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Yes, Dr. Pournelle was indeed a visionary and a brilliant man. "Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free." A quote from my all-time favorite science fic

Yes, Dr. Pournelle was indeed a visionary and a brilliant man. "Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free." A quote from my all-time favorite science fiction author, RAH, also seems appropriate: "TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!"

DonHopkins 9y ago
Yeah, you can't be for small government if you think you're entitled to handouts of free networking service, free timesharing service, free data storage, free system administration, and free friendly help desk service, all sponsored by big government grants. And those long haired commie USER-A-holes at the MIT AI Lab Help Desk certainly were rude to him, almost as bad as Comcast. Pournelle certainly predicted the decline of Internet customer service.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  Same as every small-government conservative, going right back to Heinlein: the military doesn't count. ARPANET was a military operation.
  - justin66 9y ago
    Of course, most of the really great stuff had been funded by ARPA before the whole thing became DARPA. Weren't a lot of the Xerox PARC people refugees from that whole process?
    - scroot 9y ago
      Not just refugees. The way Alan Kay describes it, PARC was essentially in the spirit of ARPA, one if the last great efforts that could be said to come from that culture. Part of the reason, he claims, is that Bob Taylor (veteran of ARPA and IPTO) managed to convince Xerox to make such a lab with minimal interference just as the old guard of ARPA funders saw their resources begin to dry up.
- Recurecur 9y ago
  You don't like his politics? Fine...although I think you should reflect long and hard on how often government is an impediment to what's right as opposed to a help. If you think anything you listed was "free", you're delusional. :-) You're also laser-focused on one minor incident in a very long, productive life.
  - DonHopkins 9y ago
    I also don't like his hypocrisy. I certainly hope for your sake that you're not in Texas or Louisiana or Florida, up to your neck in water, waiting for the climate change deniers in the government to bail you out. MIT never sent me or POURNE a bill for the all the networking and computer services, personal guidance, tutoring and support we received pro-bono from the MIT-AI Lab staff, so it was free to us, and I for one appreciated it and am grateful. RMS even custom wrote POURNE some free software at his request. You can't put a price on this: "He was immensely helpful to me in those days, patiently showing me things about emacs — his full-screen editor that he wrote in TECO, and the less said about TECO the better — as well as adding some special code to take care of things I wanted to accomplish." https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reviews/bookmonth.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reviews/bookmonth.html But they did send me an official MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy that I had to promise to abide by in order to use their machines, which I gladly signed and returned and followed. And POURNE was flushed because he clearly violated it, not because of his politics. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html >13. Any use of the MIT ITS machines for personal gain, profit making enterprise, or political purposes is not a legitimate use of the Laboratories' computer resources. >14. These specific statements of policy give a minimum of how a tourist ought to behave to be a responsible user on the MIT ITS system. They are not a complete list of all the ways tourists should or should not behave. Just because some particular anti-social behavior is not listed does not mean that it is acceptable. What a tourist should do is cultivate a good attitude: make a positive effort to anticipate and avoid actions that would interfere with other users. If you cannot tell whether a certain course of action can interfere with any one, find out from someone else before trying it. It's so ironic you're trying to Gish Gallop with tired talking point against big government, which funded the ARPANET, and which is currently busy dealing with a series of natural disasters, while you are trying to smear the MIT-AI lab as a bunch of communists. My failure to respond to all of your posts within your expected time frame is because they're simply not worth responding to. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

DonHopkins 9y ago

Yeah, you can't be for small government if you think you're entitled to handouts of free networking service, free timesharing service, free data storage, free system administration, and free friendly help desk service, all sponsored by big government grants. And those long haired commie USER-A-holes at the MIT AI Lab Help Desk certainly were rude to him, almost as bad as Comcast. Pournelle certainly predicted the decline of Internet customer service.

Pxtl 9y ago
Same as every small-government conservative, going right back to Heinlein: the military doesn't count. ARPANET was a military operation.
- justin66 9y ago
  Of course, most of the really great stuff had been funded by ARPA before the whole thing became DARPA. Weren't a lot of the Xerox PARC people refugees from that whole process?
  - scroot 9y ago
    Not just refugees. The way Alan Kay describes it, PARC was essentially in the spirit of ARPA, one if the last great efforts that could be said to come from that culture. Part of the reason, he claims, is that Bob Taylor (veteran of ARPA and IPTO) managed to convince Xerox to make such a lab with minimal interference just as the old guard of ARPA funders saw their resources begin to dry up.
Recurecur 9y ago
You don't like his politics? Fine...although I think you should reflect long and hard on how often government is an impediment to what's right as opposed to a help. If you think anything you listed was "free", you're delusional. :-) You're also laser-focused on one minor incident in a very long, productive life.
- DonHopkins 9y ago
  I also don't like his hypocrisy. I certainly hope for your sake that you're not in Texas or Louisiana or Florida, up to your neck in water, waiting for the climate change deniers in the government to bail you out. MIT never sent me or POURNE a bill for the all the networking and computer services, personal guidance, tutoring and support we received pro-bono from the MIT-AI Lab staff, so it was free to us, and I for one appreciated it and am grateful. RMS even custom wrote POURNE some free software at his request. You can't put a price on this: "He was immensely helpful to me in those days, patiently showing me things about emacs — his full-screen editor that he wrote in TECO, and the less said about TECO the better — as well as adding some special code to take care of things I wanted to accomplish." https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reviews/bookmonth.html https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reviews/bookmonth.html But they did send me an official MIT AI Lab Tourist Policy that I had to promise to abide by in order to use their machines, which I gladly signed and returned and followed. And POURNE was flushed because he clearly violated it, not because of his politics. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/tourist-policy.html >13. Any use of the MIT ITS machines for personal gain, profit making enterprise, or political purposes is not a legitimate use of the Laboratories' computer resources. >14. These specific statements of policy give a minimum of how a tourist ought to behave to be a responsible user on the MIT ITS system. They are not a complete list of all the ways tourists should or should not behave. Just because some particular anti-social behavior is not listed does not mean that it is acceptable. What a tourist should do is cultivate a good attitude: make a positive effort to anticipate and avoid actions that would interfere with other users. If you cannot tell whether a certain course of action can interfere with any one, find out from someone else before trying it. It's so ironic you're trying to Gish Gallop with tired talking point against big government, which funded the ARPANET, and which is currently busy dealing with a series of natural disasters, while you are trying to smear the MIT-AI lab as a bunch of communists. My failure to respond to all of your posts within your expected time frame is because they're simply not worth responding to. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop