Re: OT: Gore's Global Warming

"Hachiroku ????" <Trueno@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:44:55 -0500, DH wrote:
"Hachiroku ????" <Trueno@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Tue, 10 Jul 2007 17:35:14 -0400, Cathy F. wrote:
"Hachiroku ????" <Trueno@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:17:44 -0400, Cathy F. wrote:
It was already beyond the planning stages by the time Gore 'thought'
of it.
DARPANet was implemented around 1968, and on a massive scale around
1971:

I already knew about ARPANET - that it was the forerunner of the
internet that we now know & use.

Cathy

Yup...and it was already in place when Al 'invented' it...

Al didn't claim to invent either ARPANET or the subsequent (publicly
used)
internet.

Cathy

Yes, he did.

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

Then came the kicker: "During my service in the United States Congress,
I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Huh?

Preliminary discussions of how the ARPANET would be designed began in
1967,
and a request for proposals went out the following year. In 1969, the
Defense Department commissioned the ARPANET.

Gore was 21-years-old at the time. He wasn't even done with law school
at Vanderbilt University. It would be eight more years before Gore would
be elected to the US House of Representatives as a freshman Democrat
with scant experience in passing legislation, let alone ambitious
proposals.

By that time, file copying -- via the UUCP protocol -- was beginning.
Email was flourishing. The culture of the Internet was starting to
develop through the Jargon File and the SF-Lovers mailing list.

In your zeal to make Gore look like a grasping and seedy politician, you

It's not a real hard task...

if you ignore the reality.

ignore the reality. In 1983, DARPANet was still closely controlled,
lightly used, difficult to deal with and relatively unknown. UUCP was an
unreliable joke and everyone knew it and not all systems on DARPANet
supported UUCP, anyway. If you wanted an e-mail message or file
connection, you had to enter the routing path in the command line (unless
you had homebrewed a shell that did this for you, hacked one of the
utilities or had an early version that read a routing file that you
maintained as an ASCII flat file). There was little to no reason to
expect
it would ever become anything. The expectation was that private networks
would grow.

While this is all true, the backbone was in place and growing. I had
e-mail in 1985 and was using UUNET shortly thereafter. You know, UUNET,
the basis for what we're using right now?

Big whoop. I had e-mail in 6 years earlier.

Yeah, it was kludgey, and you needed command of the commands, but once you
used it for a while it got easier. Yeah, it was a PAIN IN THE @$$ using
Archie, Veronica, Gopher, etc, but Al Gore didn't have a lot to do with
FTP, LDAP, SMTP, etc. The minds in the Universities were already well at
work on those. And, as you mentioned, Ken Olsen and the Brain Trust at DEC
were already well at work on TCP/IP and Ethernet.

And you didn't carefully read what I wrote, either. TCP/IP was a sideshow
to the main event, DECnet. KO was not a fan of open systems.

We had an Ethernet
implementation when I was working in CT by 1989/1990 on a VAX.
Back then, on UUNET, I was known by the nym HaxVax.

Sure. UUNET - Unuseable, Unweildy NET.

Al Gore was a politician. The best job a politician can do it to put seed
or grant money where it will take root and grow for the nation. That's what
Gore did.

I know. I was at DEC at that time, working on projects boasting "the
computer is the network" and "the network is the computer." But the
"network" involved was DECnet.

DEC was actively working on TCP/IP (we would release it a couple of years
later - and it was several years behind the capabilities of DECnet
through
the '80's and early '90's) expressly for ARPANet installations. There
was
little to no thought of making it avaialble to the herd.

ARPANet/DARPANet was NOT "The Internet."

Huh? Of course it was! But there was no HTML, no GUI, etc. But DARPANet
was the foundation and the backbone foundation on which the Internet was
built.

No, it wasn't. And the marketing was entirely separate from main stream
network marketing.

OK, OK, so he didn't *say* he invented it.

But he did *indicate* he was instrumental in it's creation.

And he's right. Did you even read the link you provided below?

Yup.

Clearly you didn't or we wouldn't be having this conversation. If Vint
Cerf, Robert Kahn and David Farber think Gore should get credit, that's the
end of the argument. And that's what that link says.

I remember the Telecommunications Act because of some of the
'caveats' it included to pry into people's privacy. Since I was already
well in tune with UUNET, FTP and e-mail, I was actually AGAINST a lot of
the proprosals put forth in the Telecommunications Act.

And for all your righteous indignation over that; which would have at least
codified *something* into law (and eventually, to stand a test in courts),
you seem awfully quiet with respect to Bush's blatantly illegal wiretaps
(the guiding principle of the Bush Administration is "If the Decider says
it's OK, that's good enough for us!").

And a 'note' by Bob Kahn and Vinnie Cerf, the main people behind the
TCP/IP protocol:

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200009/msg00052.html

Credit where credit is due. Without Gore, the Internet would not be
where
it is today. With Gore, we leaped ahead of everyone else in
connectivity.

It would have gotten there. It was already well on it's way.

There's no evidence for that. None. Zilch. Zero. DECnet, SNA and other
architectures would still be fighting it out.

Now we're behind everybody else in the G8 and probably half of all the
rest of the "industrialized" societies. We're in danger of being
overtaken by countries like Paraguay.

Who's been in charge since 2001? Who took over Congress in 1994?
Answer:
A bunch of reactionary Neanderthals who lack the vision to restore the US
to leadership in the 21st Century.

Of course, others get credit, too. Berners-Lee, for instance, made "the
Web" possible, with the idea of HTTP replacing gophers and other
interesting Internet sideshows. But you can go further back in assigning
credit for this, as the original concept of the browser belongs to
Franklin Roosevelt's Science Advisor, Vannevar Bush (a name I'd bet a
quarter you did not even know) and his suggestion of the "Memex" in the
'40's (and you've never heard of the "Memex," either).

Never heard of him. But I had heard of Memex, although I wasn't aware of
what it was.

The fact remains that Gore was one of the few politicians to look at the
technology, see the advantage to it and actively push it further into
society as a whole. That's vision.

What was Bush's big accomplishment, back in the early '90's? Working his
Daddy's buddies and Texas political contacts to build a stadium that
transfers Arlington Taxpayer Money into the pockets of the owners of The
Texas Rangers Major League Baseball franchise. Is that vision? Yet another
stadium built on the backs of the people to enrich a few?

And Gore's concern for the possibility of Global Warming goes way back, too.
Back to the days when we could have done a series of little things; simply
jacked up CAFE regulations a few per cent per year, hiked mass transit
investment by a few per cent per year, taken different and more aggressive
steps to encourage more energy-efficient home and office building practices,
discouragement of slash-and-burn tropical development and the early
reductions of little things would have bought extra decades of reduced CO2
growth with negligible inconvenience.

As it is, and I have pointed this out before, half the housing stock in many
areas of the country has been built since the original Arab Oil Embargo and,
yet, is built with little regard to any performance improvement from passive
solar gain or direct solar heating. Tweaks to the law 30 years ago would
mean a tremendous difference in CO2 emissions from home heating today.

But - didn't happen. Nobody shared that vision thing. Now, holding to CO2
limits will be more difficult and, most likely, much more urgent.



--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OT: Gores Global Warming
    ... internet that we now know & use. ... Al didn't claim to invent either ARPANET or the subsequent (publicly ... Gore was 21-years-old at the time. ... unreliable joke and everyone knew it and not all systems on DARPANet ...
    (alt.autos.toyota)
  • Re: OT: Gores Global Warming
    ... DARPANet was implemented around 1968, and on a massive scale around ... internet that we now know & use. ... Al didn't claim to invent either ARPANET or the subsequent (publicly ... Gore was 21-years-old at the time. ...
    (alt.autos.toyota)
  • Re: Gore - A Pathetic Embarrassment To US Science
    ... "father of the Internet" and Robert Kahn was the division chief at DARPA ... Al Gore and the Internet ... Bob and I believe that the vice president deserves significant ... The Vice President deserves credit for his early recognition of the value ...
    (soc.retirement)
  • Re: Gore - A Pathetic Embarrassment To US Science
    ... Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." ... Gore *never* claimed to have invented the Internet. ... Stanford where he had developed the basic protocols used in the Arpanet. ...
    (soc.retirement)
  • Re: OT: Gores Global Warming
    ... internet that we now know & use. ... Al didn't claim to invent either ARPANET or the subsequent ... Gore was 21-years-old at the time. ...
    (alt.autos.toyota)
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