[NTLUG:Discuss] RE: OT (waaay OT): BitTorrent and TV shows

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sun, 2004-12-05 at 16:14, Fred Hensley wrote:
> At times like these I dearly wish my grandmother were still alive.
> She had an amazingly effective way to keep her arguing grandkids (including
> myself) in line, even when absolutely sure I was in the right.

I don't think I was "in the right," or he was "in the wrong."

If you ignore someone's context, or try to move it to make your
viewpoint correct, then all you are showing is that you can make any
argument stick from any context.

So we were _both_ right, and _both_ wrong, given differing context.

Maybe I get "erk'd" when someone starts talking about government
dollars.  And maybe that's the Libertarian in me.  But I thought given
the context of my viewpoint, I was very accurate.

And given the context of the other gentleman's viewpoint, he too _was_
very accurate.  But the contexts differed, and I tried to show were they
were.

God knows without the infrastructure in roads, communications, etc...,
not much could be done.  And private industry on its own would have
taken much longer to build that infrastructure if the government had
not.

Which brings me back to my original point, national security is
typically what drives the government's dollars -- even if there is an
eventual, infrastructure or technology gained for the end-consumer.  And
we _indirectly_ benefit in the end, from those national security needs,
even if they are long forgotten.

Because if you remove context, Al Gore _did_ invent the Internet.  He
almost singlehandedly made the decision to allow commerce on the
NSFNet.  So in 1996, he invented the majority of the Internet, under
that context.  ;->


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                    b.j.smith at ieee.org 
-------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Subtotal Cost of Ownership (SCO) for Windows being less than Linux
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) assumes experts for the former, costly
retraining for the latter, omitted "software assurance" costs in 
compatible desktop OS/apps for the former, no free/legacy reuse for
latter, and no basic security, patch or downtime comparison at all.