On Tue, 3 Jun 1997, Tresy Kilbourne wrote:

>  This seems to be a success story to me: government got high-tech started,
> then it became self-sustaining, and society benefited. If, in the 50s the
> government had been straightforward about it and said, it's a choice
> between publicly subsidized high-tech and no high-tech at all, I think
> most people would have said, by all means, subsidize high-tech!
>

The problem is one of priorities of government, which, currently and in the
past, has been based on something other than benefits to humanity. The
high-tech development-using our tax dollars-that has helped put these
machines on our desks, also did a much bigger job at creating and using
weapons of mass destruction. Had we been given a choice between computers
for peace and mis-guided missiles of war, maybe things would have been
different. But we were not given such a choice, nor will we ever be given
one. We need to create it, democratically.

fs