deb1 wrote: My own personal viewpoint is that Gore, like a lot of politicians, simply has an overinflated sense of his own importance and said something without thinking. That doesn't mean that he doesn't have some good ideas or wasn't a good candidate.
He could have simply said `expand', but he `created' what will certainly earn him a couple of sentences in his obit.
Since the thread mentions the National Defense Highways (Interstate) and as the `net' was born to `create' a system of communication that would have the resilience to continue operating even though individual nodes were being vaporized, I thought it would be nice to point out a couple of things:
O.K., `Skynet' (Arpanet) was born (nah, didn't become self-aware). First message (note the date):
Staying with the Cold War theme, I'd suggest politicians could still get some mileage out of carrying one of these around to help them calculate the degree of cratering of their image that might occur by launching their feet into their mouths:
That said (back to mushing along the dogsled), imagine a petri dish colonized over an instant and suddenly (geologically speaking) fluorescing. We're as colonial as penguins and as dirty as mud daubers and, owing to our biology, don't do well thinking/planning/executing in increments greater than a single generation (30yr.). Keep an eye on the `culture'...