crash or open up security holes due to random interactions".
These guys really think Java and C# are "expressive" when it comes to programmer intent?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm kidding in the sense that this is not likely to be adopted and hence civilization is likely to fail. More likely is the scenario where net assets are "taxed" via clan-based protection rackets under warlords that arise from the mess. The rates will be much higher then.
Ultimately this principle applies to taxing net assets in general.
Since the primary function of government is the protection of non-subsistence property rights, it is sensible to charge a use fee for those rights. Note, I said "non-subsistence" property rights. The point here is that house and tools of the trade are protected from confiscation under bankruptcy law precisely because they are subsistence assets. Where government does not exist, subsistence properties are typically defended by the occupant, whose life is sustained by those assets. Government brings precisely the property rights we associate with civilization -- assets beyond home and tools of the trade.
Given the relatively liquid nature of civilization, it makes sense to define "subsistence" in some dollar value of assets. Various ways of defining the dollar value are all approximately equal:
- The median price of housing a person plus the median price of capitalizing a job.
- The threshold used by the SEC for "qualified investor".
- The level of savings insured by the FDIC.
- Or, for the historically inclined: The market price of 20 arable acres in the Confederate south, a mule, a plow and a small house on such land.
Until a citizen accumulates the subsistence net asset level, they should pay no tax and then pay tax only on the net assets they own above subsistence.Assessment should be by the owner, thereby establishing a "fair market value" for the exercise of eminent domain. Net assets only would be taxed and would be calculated by subtracting the fair market value of debts against the estate from the self-assessment of the occupant.
Other forms of taxation could be eliminated in a revenue neutral way if net assets, in excess of subsistence levels, were taxed at the risk free interest rate (approximately the interest rate on the national debt).
Indeed, given the centralization of asset ownership that has resulted from the subsidy of non-subsistence property, a subsidy inherent in civilization, it may be the failure to use this tax base is the ultimate cause of the repeated decay of civilizations from ancient times.
Maybe someone will solve the fabrication problem but these articles haven't even talked about it. Until someone makes the transition from the statistical mechanics of photolithography to the molecuar mechanics posited by nanotechnology devices, the fact that feature sizes of electronics devices are on the order of nanometers is insufficient justification to claim that we're on the verge of the nanotechnology revolution.
Look it up.
It's probably just a coincidence but I set up a local support team for Space Studies Institute in Miami early in 1982 so maybe some of our radio appearances had an affect.
When are all these paleolithic types going to recognize that loss of manufacturing is progress to a services economy -- that deficits don't matter and that there is a Santa Claus?
If job security for existing MS programmers is an issue, just given them all a yearly decreasing proportion of their current salaries for the next 5 years: 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, 20% -- and during that time let them find financing to compete.
I hadn't done this search for a while but just now I re-did it and discovered that the Mercury compiler now has XSB-style tabling. This is an important advance for practical logic programming.
XSB is closer but for a more serious treatment of the predicate-oriented approach see my prior /. comments regarding subsuming exception handling and "OO" programming within a predicate formalism.
Ultimately you want to dispense with the SQL database altogether and leverage the fact that predication is relational so you eliminate an entire layer of semantic noise.
While working with the corporate software process group at SAIC (I was managing the automated ordnance inspection software department at the time) it became apparent to me that most of the software process is reducable to a human-mediated build/compilation process where the "source" language is the formalism used for specification. Since the highest level language for specification is predication (largely of pre and post conditions of the system's operations) it became apparent that predicate calculus tools -- not necessarily direct execution thereof -- could be very important for automating large portions of the software process.
Since Rails isn't high enough level, its specification language is inadequate and the resulting code generated must be edited directly. But it is a step in the right direction.
Being a Dead White Males is a growth industry.
in 1999 I predicted Javascript employment would beat Java employment by 2003 but I didn't count on the third world paper mills being pushed so hard to churn out Java programmers sucker punching buzzword compliant CTOs. Sun's perversion probably cost the world economy a trillion dollars but things seem to finally be turning around.
This sort of incentives-based policy is in the tradition of American values. It should be no surprise that such values are being eroded as the 'nation of immigrants' changes from pioneering independence to bureaucratic dependence. The use of a socialist bureaucracy to explore space is a fundamentally different experiment that other proven American approaches to expanding the resource base available to humanity.
In 1989 I was working on grassroots legislation to reform NASA's launch services policies. This led to the passage of P. L. 101-611, The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 which required NASA to procure launch services from private vendors whenever possible. This is common sense if proper boundaries between public and private functions are to be maintained. As radical as this may sound to many who see NASA as a space transportation company, it was, in fact, Presidential policy at the time and the legislation was therefore, in fact, redundant, but bureaucratic inertia demanded separate acts by the Legislative branch to reinforce the Executive's own command structure. This legislative effort started out as an attempt to passsomething along the lines of the Kelly Act of 1925 (which formed the basis for Jerry Pournelle's recommendations first put forth by his Citizen's Advisory Council for Space Policyin 1980), but compromised when it became clear that resistance from NASA, and its contractors, to citizen involvement in space policy was so intense that serious reform would be impractical. My testimony before Congress legislative follow-up to P.L. 101-611 made recommendations for a focus onincentives for commercial investment, rather than plans or "programs". An example of incentives-based legislation, applied to fusion energy policy, was recommended for passage by Bussard, R. W., one of the founders of the US fusion program in a letter confessing some of the subterfuge to which technical leaders resorted. It is still quite relevant today given the reliance on Middle Eastern oil and problems with fission energy. The point here is that incentives are more effective in general than governmental programs.
The first settlers in America experienced enormous causalities their first years they were in America. Entire colonies were lost. The original colonies included a substantial variety of fundamentally differing approaches to settling North America. America's frontier wasn't built by a centrally controlled bureaucracy -- and there is no reason to expect such a bureaucracy will take Americans to their next frontier.
Space policy is a touchstone of American values since Americans are spiritually a pioneering culture. Let's not forget who settled the frontier, how those "immigrants" differed from later immigrants, and what sort of "program" they had to settle the new frontier.
If Michael Griffin is for real about this he may just reawaken the very pioneering character of Americans. We must hope he is not just sincere but will be successful doing so.
One of the drop-off points in the Portland area goes by the name of "Fisher's Landing", which is at "164th and highway 14". Google Transit doesn't recognize either.
Very magnanimous (as well as wise) of NASA however that was law 15 years ago -- PL101-611 the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990. Dan Goldin must have been too busy "reforming" NASA to bother following the reform laws grassroots activists got passed the aerospace lobbies.
First we have the Old Testament's "Ten Commandments" then the New Testament's "The Golden Rule". Now we have Google's "Ten Golden Rules". Since the Guttenberg Press was what gave rise to the Protestants and the Protestants are what gave rise to the counter-reformation's Jesuit order, it seems we have something like a new Jesuit order arising in response to the new Guttenberg revolution. Like the Jesuits the goal is to subvert and recentralize control of media lest something really nasty happen like a new Enlightenment with science and all manner of Heresy.
Silly people. The book of Genesis is largely derived from the Epic of Gilgamesh. So if some "Rabbis" (if you want to call Moses a "Rabbi") wrote it down, it was probably copied from some Sumerian legend.
Actually, I recall the first place I ran across the scaling law favoring huge Tokamaks was in Robert Hirsch's critique of the Tokamak program published in AAAS "Science" in the mid-70s, which is why I made the comment I made. I don't recall the entire content of the article but it tried to presume the strongest case for the Tokamak at that time. The technical challenges of economically building and operating a reactor of that size are enormous. That's why when Bussard left the government program (around the same time) to work with private capital, his approach was to look for scaling laws that favored smaller, disposable devices which was obviously a good strategy from the standpoint of development costs and risk.
I suppose the fact that he was the only Republican candidate to win on a write-in vote in recent history doesn't cut him any slack with guys like you since he's guilty by association with a pariah like me.
But then there's always Robert Bussard, who gave my organization credit for the legislation he submitted to Congress along with his expose letter. Oops.. there again, we can, with great aplomb circularly reason our way out of this by virtue of the fact that he is guilty by association with me.
In fact that arguement can apply to anyone who claimed I accomplished anything real. :)
Doesn't it make sense that government project managers would portray their technology as something that requires enormous scale and many years? They'll be retired with a fat pension by the time they are proven wrong -- if anything can be "proven" in an environment of politically volatile funding from year to year. They can always claim that they just weren't given enough money -- just like NASA does with the Shuttle disasters.
Congressman Packard did. There have been a few others. :)
Diving into the system the way I did -- giving it the the benefit of the doubt -- and coming to conclusions deserves a bit more respect than someone sitting around behind a semi-anonymous persona and a keyboard calling "whack jobs" people who have done real work.
Given:
This was 1992.
I never got very far with this legislation myself but about 3 years later, Bussard decided to submit this legislation -- with a kicker: He blew the lid off the early history of the Tokamak program in a letter sent to all the Congressmen and laboratories responsible for fusion technology wherein he said this:
Five years later, after working with Koloc and recovering the original images, I discovered that the photographs of the Plasmak plasmoids were almost certainly an artifact of the way CCD arrays shift their images out: The plasma discharge is time symmetric which, combined with the shifting of the image out of the CCD array, produced the illusion of a prolate spheroid. The discharge was so bright it overcame the CCD mask and exposed the image as the image was being shifted out of the array.
This was highly disappointing to but it, along with Bussard's disclosure, shows how deceptive these things can be and why a prize system is superior to providing government funding for polit
In the beginning there was the PLATO network which had a working prototype designed for mass-market which would have amortized itself within 5 years easily at $40/month service, including the rental of a bit-mapped graphics, touch screen, plasma displays. It had realtime multiuser games, even some multiuser 3D first person shooter games, as well as email, discussion fora (the origin of Ozzie's "Notes") and the ability for anyone to write programs for anyone else to run via the network. A single Cyber 760 benchmarked out at several thousand simultaneous users with 1/4 second response time. "Management" decided to focus on the higher profit margin corporate education market.
So I left PLATO and took up position as architect for the authoring system for the mass-market videotex experiment conducted by AT&T and Knight-Ridder News called "Viewtron" -- a service of the joint-venture company, Viewdata Corporation of America. They had done market research which showed that the thing people most wanted was discussion. Having been from PLATO this was no surprise and indeed it was obvious to me people wanted to be able to provide publications and software services to the public. But when I presented an architecture whose primary discipline was to treat the desktop computer as the host system nearest the user (ie: P2P in 1982) I was told by a decision-maker that "we see videotex as 'we the institutions providing you the consumer with information and services'" Yes that was what he said. He may have been trying to get my goat but that is in fact the direction they took things. In any event I was about to be told by the corporate authorities that my P2P telecomputing architecture, which would have provided a dynamically downloaded Forth graphics protocol in 1983 evolving into a distributed Smalltalk-like environment beginning around 1985, would be abandoned due to a corporate commitment to stick with Tandem Computers as the mainframe vendor -- a choice which I had asserted would not be adequate. (At least Postscript survived.) I was subsequently offered the head telecomputing software position at Prodigy by IBM and turned it down when they indicated they would not support my architecture either, due to a committment to limit merchant access to their network to only those who had a special status with the service provider (IBM/CBS/Sears). The distributed Smalltalk system was specifically designed to allow the sort of grassroots commerce now emerging in the world wide web. (Now that via AJAX people recognize JavaScript is similar to the Self programming language and the Common Lisp Object System there is some resurrection of the original vision.) But this wasn't in keeping with IBM's philosophy at that time since they had yet to be humbled by Bill Gates coup but already Gates had locked in his position as the bottleneck between Moore's Law and software by retaining ownership of MS DOS while it was being distributed on IBM's hardware.
Lest people think the government is the ultimate savior in all this -- I did make a run at developing this sort of service on my own nickle using PC hardware but was squashed by the U.S. government when it provided UUCP/Usenet service, via MILnet, to a XENIX-based competitor in San Diego and would not offer me the same subsidy. MILnet was, by law, not for public access. Rather it was exclusively for military use. My complaints to DoD investigators resulted in continual "We're looking into it." replies. By that time Usenet was taking off and I couldn't get a seed market to finance any further work.
What Berners-Lee did was admirable in that he aimed lower -- for the low hanging fruit of simple document presentation. The sacrifice of P2P was, however a bit much to sacrifice. I still think that should have remained the "primary discipline". Things are slowly recovering though.
First of all, safe is implied by expressive. Side-effects like buffer overflows result from the language semantics not being expressive. For example, you virtually never intend for an array allocation to result in an object whose semantics are to walk all over other data structures that happen to have been declared in proximity.
Secondly, with that fact firmly in mind, you want to focus on expressivity so that your language helps you say precisely what you mean -- and you never mean "crash or open up security holes due to random interactions".
These guys really think Java and C# are "expressive" when it comes to programmer intent?
What abject failure to perform their duty!