Politicians, Napster, And The Invention Of The Net

sdo1 pointed us to the major candidates take on napster. Here's Bush and here's Gore. A phenomenal number of submissions have arrived regarding Gore's invention of the Internet (mostly surrounding the fact that Vint Cerf credits Gore as being the most influential politician in its creation). And lastly is a series of more techie oriented interviews with Nader and Gore (well, Gore's advisor anyway) that is running on Wired.

The New Science of Character Assassination

The New Science of Character Assassination
Phil Agre [ucla.edu]
15 October 2000

You are welcome to forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose.

The past ten days will go down as a turning point in American history. This is what it's like when the far right is taking over your country: the people support Al Gore's policies, but the polls are shifting toward George W. Bush because the media is filled with false attacks on Al Gore's character. A story in today's (10/15/00) New York Times states openly what has been clear all along, that this campaign of character assassination has been planned and executed over a long period by the Republicans.
--Story Link-- [nytimes.com]

Character assassination is, of course, nothing new for Republicans, who mastered the art in the days of Richard Nixon. What's new is that the press constantly repeats the lies. Not just once or twice, not just the occasional slip, but over and over and over.

Let us consider the New York Times story in detail. Written by Alison Mitchell, it describes Al Gore's abject apology for two trivial and much-exaggerated errors in the first debate as "the culmination of a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy".

The New York Times discerns four landmarks in this campaign, and they are as follows:

• Landmark number one:

• ... in December 1997 ... the [Republican National] committee announced it had started a contest to come up with a slogan for Mr. Gore after he told reporters that the hero and heroine in the novel "Love Story" were modeled after him and his wife, Tipper. (Erich Segal, the author, soon said that his protagonist, Oliver Barrett IV, was only partly based on Mr. Gore, while Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore.)

  In this case, the RNC's claim was false. Gore had not told anyone that Love Story was based on him and his wife. Rather, he had mentioned a newspaper article that had inaccurately said that, and was carefully to say that he only had the article's word to go on. Observe that Mitchell repeats the RNC's false account, and then (following the longstanding convention) makes it sound as though Segal was contradicting Gore, when in fact he was defending him. The false "Love Story" store continues to be repeated to the present day.
  --Story Link-- [dailyhowler.com]

• Landmark number two:

• So when Mr. Gore said in an interview with CNN in March 1999 that "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, issued this mocking statement: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the paper clip".

  The problem, of course, was that Gore's claim was correct. As the Internet's scientific leaders attest, often heatedly, Gore recognized the significance of the Internet very early, and took the initiative in doing the political work and articulating the public vision that made the Internet possible. His sentence, which is often not quoted in its entirety, makes perfectly clear that he was talking about the work he did in the context of his Congressional service, and that he is not claiming, ridiculously, to have done the technical work as well. Mitchell shades the story by omitting the Republicans' (and media's) most common distortion of the matter, that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. This falsehood has been repeated on literally hundreds of occasions, and George W. Bush routinely uses it in his speeches.
  --Story Link-- [chicagotribune.com]
  --Story Link-- [somewhere.com]
  --Story Link-- [somewhere.com]

• Landmark number three:

• On the day Mr. Gore announced his candidacy in Carthage, Tenn., his family's hometown, Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a more elaborate stunt. He rode in a wagon pulled by mules to the hotel on Embassy Row in Washington where Mr. Gore lived for much of his youth.

  "He has tried to pass himself off as this hardscrabble, homespun central Tennessee farm boy and that is not what he is", said Mr. Nicholson, playing off the fact that Mr. Gore had told The Des Moines Register that he had learned to slop hogs and clear land on the family farm. Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore's father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm.

  The problem, again, is that Gore's claim was true. He did work on his family farm as a child. This time, Mitchell admits that the Republicans were making it up. But she still shades the story by making it sound as though the truth hadn't come out until later, and as though the contrary view rests solely on the word of Gore's friends. In fact the childhood farm chores had been extensively reported for a decade. The false claim that Gore had lied about the chores was repeated on many occasions in the press.
  --Story Link-- [speakout.com]
  --Story Link-- [dailyhowler.com]

• Landmark number four:

• The Republicans got help as well from an unexpected source. When the Democratic primary fight became bitter, former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey insisted that Mr. Gore had deliberately distorted his policy positions in what he called a "pattern of misrepresentation". At one point, Mr. Bradley spat out, "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?"

  The problem is that Bradley is endlessly quoted to this effect without any attempt to determine whether he is right. In fact Bradley often wrongly accused Gore of distorting his positions.

And that's it. That, according to the New York Times, is the story of the Republicans' campaign to paint Al Gore as an embellisher. The New York Times cites four accusations, all of them false, and in every case the New York Times either repeats the false accusations as truth or else provides misleading accounts of them.

The New York Times' article is not an aberration. The list of false attacks on Al Gore's character that have been circulated in the media for the last two years is extraordinary. In some cases, as in the ones (mis)cited by the New York Times, Gore is accused of lying when he was actually telling the truth:

• Several publications have called Gore a liar in very harsh terms because he claimed that his father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. It is true that his father lost his nerve on the Civil Rights Act, but that does not change the overwhelming and (until recently) universally accepted evidence of his leadership on civil rights. Gore's assertion is perfectly accurate.
• 
  --Story Link-- [dailyhowler.com]
• In probably the single most vicious attack of the entire campaign, several publications have suggested that Gore lied when claiming to have been present at his sister's death. The only evidence they offer is that he also made a political speech the same day, and Gore's driver has explained his schedule for that day in detail.
• 
  --Story Link-- [dailyhowler.com]

In other cases, Gore's words are twisted, misquoted, or simply made up to make him sound as though he were making a claim that he was not making. For example, some publications have even claimed, falsely, that Gore literally uttered the words "inventing the Internet".
--Story Link-- [dailyhowler.com]

There are many others:

• In the closing moments of Gore's second debate with George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer falsely accused Gore of having called Bush a "bumbler" in one of his campaign commercials.
• 
  --Story Link-- [speakout.com]

  Was this simply a mistake on Lehrer's part? Okay, but Lehrer made his "mistake" in the context of rebuking Gore for his own miniscule mistakes in the first debate.

• Gore told a a union audience that his mother had sung the "union label" song to him as a child. Gore's comment was obviously a joke and the audience took it as a joke. Yet, incredibly, numerous supposed journalists have asserted that he meant it seriously, or else tried (on no evidence) to cast doubt on Gore's obviously-true claim that it was a joke.
• 
  --Story Link-- [speakout.com]
• When Gore spoke of his proposal to put Social Security and Medicare in a "lockbox", some "journalists" accused him of dissembling on the astonishing grounds that he was not actually proposing to put the money into a physical box.
• 
  --Story Link-- [dailyhowler.com]
• When the Washington Post finally gave up on the "Love Story" story, pretending that it had only recently been disproven, they moved to another falsehood. Gore had claimed that his sister was the first volunteer for the Peace Corps. This claim was accurate, inasmuch as his sister had in fact worked for the Corps without pay from its earliest days, only later joining its paid staff. But the Post called Gore's claim a "lie", on the grounds that she had not worked as a volunteer *overseas*, which Gore had never claimed; they did not mention that she worked without pay.
• 
  --Story Link-- [dailyhowler.com]
• Gore told some students in New Hampshire the story of a Tennessee community activist who brought his attention to a toxic dump, whereupon he looked for other examples, found Love Canal, and held the first hearings on the issue. "Journalists" first misquoted him as having claimed to to have started the issue, when in fact he was giving credit to the activists. Even when the misquotation was grudgingly corrected, they continued to distort his words, as if he were claiming to have discovered the toxic pollution at Love Canal.

In yet other cases, Gore made a trivial error that has been exaggerated by his critics, and the exaggeration has been falsely attributed to him. Such is the case with the school in Florida that Gore cited in the first of his debates with George W. Bush.
--Story Link-- [salon.com]

These are just a few examples among many. People make mistakes all the time. Al Gore is one of them, and it's surprising that an army of opposition researchers hasn't come up with more substantive errors after fact-checking a whole life of public statements. So is George W. Bush, whose errors during the two debates so far have been dramatically worse than those of Gore. To start with, Bush falsely implied that the Europeans have no troops in Kosovo, when in fact they have tens of thousands, and that the United States has significant numbers of troops in Haiti, when it does not. And he made numerous false statements:

• that Gore was outspending him, when the opposite was true;
• that the rate of uninsured people was falling in Texas and rising nationally, when the opposite was true;
• that the men who killed James Byrd would be put to death, when only two had been sentenced to death and their appeals had not been exhausted;
• that middle-income seniors would get drug coverage immediately under his Medicare plan;
• that Gore had lied about this;
• that the new spending in his budget plan is equal to the tax cuts;
• that "most of the tax reductions [in his plan] go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder";
• that the president is unable to influence the actions of the Food and Drug Administration;
• that Hillary Clinton's 1993 national health insurance initiative would have entailed nationalizing health care; and
• that Gore had claimed to be the author of the Earned Income Tax Credit law.

That is just a partial list of Bush's "mistakes" in two ninety-minute debates, and it doesn't include the dubious numbers he quoted from Republicans in the Senate or the mess he made of education, taxes, Social Security, and the Middle East. Nor does it include the "mistakes" that littered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, or the especially egregious "mistakes" of his brutal campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, and so on.
--Story Link-- [washingtonpost.com]

With only a few exceptions (like the one just cited), the press has gone to great lengths to cover up or minimize Bush's false statements. Press coverage of the first debate focused overwhelmingly on Gore's two comparatively trivial errors and on endless suggestions that Gore was rude for having sighed several times.
--Story Link-- [washingtonpost.com]

Of course, the sighs were often exaggerated by turning the volume up. (Falsely calling someone a liar, as Bush did several times, is not rude?) Pundits bizarrely praised Bush for his command of the issues after the first debate despite his lengthy catalog of errors:
--Catalog Link-- [speakout.com]

And the 10/5/00 Washington Post buried the Democrats' list of Bush errors at the end of a long story about Bush's accusations against Gore.

The problem is systemic. A reporter for a British newspaper, the Observer, was struck at the completely different approaches of the reporters covering Gore and Bush, and reported a disturbing incident in which a Washington Post reporter well-known for her open hostility to Gore held a toy gun to his head.
--Story Link-- [ft.com]

Indeed, press coverage of Gore has been spun in a strongly negative fashion for a long time.
--Story Link-- [cjr.org]
--Story Link-- [people-press.org]
--Story Link-- [cmpa.com]

The press, following the lead of Republican "investigators", has repeatedly falsified and spun the famous Buddhist temple event, among others.
--Story Link-- [prospect.org]

They have also falsified and exaggerated Gore's performance in earlier debates, thereby creating a caricuture of him as a vicious attacker.
--Story Link-- [dailyhowler.com]

Yes, the press has suggested that Bush is not mentally competent to run the country. But it has not fabricated huge amounts of evidence to support this charge, and it has not routinely used vocabulary that is remotely as harsh as that used against Gore. You have rarely seen the media call Bush a "moron" or "idiot", but Gore has routinely been called much worse. Here is a very partial list:

• "evil" [dailyhowler.com]
• "imperious&qu ot;, "repellent" [nytimes.com]
• "lethal", "ruthless", "liar" [dailyhowler.com]
• "ruthless", "relentless", "bully", "maniacal" [dailyhowler.com]
• "manipulative", "dishonest" [dailyhowler.com]

(I am citing the Daily Howler for most of these examples so that you can read some analysis of them. But the Howler provides precise citations for the originals, which should be easy to look up.)

Indeed, Bush's alleged mental incompetence is often tacitly used to excuse his falsehoods -- he doesn't know what he's talking about, so he can't be lying. Or Gore is accused of a "pattern" of false and exaggerated statements, but then Bush escapes the same accusation for the simple reason that nobody bothers to gather Bush's false and exaggerated statements in one place.

This is just the press. We're not even talking about the conservatives on the Internet that have been circulating long lists of Gore's supposed lies and exaggerations -- most of which are, of course, themselves lies or exaggerations, including garbled and embellished versions of the already false versions in the press. Some of these lists are credited to the RNC, but of course it is hard to know for sure.

The new science of character assassination, then, has several components:

• It starts with a strategy: a conscious choice by a political party that it is going to position its opponent in a certain way. The 10/15/00 Washington Post quotes a Republican consultant as saying that "PR 101 is define your opponent before he tries to define himself", and the whole campaign is clearly organized by the principles of PR.
• It requires a clearinghouse to distribute "facts" that fit the strategy. In this case the burden has been carried by the Republican National Committee and by the office of House majority leader Dick Armey, which got its start by circulating the original fraudulent charges from Wired News about Gore's Internet statement.
• It requires rank-and-file supporters who are willing to pass along any junk that fits the party line.
• But above all, it requires a press corps that has decided to go along with it. Part of the problem is that the press operates in packs -- an echo chamber of lazy pundits in which every "fact" that fits a prevailing stereotype gets endlessly repeated.

But it's not just that. It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch's media properties, such as Fox and the New York Post, publish smears against people who disagree with Murdoch's far-right views. But it can hardly be an accident that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press have all assigned reporters to the Gore campaign who write, day in and day out, the same sorts of exaggerated smears. To be sure, the press is not unanimous in spreading Republican lies as truth; the contrast between the NYT/Post/AP axis and the calm reporting of the Los Angeles Times could hardly be greater. But the Post, Times, and AP, all well-connected and widely syndicated, set the tone for the press as a whole. The fix is clearly in, and these establishment media operations are clearly down with it. They see which way the wind is blowing, and they don't want to get left behind.

A kind of coup is in effect, continuing the pattern of the Whitewater hoax and impeachment. If the far right succeeds in its campaign, then the incoming government will be staffed by people who are trained in the new science of character assassination. It's all they know. And having destroyed Al Gore, they will come after the rest of us.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Philip E. Agre.
All rights reserved.

"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."

interesting...

I have been a musician for several years now, and I was very pleased (as a techie) to see that I could listen to low-quality songs on my desktop computer. Heres what I have to say as far as paying for music is concerned:

art is free, as it should be.

music is something they've found a way to capitalize on, and they have.

If people turn down their money-guided mindsets and think about the music, they'll be more creative, and free. Which is why (as a musician) I dont mind if The whole world hears what I have to say.

Neither candidate proposes real solutions

It is extremely unlikely that the candidates, or at least Bush, really wrote those statements. I find it highly unlikely that the Governer knows what peer-to-peer file sharing means. Furthermore, both major US candidates propose that the artists should be compensated, but neither states how. Bush makes a blanket statement -- it is unfair to artists, and we need to compensate all of them. Meanwhile, Gore states that new solutions will develop naturally, as they did in radio. Both of them conveniently ignore the RIAA, MPAA, and other huge lobbying organizations. All in all, a very uninformitive answer to a pertinant question for geeks.

I agree with this statement

Cerf himself, one of those often credited, describes it thus: ''I consider Bob Kahn and myself to be the principal fathers of the specific design, but we were very dependent on the work of others.'' In short, Cerf says, ''I don't think it makes sense to give any one person such a title.''

Gore can be given credit for sponsoring some bills. This is infinitesimal (sp?) with all that was poured into the Internet--I was actually taught NII (National Information Infrastructure) and GII (Global Information Infrastructure) at Purdue.

Items I consider:

• How much money did the Baby Bells contribute?
• How many people developed it or for it?

IMHO, the Internet would have come along even if Gore had been against it from the beginning. I consider it a group effort and nothing more.

Re:Neither candidate proposes real solutions

On what are you basing your claim that Bush has no idea what peer to peer file sharing is? I watched the debates... both people sounded like politicians, neither sounded stupid.

Gore touts technology as some miracle savior... I loved the part about the fact that the oil crises is not a crises because technology will "magically" create cars that get 140 MPG.

Classic pointy haired boss stuff... You and Bill may not be held accountable to the laws of the state, but the laws of physics take more then a good spin machine to work around.

Can we create cars that get 140 mpg? Probably, but not soon enough that we can continue to ignore petroleum issues. When we make them they will be pretty darn expensive, and they are not going to have any of the features YOU want in a car right now (unless you like your Ford Festiva).

The Honda Insight hybrid is the perfect example. Cool? Yes. Innovative? Yup. Practical? Errr... I don't think so...

The insight is really just a updated CRX, which back in 89 was already pushing 50 MPG (the insight gets 70 MPG). The difference is that you could get the CRX for close to $10,000, and it would run with little maintenance for 200,000 miles easy. The insight costs $20,000, and will likely need an expensive battery replacement every 3 years or so.

Continue to push for new technology, but if you look at it as your sole savior you are going to be cold and hungry sitting there in the dark.

(IMHO :)

(note to the secret service... the killbill nick has nothing to do with anybody in politics, it is a combination of my first and last name and was given to me in 1984)

Bill

Presidential Debate Transcript

Jim Lehrer: Welcome to the second presidential debate between Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush. The candidates have agreed on these rules: I will ask a question. The candidate will ignore the question and deliver rehearsed remarks designed to appeal to undecided women voters. The opponent will then have one minute to respond by trying to frighten senior citizens into voting for him. When a speaker's time has expired, I will whimper softly while he continues to spew incomprehensible statistics for three more minutes. Let's start with the vice president. Mr. Gore, can you give us the name of a downtrodden citizen and then tell us his or her story in a way that strains the bounds of common sense?

Gore: As I was saying to Tipper last night after we tenderly made love the way we have so often during the 30 years of our rock-solid marriage, the downtrodden have a clear choice in this election. My opponent wants to cut taxes for the richest 1 percent of Americans. I, on the other hand, want to put the richest 1 percent in an iron clad lockbox so they can't hurt old people like Roberta Frampinhamper, who is here tonight. Mrs. Frampinhamper has been selling her internal organs, one by one, to pay for gas so that she can travel to these debates and personify problems for me. Also, her poodle has arthritis.

Lehrer: Gov. Bush, your rebuttal.

Bush: Governors are on the front lines every day, hugging people, crying with them, relieving suffering anywhere a photo opportunity exists. I want to empower those crying people to make their own decisions, unlike my opponent, whose mother is not Barbara Bush.

Lehrer: Let's turn to foreign affairs. Gov. Bush, if Slobodan Milosevic were to launch a bid to return to power in Yugoslavia, would you be able to pronounce his name?

Bush: The current administration had eight years to deal with that guy and didn't get it done. If I'm elected, the first thing I would do about that guy is have Dick Cheney confer with our allies. And then Dick would present me several options for dealing with that guy. And then Dick would tell me which one to choose. You know, as governor of Texas, I have to make tough foreign policy decisions every day about how we're going to deal with New Mexico.

Lehrer: Mr. Gore, your rebuttal.

Gore: Foreign policy is something I've always been keenly interested in. I served my country in Vietnam. I had an uncle who was a victim of poison gas in World War I. I myself lost a leg in the Franco-Prussian War. And when that war was over, I came home and tenderly made love to Tipper in a way that any undecided woman voter would find romantic. If I'm entrusted with the office of president, I pledge to deal knowledgeably with any threat, foreign or domestic, by putting it in an iron clad lockbox. Because the American people deserve a president who can comfort them with simple metaphors.

Lehrer: Vice President Gore, how would you reform the Social Security system?

Gore: It's a vital issue, Jim. That's why Joe Lieberman and I have proposed changing the laws of mathematics to allow us to give $50,000 to every senior citizen without having it cost the federal treasury a single penny until the year 2250. In addition, my budget commits $60 trillion over the next 10 years to guarantee that all senior citizens can have drugs delivered free to their homes every Monday by a federal employee who will also help them with the child-proof cap.

Lehrer: Gov. Bush?

Bush: That's fuzzy math. I know, because as governor of Texas, I have to do math every day. I have to add up the numbers and decide whether I'm going to fill potholes out on Rt. 36 east of Abilene or commit funds to reroof the sheep barn at the Texas state fairgrounds.

Lehrer: It's time for closing statements.

Gore: I'm my own man. I may not be the most exciting politician, but I will fight for the working families of America, in addition to turning the White House into a lusty pit of marital love for Tipper and me.

Bush: It's time to put aside the partisanship of the past by electing no one but Republicans.

Lehrer: Good night.

Why do they have to care?

President of United States of America or any other country's leader is NOT a geek. He does not have to understand what OSS really means and what p2p is. There are much much more important issues than napster to be considered first, such as education, before american kids become the dumbest on the planet(well, some already are, and they troll on slashdot), environment protection, health care, tax cut, etc. heh, I could use a couple of extra thousands every year to go to vacation while the rest of the trolls moaning over their loss of access to mp3s on slashdot.

It is funny how many slashdotters look no further from the gigantic computer monitor right in front of them.

Re:Neither candidate proposes real solutions

Isn't peer-to-peer more like when you shout out "Has anyone got some papers?", and three of your friens hear you but they haven't so they shout out too and eventually either everyone answers "No!" or someone has so they give a chunk of them to the person who asked and they give them to the person who asked them etc etc until eventually you get some and you can make a doobie?

Re:Neither candidate proposes real solutions

I watched the debates... both people sounded like politicians, neither sounded stupid.

Of what I could bear to what of the debates, both sound like politicians and BOTH sounded stupid. Bush with his childish chuckling and snorting. Goddamnit, shaddup...this is a debate...grown up stuff, you know? And Gore with his ponderous heavy monotonous droning. Damn, he should sell his speeches to the people that make those new-age forest sounds sleep-aids. Certainly would put everybody to sleep fast.

They both sounded like typical script-fed corporate clone dolts. And no, sorry, I can't believe that anyone who could say that the internet "turns hearts dark" has any technological clue in his ever loving brain.

What irks me the most is that any American would actually think this is stimulating "debate". It was more like each of them reading off pre-scripted responses to pre-filtered questions, and generally agreeing with each other.

Pointer to the "who invented the Internet" article

http://digitalmass.boston.com/news/daily/10/17/who _invented_internet.html [boston.com] is the real link; hopefully SlashCode won't the "insert random spaces" game with this post.

Re:*sigh* Nothing outside of expectations.

The first candidate to appoint a *qualified* Technology Advisor will win my vote, until then I'm not voting.

How about Reed Hundt? I've heard that he is quite competent with technology, and he certainly holds his own in the debates with Nader. Now, I haven't done enough investigation to really be able to tell if this guy is well informed, but from the horse's mouth [reedhundt.com] (ie - his web site): Depending on the leadership of his high school classmate Al Gore and finding unexpected allies in the ranks of free market ideologues, Hundt led the FCC to make the decisions that helped start a wave of entrepreneurship, which in turn has given the United States the world's leading Internet economy. As the memoir shows, every decision involved prodigious political battles--between existing industries and start-ups, between Newt Gingrich and the Clinton-Gore White House, between inside-the-Beltway lobbyists and the new grassroots advocacy of e-mails, between the politics of money and the politics of ideas. In the same period, the often ignored and historically maligned FCC was the place where government decided whether to undertake the largest national initiative to reform K-12 education in the country's history: the program to connect every classroom to the Internet by the year 2001.

Misplaced electoral focus

Where internet property, privacy, and access issues are concerned, whomever occupies the Oval Office is far less significant than the makeup of Congress. Those of us with a professional or social interest in these issues should focus on the activity (or lack thereof) of Congess, the FCC, and the federal judiciary. I would feel more comfortable if the new President does nothing at all, given that a little knowlege is a dangerous thing.

Marc Andreeson...

developed Mosaic under a federal grant authorized by one of Gore's bills.

I have to wonder. Were the good folks in Tennesee clamoring for Universities to be connected by a high speed WAN, or for the development of a graphical hypertext browser?

I personally don't like Gore very much; the "new democrat" thing is a bit too close to toadying to the big corporations, but he's no dummy. He definitely had vision on the issue back in the 80s when all this stuff was just a pipe dream. People are forgetting how exotic this stuff was back then.

Politics can turn anything positive into a negative. It kind of reminds me of how Jerry Brown got the sobriquet "Governor Moonbeam". He noted that California was a big state, and spent a lot of money for officials to travel from one part of the state to another. He proposed looking into launching a geosynchronous satellite to do video conferencing, which would save on travel costs and increase speed. This idea doesn't seem so far-fetched today, does it?

Re:Neither candidate proposes real solutions

> I find it highly unlikely that the Governer knows what peer-to-peer file sharing means.

His staff explained it to him. "It's kind of like when you go to a party, and everyone snorts off the same mirror."

Napster, a big corporate conspiracy

I'm coming to realise that what Napster claims to be, the best thing in obtaining legal music, is nothing more than a front for what it really is - a tool for organisations like the RIAA to get Congress to impose the most draconian laws possible to ensure that they get to keep their beloved monopoly position.

Sure, it may sound paranoid, but who would really release a piece of software which anyone could have told you was going to be hammered into the ground by litigation and legislation? Maybe Shawn Fanning would have, but their are some savvy people working for Napster, and it's hard to see them as being naive visionaries fighting the corporate foe.

And besides, just look at the software itself. It's hardly a labour of love is it? It looks like someone spent about an hour using VB1 to put a front end on a fairly simple network protocol. And indeed, the very protocol itself is designed to make the service easy to shut down in the event that Napster "loses" in court.

No, I think that the entire company has been funded by the RIAA for the sole purpose of vindicating their "you're all thieves and pirates" stance. Maybe Shawn Fanning was for real once, but I'm sure the endless $$$ of the RIAA would have been enough to buy his complicity. And the RIAA has gotten a hell of a lot of leverage off of the back of cases like Metallica and Dr Dre.

It's been said before that Napster is one of the worst things that could have happened in the struggle to promote new business models and remove the RIAA monopoly. I think it's kind of obvious why.

Re:*sigh* Nothing outside of expectations.

Mr. Hundt is indeed proficient in a "techie" kind of way, but in the Wired interview (especially the last two installments) he glazed over far too many issues to allow my to buy off on his view just yet. I think we all realize by now that Gore didn't actually claim to invent the Internet; Hundt touches on this. What he doesn't seem to realize (and Gore either, for that matter) is that the Internet would have developed without him -- it certainly didn't need his help. As for what Gore's actually done for the 'net community at large... wiring classrooms? Great. Wonderful. But not exactly a "fully completely" tech policy.
As for Bush, well, he stated once and for all last night that he favors filters for Fed-$-receiving institutions, so it goes without saying that his tech policy is likely to be, shall we say, less than savory.
If only either candidate had the balls to clearly elucidate their position on just one issue, this would all be so much easier.