Here's a true rarety, heyesey: I can't disagree with you, there.

As it happens, I am unenrolled, which in Massachusetts means I can (and do) vote both ways.

In fact, I voted last Tuesday in a state primary election. I took a Democratic ballot and voted for a Democrat.

Clinton was over-rated. Period. If you really are from the U.K. (and I suspect you are, judging from the times when you appear to come on/offline here), you must detest the man. I mean, Kosovo? Bosnia-Herzegovina? Sudan? Those Orwellian skirmishes turn the stomachs of reasonable people on these shores. Level-headed Europeans must pale at the thought of them. I do not have any personal friends in England, but I have many friends in southern Ireland, and they detest the entire Clinton clan. I grant you, they do think less of W. Bush, but Clinton is up there in the pantheon of ugly Americans.

 

Any chance Barry pulls an FDR and runs again? I hope so he is doing a great job.

 

Voting both ways? You dirty dirty girl.

 

Yes, and he did it by raising the top tax rate.

 

Not without changing the Whateveritwas'th Amendment.

 

if obama did run again by some fucked up nightmare he would not stand a snowballs chance in hell
in excesses of 65% of all democrats hillary would win hands down today and since there are even hard core republicans that are rethinking allegencies id say the odds up almost even
could ted cruz win office not unless he got the final ruling from the supreme court on the deffinition of "natural born" first since he was canadian born

and mark rubio might garner the cuban votes but that wouldnt gain much traction after all of the trouble he has caused
so what republican candidate does that leave?
sara palin???????????????????????????????????

 

All by himself. Because he's so wicked smart. Ugh.

No, dweeb, no. The debt went down in spite of him. Due to a little thing called the Dot Com Bubble. Remember that weird little time when a little flash in the pan called the World Wide Web exploded by about ten thousand percent?

Christ, DL. Clinton didn't reduce the national debt. Al Gore did. By inventing the Web. :excited:

 

Hey, now. Get the claims right, at least. He never claimed he invented the Web, he said he created the Internet.
invention =/= creation
web =/= internet
While he may have overstated his contribution a bit, he did spearhead the bill that allocated funds to bring the internet to the general public in the US.

 

Are you for real?

When the Internet was created, Al Gore was still a pimpled brat at Harvard.

All I'm doing is being charitable by correcting his moronic claim. The Web is what brought the long-existing Internet to the general public.

Al Gore is a fucking moron from start to finish.

 

Yes. Don't believe everything comedians intentionally misinterpret and turn into jokes.

As I said,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_Act_of_1991
Emphasis on bringing the internet to the general public.
Among other things, it allocated funding to the telecom companies to extend the infrastructure necessary to make access widely available to the general public.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology

Web specifically refers to http(s) traffic over port 80 (or sometimes 8080), which accounts for a less than half of all internet traffic.
Mosiac was the first wideley-used web browser, and it was developed at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications. The NCSA received much of their funding from the Gore Bill.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn stated in one of their books "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President".
If you don't know who they are, you shouldn't be debating internet technology. If anyone deserves credit for "inventing" the internet, it would be them as the creators of TCP/IP.

 

I'm liberal but thinking Chris Christie

 

Thanks for pasting crap from Wikipedia.

Do you realize you've just sunken your own apologies to Al Gore and supported my own argument?

By the way, your Wiki article omitted Tim Berners Lee and David Clark, both of whom I've met, among many others.

I've also met Cerf. And his name is Vinton. Not "Vint."

Sorry about all the name dropping, but you started it.


Finally, read your own damned post. TCP-IP predates Gore. He was a schoolkid when the Internet was invented. As I said, before you ran off to Wikipedia.

The so-called "Gore Bill," for which he personally played a minor role at best, funded Web browser development, in order to facilitate, expand and disseminate the precursor of HTML, which had been developed at Parc Labs among other places to facilitate graphical help systems.

As to Cerf's claim that Gore had a huge role, that is an absolute crock. Cerf is a brilliant guy, but his words are misconstrued, just like the words of anyone else with whom Gore comes into contact. Cerf has also become, to some sorry extent, a political animal, and his alignment with NAS/NAE has given him an unwholesome proximity to government, which corrupts everything, period.

The single most crucial single individual to the Web as we know it today would be Sir Tim Berners Lee. And if you had Cerf alone at a bar, away from television cameras, and dumped a few drinks down his throat, that is exactly what he would tell you.

But this is all besides the point. I don't have a problem with who did or didn't do what for the Internet and the Web.

What I have a problem with is the way low information voters in this country think a shallow, superficial moron like Al Gore is Christ Himself, Reborn. The man is now worth two hundred million dollars, and he made that money by pretending to be a scientist, by shilling a fully illustrated book about imperiled polar bears, by doing everything in his power to drive the fossil fuel industry into the ground, and most recently, by selling his television news station and distribution rights the oil sheiks who run and bankroll Al Jazeera.

And I have to be preached at by you, another apologist? Telling me there's truth to the utter fucking bullshit that he had anything whatsoever to do with the Internet?

Goddamn it!

Tell you what! If Al Gore invented the Internet, Barack Obama invented the Hospital Emergency Room!

Sheesh.


(breathe.) (calm.)

There. I feel much better.

 

well whoever he is the most important thing is he has blonde hair, average size and wears prescription glasses. he also must be athiest with a mix of satanism and buddhism and have a chinese first lady, perhaps?

 

be ex.cia too, he could be like a national hero before he even becomes president, before debating and polls are even taken. on letterman one of the top 10 will be the president will personally hunt down and kill every single terrorist with his bare hands.

 

​

 

I'm not apologizing. I'm pointing out that he never made the claim "I invented the web" despite media and comics- and now you- attributing it to him.

My bad. You should probably correct me that "Bob Kahn" is actually "Robert Kahn" while you're at it.

Who's that? Is he related to Sir Timothy Berners-Lee?
See, two can play this game. Which is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand, whether you're doing it or I am.
As an aside, why would an article about a US Act of Congress be expected to mention an Englishman working (at that time) at CERN?

Have you been following along? He never claimed that. His exact quote was "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet."
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/president.2000/transcript.gore/

creating does not equate to inventing
When a couple have a child, it if often said they created a new life. Does this mean they invented life? Or conception? Insemination? Pregnancy? Childbirth?
No, the two terms are not synonymous.

He was not a schoolkid in 1983. Why 1983? While the internet was built on earlier technologies like ARPANET, the internet- as we know it today- began in 1983.
The computers on the internet in 1983 could connect and communicate now, with today's internet. The same can't be said of computers from earlier networks. The protocols used weren't the same for older networks.
IPv4 was standardized in 1981, and TCP/IP in 1982. The rollout of the two together was 1983.

Ok, here read it in Cerf and Kahn's own words. They list Gore's contributions to the internet, going back to the 1970s. Which would be before the internet existed, BTW.
http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00311.html
It's kinda hard to misconstrue.

Stop. Back up. For someone who claims to be knowledgable on this topic, you seem to have a hard time discriminating between "web" and "internet".
The web is a service that runs on the internet. It's one of many services, and it's not even the majority of the overall traffic.
Again, these are two related terms- but not synonymous.
Can you use the internet without touching the web? Yes.
Can you use the web without touching the internet? No.

Your rage seems to be blinding you. I'm not defending (or agreeing with) his environmental positions. In this one thing, however, he was mis-quoted.
In this case, mis-quoted by you, when you made the comment about him "inventing the web." I linked you earlier to the transcript of the CNN interview where this initially occurred. Go look at it, show me where he said he "invented the web"- which was your claim after all.
If you want to go after the guy, there's plenty of legit things to go for. However, this is not one.

Your own words:

So then he DID have "anything whatsoever" to do with the internet, by your own words.

Your opinion of him notwithstanding, but bear in mind that even intelligent people occasionally make poor decisions. This is generally accepted and understood. After all, "nobody's perfect." It also shouldn't be too hard to understand that it's not impossible for a relatively unintelligent person to occasionally make a good decision. There are few absolutes in this world.


I think you really need to calm down here. I'm sensing large amounts of blind rage from you.