
Gordon Brown: Building Britain’s Digital Future - michael_nielsen
http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page22897
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arethuza
Being old enough to remember the Alvey Programme and having worked on the EU
ESPRIT programme I'm just a wee bit skeptical when I hear a politician making
any announcements about funding one particular area of CS research.

The Semantic Web has always appeared to me to be good old symbolic AI with a
dash of angle brackets.

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Tycho
The thing that bugs me is that fast-broadband, from what I can tell, has been
rolling out _just fine_ without any government interference. I wouldn't want
the government to take credit for and therefore stewardship over something
that the private market can easily achieve by itself.

Maybe they have been more involved than I thought, though. Need to investigate
more.

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kierank
* fast-broadband, from what I can tell, has been rolling out just fine without any government interference.*

Only in built-up areas with a high population density.

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lifeisstillgood
Wow.

It is utterly incredible what an election you are likely to lose will prompt
politicians to promise.

Over here the election has begun in earnest, with the big guns coming out in
just one day to promise big new initiatives - from a industrial strategy for
green energy and biotech, to UK Space Agency to Semantic Web-enabled
government departments.

Some of this is aiming in the right direction, like releasing OS maps,
broadband for digital poor and access to government processes online. But some
of this terrifies me - "allowing users of government services to identify
themselves simply and definitively" sounds like an ID card online.

I love that Gordon has been listening to some of the right people. I am scared
that my government is going to try and go online when they support things like
the Digital Economy Bill copyright sections. Whoever wrote this speech did not
do the policy work on clause 17.

roll on may 6th

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ZeroGravitas
The tories have been surprisingly on-the-ball with support for open source IT
and similar so with both main parties supporting positive moves in this
direction the only problem will be if they're all talk and do nothing about it
when the time comes to actually take action.

Oh, just burst my own bubble there.

