[e2e] end of interest

[David P. Reed]

As a non-bitter person, I have to answer Fred below.

Fred Baker wrote:
>
> If your research was funded by a Major Company, then you are betting 
> that improvements to the present model are a good thing. Paradoxically 
> perhaps, thus far the things we have learned on this axis have been 
> useful as well.
Not true - major companies often fund alternatives to its present model 
- even internally.  Perhaps Cisco doesn't fund investigations of what it 
is NOT selling?   In fact, I personally think the only companies who can 
*afford* not to study alternatives are those who are comfortably able to 
enforce their market power against innovators.

In fact, piling on some criticism of current practices in some 
companies, funding universities to do what the company thinks might be 
merely small, incremental improvements just turns universities into 
outsourced development shops for graduate students to do work for the 
companies that the companies can't afford to pay full time employees to 
do.  Research is quite different from contract programming.
>
> I'm seriously wondering where the bitter folks who hate the businesses 
> that made the Internet a worldwide communication infrastructure are 
> coming from. Do they hate the Internet? Would they rather have an 
> Internet that was undeployed for lack of funding, and therefore the 
> system they the say they dislike because it is the last viable 
> business standing?
Perhaps you misread.  I don't hate businesses - I worked too long and 
proudly in industry R&D to hate them.  I highly respect businesses and 
their power.   I am hardly bitter as a result, and in fact I love the 
Internet.  I don't think Cisco or BBN or Microsoft or Google are humans, 
and 99.9% of their current employees, if you think about it, had little 
to do with the creative acts that created the Internet.  Those 
*organizations* are not worthy of thanks or worship.  They are worthy of 
respect, but also demand criticism - criticism EQUAL to their power today.

I do feel free to criticize the companies and their policies.   In fact, 
I feel that the paragraph above is insulting, twisted, and just plain wrong:

Ascribing motives that are not there (bitter, hate, ...) is rude, 
obnoxious, and yet highly typical of the way discourse plays out on FOX, 
CNN, MSNBC in politics.  I'm tempted to utter expletives, Fred.  But I 
won't.