The gov't had to fund the early beginnings of the Internet because it took so much out of the economy to fund Moon/Space/Spy satellite programs against an enemy that could barely produce a decent TV set. They even took a small army of scientists and engineers out of the economy.
This does not even include the telecom regulations preventing competition and innovation during the 50s through 80s. MCI prospered and gave AT&T competition after some regulations were dropped.
When the Gov't takes so much, it's no wonder why scientists/engineers needed it as sugar daddy back then: That's where all the money was.
> spyware, botnets, DOS extortion and so on
We have a market to develop countermeasures: YCombinator and its copycats. The last place you would want protection is from the same gov't that still has problems running the post office and Amtrak.
> the hated, loathed government was the one that actually created it.
The Gov't also used private firms and pre-existing innovations from the market to develop a lot of the programs. Mises.org has published articles about NASA and related programs using pre-existing technologies from the market. The growth of the Internet and Web also came when the Gov't de-regulated large portions of it.
> they're pushing a political point of view
True. Their political POV is: get politicians out of lives, businesses, and private property.
I agree. Krugman/NYTimes articles do not get a warning like the link above.
The link above shows what happens when a series of tech innovations allows a group of people to interact with little to no Gov't intervention. That is a lot more interesting than the latest Krugman/NYTimes perspective on engineering a miracle recovery.
However, I also agree that Mises.org links do not belong on Hacker News. The HN audience, like most Americans, seems to have embraced the idea that you can engineer economic miracles. Anything remotely related to Mises.org is slapped with a warning.
This is Neo-Keynesian town, buddy. No Miseans need apply.
Try post-2012. That's when some Austrian sympathizers are predicting The Greatest Depression. People, even on HN, will be more open to the Austrian POV then. (Maybe even to the Hoppean view. Oh joy!) Meanwhile, I'm going back to this Celente PDF linked on LRC. It mentions micro-farming as a growth industry.
If anyone tries to correct you on the pronunciation maybe you can tell them:
"Post-erous, posterous, smackerous... They're too busy putting in new features to care about stuff like that. They care about results, not pronunciations. That's the start-up way."
(Unless of course it's Garry Tan trying to correct you on it.)
"The larger story at hand is, who are the players (nations) involved, and what was the intention of this likely counterfeiting operation? Maybe the future will reveal the answers to these questions. But maybe not."
Never met her, but she is computer + gun savvy. She might be willing to try out your website. She is a writer, gun enthusiast, savvy shopper, etc. Here is one of her gun articles to give you an idea of what she knows: http://www.lewrockwell.com/decoster/decoster152.html
That combo makes it crazy easy to maintain a bunch of web apps and explore/publish different ideas.
Long-term, I want to drop Ruby and go to Factor (http://factorcode.org/). You can do some amazing cool stuff in Factor that is next-to-impossible in Ruby/Python/Java/etc. It's hard to find a blog post or a screencast that shows you stuff like parsing functions and macros that let you mold the language to your needs. (The documentation on them is pretty straightforward after you learn the basics.)
Then there's the postfix notation. Most people think that's Satan's love child. It takes some time to get used to.
There was a study that was published in Oct. 2007 by researchers from the University of California (Berkeley). They did not find any negative effects from heavy vitamin and supplement users. In fact, all the tests they ran showed they were far healthier than the non-vitamin users.