I hate it when that happens.

is qwerty29 a bot?

Hmm I am keeping an eye..

watching as well

The internet does need regulation and it has been regulated almost; and I will go out on a limb and say; from the beginning. Its inception was for defence and industry and it evolved into the largest communications network(system) in the world. Now to qualify my assertions. When criminals (in this case i am not speaking of our respective governments) started their financial scams, child predators etc the law of the land was not around and why? Hell no one knew who's jurisdiction it was. That got ironed out sort-of and now we have a combination of knee jerk amongst well thought out legislation. Don't get me wrong I don't think that we need any more intrustion into our lives then is absolutely necessary.

The internet was originated by the scientific community to share information freely. The government has never had any control of it except in totalitarian countries.

PaulS wrote:

The internet was originated by the scientific community to share information freely. The government has never had any control of it except in totalitarian countries.

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet[b]
It has a very good explaination of the origin of the internet. I was in military communications back int he early 70's and I didn't know at the time but i was on the internet then.

Aah yes...The early 70s. A typewriter, phone and a cradle.

Bushmaster wrote:

Aah yes...The early 70s. A typewriter, phone and a cradle.

Its funny but I really miss those days. I would have to add a Model 19 teletype machine and the tpe relaty cabinets. I was the interface between two or more users and they replaced me with some electrons!

Lets you and go over and crack that fifth that Vince has hidden behind those stumps of his at the fire...

I had a direct connection to the Navy laboratory in San Diego (I was in Seattle).

This is from Wikipedia:

Quote::

"The history of the Internet begins with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. Initial concepts of packet networking originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, Great Britain, and France. The US Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as the 1960s for packet network systems, including the development of the ARPANET (which would become the first network to use the Internet Protocol.) The first message was sent over the ARPANET from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock's laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the second network node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Packet switching networks such as ARPANET, Mark I at NPL in the UK, CYCLADES, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of communications protocols. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was introduced as the standard networking protocol on the ARPANET. In the early 1980s the NSF funded the establishment for national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, which also created network access to the supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Private connections to the Internet by commercial entities became widespread quickly, and the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic."

In the early 1980s I was on the internet through a modem connection to the VAX computer at the UW. It cost me $1 per CPU second. The only real information was all scientific and I learned a lot. Back then it was mostly university research, public, private and military.