Ozymandias wrote:Alright, then name me one society throughout history which managed to not only avoid wealth inequality (and I don't mean pure socialism, but something more on par with America in the 60's) and simultaneously managed to persist as a politically relevant polity for a few hundred years without any statistically significant change in the wealth gap. We've had 5000 years to get it... if we haven't done it yet, it probably won't happen.

The concentration of wealth into the hands of the few is the unavoidable result of human nature and the ability of the wealthy to accumulate more wealth. Its immutable, for better or worse.

danivon wrote:PCH - booms are great, ain't they? Shame they often get followed by a bust. How you liking the current one?

It also doesn't mean that innovation is caused by greater inequality.

rickyp wrote:Fax

But i really don't believe that in somewhat modern countries with decent standards of living and economic growth the objective income equality plays anykind of role, it's all an emotional thing.

So being pissed off that your house is worth less than your mortgage, that you can't afford to send your kids to college, that you can't move out of a job you hate because you won't get insurance...(I guess that might change soon) none of these are valid because its just an emotional response?

rickyp wrote:But to dismiss this as emotional is silly. People are emotional creatures. They are motivated not just by physical rewards but by emotional rewards.

rickyp wrote:The people of Egypt marched and ended Mubareks reign becasue they had amassed an emotional resevoir of resentment. In Egypt income disparity is enormous and was at the heart of that resentment.

rickyp wrote:But all of that is triggered by emotional reaction NOT some kind of intellectual struggle.

rickyp wrote:The rage of the Tea Party is caused by resentment to a changing society that they seem to have trouble gaining personnally. Some it directed at the demographic reality that the US is becoming. Some of it aimed at Wall Stret. Muych at govenrment. They might not have a real rationale focus on whats really letting them down ...but their emotions are real and valid .

rickyp wrote:The Internet, arguably the greatest innovation of the last 25 years, didn't come about because of a desire to accumulate wealth by a few entrepreneurs. Its innovation came about because of a desire by the US government, and then others, to produce a better communications system. All the original scientists working on wanted it was to have their computers talk to each other

geojanes wrote:Al Gore told me that the thought of commercialization came much later, well after he invented the Internet. Give him a call Archduke, he'll set you straight.

You think the scientist who created the Internet didn't thinf of the commerical applications and/or desired to take advantage of it? How older are you?

However, the point to point communication model was limited, as it did not allow for direct communication between any two arbitrary systems; a physical link was necessary. The technology was also deemed as inherently unsafe for strategic and military use, because there were no alternative paths for the communication in case of an enemy attack.

As a response,several research programs started to explore and articulate principles of communications between physically separate systems, leading to the development of the packet switching model of digital networking. These research efforts included those of the laboratories of Vinton G. Cerf at Stanford University, Donald Davies (NPL), Paul Baran (RAND Corporation), and Leonard Kleinrock at MIT and at UCLA. The research led to the development of several packet-switched networking solutions in the late 1960s and 1970s, including ARPANET, Telenet, and the X.25 protocols. Additionally, public access and hobbyist networking systems grew in popularity, including unix-to-unix copy (UUCP) and FidoNet. They were however still disjointed separate networks, served only by limited gateways between networks. This led to the application of packet switching to develop a protocol for internetworking, where multiple different networks could be joined together into a super-framework of networks. By defining a simple common network system, the Internet Protocol Suite, the concept of the network could be separated from its physical implementation. This spread of internetworking began to form into the idea of a global network that would be called the Internet, based on standardized protocols officially implemented in 1982

rickyp wrote:The origins of the Internet were its military application.... The scientistrs working on it had no desire but to fulfill that specific need. It wasn't till 1982 and the first ISPs that commercial applications began to be developed and none of them were developed by the originators...

danivon wrote:How did he take advantage of it? Well, he ... umm ... released everything open source and took zero royalties. Then he set up W3C, which developed updated and royalty free sets of standards to improve the web.

While others have made millions from the web, Berners-Lee earns a modest academic salary and until recently drove a 20-year-old VW Golf each day to his sparse, nondescript office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There he maintains standards and develops his creation as the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Just that when a boom happens, some people jump up the pay scale and others are left behind