We covered this in depth back during the 2000 election. The "invented the Internet" meme was largely the result of sloppy, slanted reporting by Declan McCullagh. I wrote about it here:

http://archive.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/10/05/gore_internet/

The sad thing is, the controversy obscured the truth of the matter, which was -- as Vint Cerf confirmed -- that Gore really did deserve a lot of credit for the way the Internet evolved from a university network to the global resource it is today.

But of course for a decade the GOP has aimed its lies at its opponents' strongest points. And it's been sadly effective.

Well, in the best-case scenario that $80 billion investment in AIG, and the other chunks of Wall St. we all collectively now own, turn out to be good investments. The markets drop a bit more, the dust slowly clears, the economy picks itself up and moves forward, and these assets regain some value.

In the worst case, we just tossed roughly One Iraq-War Year's unit of federal debt down the toilet in an effort to keep the wheels of finance greased. Given the profligacy of the Bush administration, this is upsetting but really just more of the same. At least, unlike Iraq, there is apparently some good reason to blow money on AIG.

Andrew, I'm really surprised you don't understand that this credit crisis is the PERFECT moment to return to that all-important item on the GOP agenda -- lowering the capital gains tax! Isn't it just obvious that's what the nation needs right now?

Oh, wait a second, are there any capital gains in sight?

Andrew, I think that, unfamiliar though it is, you and I may need to start getting used to being part of a majority!

It's Santayana time again, I guess. (When is it ever not?)

Thanks for the great post. When the day's news is hard to take, the long view is definitely helpful.

Re DaviddesJ's comment: the thing I was suggesting had "no bearing on reality" was the implication in the passage from George Dyson that Google might be evolving into an AI. Like I said, fun to think about, in a science-fictional way. Not something I think is likely to happen. I know Ray Kurzweil et al. disagree. Maybe the Google guy Dyson quoted really was just talking about machine-scanning and not serious AI, but if so, why didn't he just say that?

The book scanning project itself has, ofcourse, plenty of bearing on reality -- it is, as you suggest, hugely important and potentially enormously valuable (though fraught with some business and legal questions). I think so and I would say Stross does too -- it gets a whole chapter in his book.

Dmeeks, I grew up watching Star Trek and in fact attended several of the earliest Star Trek conventions at the Commodore Hotel as a teenager in the mid-'70s (though I admit I was a little snobby about "trekkies" and preferred the world of SF fandom).

I didn't write the headline. If I still worked at Salon I'd have caught it before publication, because, yes, I know that Spock is not "all head and no heart." Them's the breaks. What I actually wrote was this:

"intellectually supreme, agile and engaged with the world, but prone to respond to the unpredictable behavior of its customers by cocking an eyebrow and exclaiming, 'Highly irrational!' "

Which I'm willing to stand by.

Lord knows where we'll be in 2012. But it can only be a good thing, should we have an incumbent Democratic administration, for the right to split whatever remains of their vote. Say, Palin can run as the candidate of the Rovian base, and Paul (or some younger acolyte) can grab the libertarian votes, and then the Democrats can get on with the actual business of government.

how much longer can any newspaper executive justify the huge operating expense of printing and distributing the printed page?

As long as the online unit still loses money and the print unit still makes money. Which is still the case for most papers (even the CSM, it seems: they're saving $3M but losing $4M in revenue by shutting down the presses). If they shut the presses they'd immediately go into the red. Most are still making money today -- just less and less each year, and less than the stock market wants them to.

I agree that, long term, print is dead. But all these newspapers have the "legacy" problem. They don't want to move their energies too far online because they're losing money there still. But by the time the lines on the graph cross and they finally give up print, they'll have lost a lot of ground to competitors online. (They already have.) It's the same problem that Microsoft faces in the transition to Web services; they don't want to give up the Windows tax. Technology transitions always seem to work this way. It's journalists' turn now.

I'm with you, Cyrus -- still on POP3, still in text editor, etc. For the same reasons.

But I feel like we're pretty much in the same position as the late '80s/early '90s diehards for DOS -- those of us (I was one then!) who had the function keys down and loved the responsiveness and hated how slow Windows (or the Mac) was in those days and said, "GUIs are toys for kids!" We were right, *at that moment*, but the change was inevitable. GUIs got faster and better and reached a point where even diehards said, the advantages outweigh the drawbacks.

The "cloud" is not there yet but it's getting there. There will always be holdouts (just as plenty of geeks still love their command lines, particularly if it's in Linux) but the cloud-based application will be the norm.