However, it is clear that he did not invent email as we know it today. This claim has repeatedly been debunked. He wrote an interoffice memo system called EMAIL which is, to my knowledge, unrelated to the development of SMTP and the ARPANET systems that preceded it. Those ARPANET systems predated Ayyadurai's EMAIL program(s).
He did not win against Gawker. Gawker happened to go out of business due to a separate defamation lawsuit while Ayyadurai's lawsuit was still pending. Gawker decided to settle the lawsuit instead.
Great people don't sue news outlets to claim credit for things they say they did decades ago. They sue for royalties, or better yet, shut up and do things. This guy checks all the boxes for a sociopathic fraud.
A fine position on its face in the general case, but let's be real here: if you trust Alex Jones specifically, you really are a moron.
> Yes, rights are important, and we must offer them generously. But surely we can agree that Nazis don't have rights?
[0]: https://www.popehat.com/2017/04/18/the-seductive-appeal-of-t...
The world is so massively full of such low hanging fruit that you can often save a massive amount of time this way as it turns out the majority of people aren't worth listening to outside of narrow areas of knowledge they directly interact with. Its a completely valid strategy. The danger of course is that you risk ignoring useful proof if what you assumed was obvious was incorrect.
Yet, I don't know anything about Alex Jones himself. It'd be nice if that were included in the critique.
If there's something you hear from Alex Jones that seems like it might be true, double-check it with knowledgeable sources before you adopt it as a fact.
Better yet, go find more reliable sources for your information.
I absolutely agree that automatically dismissing anyone whose news sources don't completely agree with yours is a big problem. But I think intelligent people can agree that some people have proven themselves utterly unworthy of trust.
If you don't think Infowars is a serious news outlet, maybe you haven't watched them? In about 20 years they have had I think 3 retractions, which a propaganda rag like CNN or the Washington Post has to do weekly.
I would wish that HN would have more people who care about primary sources - that is what my academic training taught me. Perhaps if you listened to any of Bannon's speeches rather than malicious rumor and hearsay, you would have a different opinion.
>If you don't think Infowars is a serious news outlet, maybe you haven't watched them
Sometimes the comments write themselves.
The basic fact is this: RFC 821 and 822 are the current email infrastructure (the most fundamental changes to the infrastructure are MIME and DNS routing, neither of which his system I suspect had any equivalent to). If I were to write you an email, my client would box it up in an RFC 822 formatted message and send it over a protocol described in RFC 821 to make sure that you receive it. Any definition of email that precludes this system is therefore fundamentally dishonest.
The second major issue is that Ayyaduri's invention has had no demonstrable influence on the development of email. This makes it hard to stomach the fine parsing of definitions. By contrast, for example, I consider the B&O railroad to be the first railroad in the US, a claim which does require a bit of contorting (it's the first one that opened for business on a common carrier principle). However, the B&O railroad undoubtedly had a major impact on US railroading history, even if you want to define the Mohawk & Hudson or the Granite Railway or somebody else as the first railroad.
Rather than merely be content to be known as a precocious inventor of an email program, he's trying his damnedest try to be known of the inventor of email in general even when the facts don't really support such a claim.
a) email already existed b) inter-computer email already existed c) there were hundreds or thousands of ARPANET email users by 1978
So he might be very smart, but he also appears to be thoroughly dishonest.
I'm not sure what seem worse : He using trolling tactics and expecting people to buy it, or him being so caught up in his own redefinition of reality he now believe it...
No other claims can make him win the case if this condition does not stand, can he?
I gave you the benefit of the doubt and went to his various social media outlets. He openly attacks Elizabeth Warren and constantly retweets and comments about how great InfoWars is.
So yeah, nah.
There's not much evidence this is true and plenty of evidence it is not.
Do you believe what I've said is incorrect? Do you believe that ethics aren't a requirement for public service? Do you think its OK to mug people so long as you only mug people you don't like?
I'm glad that he won against Gawker and am cheering for him to defeat Elizabeth Warren for Senate. He is the kind of smart, wise, and experienced technocrat that we could use in government, with an actual numerical sense and experience staffing teams and making payroll.