Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

The only significant thing I ever did on ARPA NET was to get GPS funded. Of course that is too strong a statement; actually it was a lot more complicated than that.

What happened was that Francis X. Kane, the silent co-author of Possony and Pournelle THE STRATEGY OF TECHNOLOGY, had invented Global Positioning System while Director of Plans at USAF Systems Command, and had managed to get USAF to request and get funding. Then in the 70's Congress zeroed GPS out of the budget. Kane called me in hopes I had some resources to get it revived. I broadcast a message about that on ARPANET, and Lowell Wood, Livermore physicist and one of Teller's inner circle, saw it, sent me email to get details, got in touch with Kane, and went to Washington where he lobbied among his Congressional contacts to get it restored. It was restored and I think it would not have been done without Wood, who would not have heard about it were it not for ARPANET. GPS turns out to be important, but then we all knew it would be; the trick was convincing Congress.

That done, I had books to write and work to do. Commercial net accounts were coming, Loudon was inventing what became CompuServe after several evolutions and transformations and acquisitions, and BYTE was inventing BIX; I still held a clearance through having been President of Pepperdine Research and I still did some policy briefings for Air Force Plans and Doctrines, and so had all the communications I needed. Stallman, one of my friends from the MIT ARPANET, was done with most of his work there (I was an early beta tester of emacs, and some of my naïve observations found their way into the final product), and I found I spent most of my time on ARPANET playing ZORK, an activity for which I had no time; it was a gift of time to find that account closed. I resented the way it was done, but not enough to speak to anyone in the Pentagon about it. I see that the story still reverberates after twenty years (it all happened in CP/M S-100 days, mostly at 300 baud; 1200 was a godsend). Peace.
(source)

Do any of you have heroes, mentors or just consistently sensible public figures that you fear losing?

Pournelle is 86 now

Between 1847 and 1859, at least 36 expeditions set out in search of Franklin’s lost ships, but all ended in failure. It wasn’t until researchers turned to Inuit oral history that they were able to locate the final resting place of the Erebus and the Terror in the past decade.

The site where Fitzjames and at least a dozen others perished was located by searchers in the 1860s, who heard Inuit stories that the survivors resorted to cannibalism – news that rocked Victorian England. That testimony was given some support in the late 1990s by the late anthropologist Anne Keenleyside, who found marks consistent with human-made cuts on nearly a quarter of the bones.

A molar from one mandible, etched with knife marks, proved a match with one of those 25 [DNA samples] and the team soon realized they were holding the remains of Captain James Fitzjames. The results were published on Tuesday in the Journal of Archaeological Science.