Oh, And By The Way…The Government DID NOT Create The Internet

by Steve MacDonald 

Mr. ‘Spread-the-Wealth’ “You-didn’t-build-that” Obama is having another bad week after reading a bit too much off the left side of the TelePrompTer.  His Divine Luminance seem to have forgotten what country he is trying to lord over.   When he tried to tell actual business owners that their success can only be the result of the work of many (with the sanction of the state and it’s many gifts to all mankind) he reminded everyone who has ever worked to make something out of nothing that Mr. Obama has no frame of reference; he has never made anything…but a speech. (And he doesn’t even make those he just delivers them.)

Oh, And by the way…someone tell the socialists who write his speeches and load up his prompter that the government did not create the internet.

It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.

If the government didn’t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.

But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.

According to a book about Xerox PARC, “Dealers of Lightning” (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn’t wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves.

The inconvenient truth is that what government involvement there was had a negative effect on the development and expansion of Internet technology.

“The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished. . . . In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia.”

So, Mr. Obama.  Your precious government?  It didn’t build that either.

H/T

Daniel J. Mitchell/ TownHall.com

Crovitz: Wall Street Journal

You are reading "Government did not Create The Internet"  by Steve Mac Donald originally posted at GraniteGrok.com Home

Isn’t it Time We Enforced the State’s IT Policies?

by Steve MacDonald 

Democrats like to manage society, ever more so when they believe it has misbehaved.  So here’s an idea the left ought to embrace with both left arms.

Because it is against state policy to use state computers for activities outside their intranet, like reading online news or–heaven forbid whiling the day away commenting on news portals like the Concord Monitor while on the taxpayers payroll–why hasn’t one of the states IT guru’s blocked all those IP’s from within the states network?  (We know they have not.)

The policy is very clear yet the system is left open to abuse.  So is this trust that the government is extending to state employees, something its leftist advocates are loath to offer to regular citizens on a wide range of things.   Well, that trust has been broken.

I believe we’ll find, in the coming days and weeks, that state employees are just as human, if not more so, that the rest of us.  That there is rampant abuse of state time and state property, in violation of the states own internet policy rules, whose apparent function is to create pointless paperwork for show, since it clearly serves no purpose as a deterrent.

The time has come to talk about cutting off state employees access to the main-stream news-porn they obsess over on taxpayer time,  to limit access, and enforce signed policy agreements.

We know that the left is all about putting limits on us, and that the bureaucracy on the whole is a pro big-government, left leaning body.  But will they feel the same way about limiting state employees access (from state equipment and property) to the newsy distractions of the outside world?

All I can say is that if they won’t block them, they had better be prepared to punish the people who violate the rules.

More to come…

You are reading Isn't It Time We Enforced the State's IT Policies? , by Steve Mac Donald originally posted at GraniteGrok.com.

Internet Pirates ‘Aaarrrrgh!’

Is the Federal Government’s move to pass the Stop On-line Piracy Act, intentionally or not, putting another foot in the door for federal censorship of the online universe?

Here’s the actual text of the thing. (No, I have not read it yet.)

As with all Federal legislation intent should be considered irrelevant.  Potential is what matters.  And if you google SOPA you’ll find plenty of it, and most of the remarks are not favorable to the legislation.  A few observations from Wired,  TechCrunch, Hot Air, Politico, and the Washington Post, which frames the bill nicely…

SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, is a bill that, in the name of preventing online piracy of copyrighted work, creates a horrifyingly large censorship authority for the Internet.

And there you have it.

So who wins this one?  Big media and Big Government, or everyone else?

cross posted here