So many Internets

One of the funnier things from the presidential debates was Bush's reference to the "Internets." And then I read this, and start to think that maybe that was Bush misspeaking by giving away top-secret military plans rather than misspeaking by incorrectly pluralizing a computer network. Next thing you know Bush is
going to reveal that his plans for overhauling Social Security include massive wood hand-outs rather than, you know, cash.

A few of things to add to the article: it doesn't mention at all the fact that the, you know, current Internet started out as a military network meant to provide a redundant computing network that could survive a nuclear attack on any specific node. See Wikipedia for more info. What the military is currently planning on doing isn't revolutionary at all; every major corporation in the world has it's own private intranet right now that routes traffic between the computers on the company's private network, and contains only well-monitored links "into the wild" of the full-blown Internet. What the military is planning on building doesn't seem to be any different from an intranet that employs satellite linkups in addition to cabling. And finally, I'm really glad that I don't see my company on the list of companies helping out the military on that project, not because I am against military technology, but because it was enough stress when a fax to the government of Singapore got lost in oblivion; I'd hate to think what would happen if the order to blow Singapore into oblivion didn't get through due to some code I wrote... actually, that would probably be a good thing.

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