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by TedBlosser 5728 days ago
"The great exception is information technology, whose rapid advance is no fluke: "So far computers and the Internet have been the one sector immune from excessive regulation."

-so true, and let's hope we can keep it that way.
2 comments
stretchwithme 5728 days ago
Can you imagine if government had tried to pick winning information technologies the way its now trying to do with electric cars?

Yep, its all over transportation. And you can see from the daily block long backup in front of Apple's global headquarters of cars waiting to get on the clogged highway 280 that innovative entrepreneurs aren't allowed to fix it.

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orangecat 5728 days ago
Can you imagine if government had tried to pick winning information technologies the way its now trying to do with electric cars?

For a real-world example see South Korea, where until just a few months ago government regulations mandated the use of IE for all commerce: http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/07/01/korea.no.longe...

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stretchwithme 5728 days ago
wow, that's whacked. And that was in place for over 10 years.

And the reason was so you could have ActiveX verifying your identity. Yeah, bet ya Microsoft worked real hard getting the latest and greatest browser out for that market.

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_delirium 5728 days ago
That's a pretty speculative causal conclusion, if a causal conclusion is what "no fluke" is getting at. The rapid advance of computers and the internet because it's the big recent technology. Many ages have their new technologies that undergo rapid advances, and computing is this age's. You could've predicted in the 1950s, and many people did, that computing would be the big technology of the 20th century, long before you had any idea how its regulation would play out.
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