Moyer is just another half-truth opinion. He calls the internet a 'visionary infrastructure project" when it was nothing of the sort. ARPAnet was simply a military project intended as a tool for military research and later some sort of military comm network. Moyer is repeating the Obama falsehood that ARPAnet was created 'so that people could make money'. ARPAnet in that form was not useful for broader application and nobody promoted as such then. HTML and the world wide web later made it more useiul along with network hardware and architectures developed at other places. The internet is the result of a bunch of unrelated efforts and the hardware is mostly in private hands propelled forward by the needs and visions of many. What it isn't is some sort of stroke of centralized government led genius, in fact the idea of networking is only logical necessity and not some out of the blue revolutionay idea. True enough government funding started it, but eventually it would ahve happened anyway as a result of personal computing. If I were trying to find an example of something that government only could have done I'd stick to mostly roads and cops. If nuclear fusion ever works then that will be a government only success story because nobody in the right mind is going have the patience or the money. There are a few others where government helped things, like in purifying silicon, or the human genome project. In general the sucesses take a long time to realize, nobody can predict them, and the success rate is low. Industry is far more efficient with their mony because they have to be. If a DARPA program manager fails, he simply moves on to the next project. If Intel fails, they lose their jobs. Guess who might be better at economic innovation?
That's easy to say from the comfort of your armchair. Or... maybe another nation, not too proud or too free-market "pure" to let government fund research, would have built it first. I'm sure we would have "eventually" caught up.
Easy? we are both just sitting here chatting, quite easy for you old chap as well It would have been very quick, the entire ARPAnet was designed and built in 9 months after many years of various folks thinking it would be a good idea. It was the result of some scientists simply wanting to share computing resources, that's all. Nobody at the time was jumping up and down about some profound new invention, it would have been done by the next group of people who wanted to do the same thing. Consider the following, I'll list the internet alonside what I think are the greatest non medical technological (I mean life changing and economically important) inventions since 1900. Alongside I'll put whether government or government funding was responsible for the invention. 1. The Airplane No 2. Transisitor No 3. Computer No 4. Personal Computer No 5. Air conditioner No 6. Laser No/Yes theory was from professors, built privately 7. Wireless Radio No 8. Integrated Circuit No 9. Nuclear Power Yes 10 Television No 11. Cellular Phone No 12. Liquid Crystal Display No 13. Jet engine No 14. DVD No 15. Video game No 16. DVR/VCR No 17. Camcorder No 18. Calculator No 19. Vacuum Cleaner No 20. Credit Card No 21. Internet Yes
I need to send that list to Obama and say "think about this you arrogant do-nothing liberal, you still think they didn't build that?"
Al Gore never said that, although conservatives will continue to take cheap shots at Gore for what he didn't say. Al Gore said (and this is not a quote, but a paraphrase) that he voted to fund the development of the internet (with your tax dollars, of course). Now, me, I don't object to the government spending money on basic research and on developing new state of the art technology. (Funding a solar power company in a very competitive already existing industry doesn't qualify.) But only a tiny percentage of the government's massive budget is spent on such things. Most of the budget goes for transfer payments, defense (including the new behemoth, the Department of Homeland Security), and interest on the national debt. None of that spending is going to move the economy forward.
yeah but... did Al ever not vote for any spending? and it is a dubious claim anyway, there was never a line item that said 'future internet' which congress debated, there was only a top line vote for ARPA. Congressmen don't go that level of detail usually unless it is pork
bull shit I heard him say it when he was campaigning and nearly fell off my chair. oh guess what here it is... <iframe width="480" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/BnFJ8cHAlco" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Actually he said he "created" the internet. Which of course he did not. He did however play a major role in "creating" man made global warming. So at least he's got that going for him, I guess.
Gore said he, "took the initiative in creating the internet". When a politician says that everybody understands that he means that he voted to spend public money funding its development. Nobody hearing that would think that Al Gore programmed up the internet in his secret underground laboratory.