Osama Bin Lay

From the “Download” technology column:

At this month’s Discovery Institute conference on “Re-Igniting the Tech Economy,” senior fellow George Gilder proposed that politicians of late are attributing bankruptcies to a “crime-wave theory.”

“In telecom, the telecasm occurred,” he said. “Thirty-five companies went bankrupt, with more than $1 billion assets in each case. … Politicians have a theory – and it can be summed up as a crime wave: Bubbleheads, executives, whatever you call it, Mohammed Atta Gates, Osama Bin Lay, Kenneth Mohammed Atta Gates, the names all run together.”

He went on to say that “the end of the ’90s was scintillating, not a failure. It was an incredible achievement. It made possible a 300,000-fold increase in Internet traffic. What it would have cost to sustain that growth – if we had been using telecom gear that was developed in 1995, the cost would have been $39 trillion in 2001. The Internet would have been impossible without the optical revolution that generated the advances.”