Google’s motto is, “Don’t be evil.”

I’ve always found that motto disturbing for two reasons. First, a company that can differentiate itself—successfully, no less—from its competitors merely by promising not to be evil implies that the average company is ridiculously corrupt. A person who announced, “My motto is, ‘don’t shoot people’” would be notable because no one thinks you should shoot people, making the promise weird and redundant—not because the promise represented some great sacrifice. Yet Google’s promise to do no evil somehow hits people, especially those in the tech industry with fresh memories of Microsoft in the 90s and the specter of Oracle in the 2000s, as a breath of fresh air. Great for Google, but pathetic for our industry.

But the second reason, and the more important one for me, is that “Don’t be evil” is not the same as “Do the right thing.” A person who watches idly while a bully beats someone up isn’t being evil, but they are being a coward, and they are not doing the right thing. Their interference could save a poor victim a world of pain and suffering, probably at minimal risk. Instead, they simply watch the bully, knowing that they themselves would not do the same thing. This may not be doing evil, but it’s also not the moral high ground. Knowing you would never beat someone up is not the same as protecting those weaker than you.

Google chose its motto carefully; if its motto were instead, “Do the right thing,” then it would have no presence in China. For all the corruption that people accuse our government of perpetrating, our government does not censor the Internet, does not shoot and incarcerate those who disagree with it, does not deny its citizens the right to vote, and does not persecute religious minorities as a matter of state policy. China does. And until today, while Google may not have been evil in China, they certainly enabled evil to go about its business by running a censored search engine there. They were unequivocally better than Yahoo, who handed over the names and email addresses of dissidents, but they weren’t doing the right thing, either. They weren’t standing up to an autocratic, dictatorial regime.

As of today, that has changed. Google has announced that they will no longer censor their Chinese search results. While you could argue that Google’s doing this out of anger that their resources have been hacked, rather than out of a genuine desire to protect its users, their result of their actions is beyond dispute: they are taking the moral high ground. And potentially at great cost: while China has certainly failed to materialize as the unstoppable threat to the West that pundits were claiming it would become two decades ago, it’s nevertheless home for nearly a billion people, and shows no sign of stopping its economic growth in the near future. For Google to make a move that will almost certainly sacrifice any chance they have of winning the Chinese market is an economically painful move.

But it’s the right move.

So, at least for today, at least this once, look at Google as a company which is not merely avoiding perpetrating evil. Google is doing the right thing, at great cost. And they deserve to be lauded for that.

Microsoft and Yahoo: this is your turn to follow in Google’s footsteps. Do the right thing. It won’t make you money. In fact, it’ll cost you. But it’s the right thing to do.

Google: where it’s not don’t be evil. It’s, “Do the right thing.”

Congratulations.

The New York Times today has a column explaining how college students feel they deserve high marks just for putting in effort.

To these students, I say: grow up.

Real life does not reward raw effort. I will not pay you for building my house merely because you showed up every day and tried very hard. Customers will not buy your software simply because you launch Emacs from 9 to 5 and do your best to write good programs, and G-d forbid that my doctor got his M.D. because, dammit, he really worked his ass off in med school, way harder than anyone else, and that really ought to be good enough. That’s not to say that putting in more effort doesn’t count; increasing your effort increases your chance of success. But effort alone does not, and should not, equal reward.

We have to abolish the sense of entitlement we’ve created in our society. For too long, we’ve told children that their best is good enough. It’s time to drop the charade. Sometimes, your best effort and best intentions still fail. You weren’t smart enough, strong enough, or fast enough to succeed. Learning how to deal with failure when it happens, and not to let it trip up your life, is a fundamental part of growing up. We need to allow children to learn this life lesson sometime before college—something which these students never did.

Because the main thing I’m hearing about Bill Gates’ TED talk is, “Bill unleashed mosquitos!”, I want to encourage everyone to watch his entire speech. Bill Gates gave an outstanding explanation of the problems with the American education system, including a solid overview of how we can start to fix this problem. Teachers in general are diametrically opposed to being held accountable for their work. With some luck, Gates and others can help get the situation changed, enabling us to fix our national education system before it’s too late.

This is an amazing, riveting talk on the progress—both social and economic—that has been made in the Third World. If you vote, if you’re active in politics, you need to watch it.

I have to confess, this is roughly my take on the situation. I’m not especially clear on what the hullabaloo is about.

And it turns out that the Toyota Prius isn’t necessarily that great for the environment after all. (This should not come as a surprise if you’ve been keeping up on the research into renewable energy.) Listen closely to the end of the segment, though—the point isn’t that the Prius cannot be more efficient than the M3, but rather that the driver has to do his part to drive more conservatively, too—something that I’ve argued, and been keenly aware of, since I started driving.

Bell Canada is currently engaged in a lovely kerfuffle with the CRTC (Canada’s rough equivalent of the FTC) for throttling BitTorrent traffic. The CRTC recently ordered Bell Canada to release its bandwidth numbers, and Bell Canada, after some protestations, complied. The little teensy problem with their data, as Ars Technica points out, is that the numbers indicate that any problems Bell Canada is experiencing have nothing whatsoever to do with BitTorrent, and can be trivially and cheaply fixed.

I am shocked—shocked!—to find that gambling is going on in here!

Tim Bray makes the same argument I’ve been making for months on why ISO-certified OOXML won’t actually make a lick of difference. At least the ISO has successfully proved how corruptible they are for all geeks to see, so I suppose the approval process wasn’t totally useless.

According to Ars Technica, parents would rather that their kids’ video games feature decapitations than sex. I don’t really have any commentary to add; just read the whole article.

Hacking isn’t limited to pro-Tibetan groups; the Pentagon notes that cyberattacks against US defense infrastructure has greatly increased in the last few years. Given the sad state of computer security and the increased use of consumer components by the military, I strongly suspect that the average American would be petrified to learn how many national secrets we’ve failed to protect. For the time being, at least ignorance truly is bliss.

I’ve been against software patents for a long time now, but when I read about stories such as satellites being turned into space garbage because the only way to fix the orbit is patented, I’m forced to question the wisdom of patents in general. I love the idea of patents; I’m just dubious that the current implementation actually works. More often than not, I see patents used not to protect a novel invention, but as a legal stick to bludgeon small competitors. That runs completely against the original intention of patents, and leaves us as a country poorer.

If what Wired claims about the recent Office patches is true, then we’re in deep trouble. (And, even if it’s not, the fact that few people would call such claims impossible makes me seriously question the wisdom of holding the Olympics in China.)

One common misconception that I have long since given up trying to correct is that constitutionally guaranteed free speech means that others must provide you a platform from which to spout your views. It does not. You have a right to say what you want; I have a right to tell you that you cannot do so from my lawn. You are responsible for disseminating your views, not me.

So, at a high level, I don’t have a problem with Starbucks’ refusal to print the phrase “Laissez-faire” on their customized gift cards. They are, after all, a private enterprise, and are most definitely not a common carrier—not even of coffee.

Yet I find myself incredibly irritated at Starbucks’ refusal to be honest about what they’re doing. Starbucks claims that they will not print the phrase “Laissez-faire” because of its political message, despite the Wall Street Journal’s clear proof that they will happily print political messages—just not that one. Starbucks should have the guts to explain and defend its own policy. Claiming nonpartisanship while censoring one particular political ideology is dishonest and hypocritical.

I’m reminded of something that happened when I was a freshman at Duke. AQUA Duke, which was the LGBT alliance at the time, painted slogans all over a train bridge that crosses Campus Drive. Some of the more conservative students found the slogans offensive and argued that they should be taken down. The bulk of the student body promptly screamed bloody murder, argued vehemently that the university needed to protected freedom of speech, and demanded that the slogans be allowed to stay. The administration agreed: the university must foster freedom of speech, even when that speech offends some students, in order to encourage free academic discussion. Duke therefore allowed the slogans to stay.

Later that week, two locals came and began preaching fire and brimstone from on top of an actual soapbox on West Campus. They stood and read choice portions of the Bible and told us we were all going to hell. Though the preachers were definitely loudmouthed bigots, they were also calm, orderly, and peaceful, and were actually spawning quite the dialog on the main quad, as many students took the time to let the preachers know what students thought of their message. Had the university actually believed in freedom of speech, these fellows ought to have been allowed to stay. Instead, after about forty-five minutes, university police escorted them off campus. No students protested that their freedom of speech had been abrogated; the only discussion of the event was a short blurb in the Chronicle the next day.

Duke was definitely legally and ethically clear to allow AQUA Duke to decorate the bridge, and to evict the preachers from campus. But to claim that the university protected the former due to free speech, while evicting the latter for what they were preaching, is intellectually dishonest. Duke had—and likely still has—a policy of selective censorship. It should have admitted as much and defended the policy.

I don’t care if Starbucks wants to follow a liberal-politics-only rule for their gift cards. I just think that they should be up-front about what they’re doing and accept the consequences. Anything less is dishonest.

As I indicated curtly in my previous post, I’m a huge proponent of nuclear power.

Though there continues to be substantial political debate whether global warming exists—largely because responding to it would be economically damaging—the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is, and has been for some time, that global warming exists and is man-made. (See the IPCC statement, and a discussion of its significance in Nature—one of the top several scientific journals in the world, and definitely representative of the scientific community—for the most recent affirmations of that claim.) Even for those who refuse to believe in global warming—whether because they believe that the overwhelming majority of scientists and their communities are corrupt, or that scientists are incompetent, or that G-d will prevent climate change—few would argue that reducing pollution, if economically viable, is a worthwhile goal.

Nuclear energy provides a cheap, reliable, highly efficient way of generating electricity right now. Combined with a movement away from fossil fuels, nuclear power would offer cleaner air and cheaper power.

Though many argue nuclear power is unsafe, I believe their fears are largely unfounded. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island are the only two nuclear-power-related accidents we’ve had over the past fifty years, and only Chernobyl had radiation leakage. Given that 443 reactors have been built and are currently operating (not even counting secret and naval reactors) according to the IAEA, fears of nuclear-power apocalypse seem overblown. Nuclear plants, meanwhile, generate no air-based pollutants, in stark contrast to coal plants, which generate relatively high levels of toxic pollutants. Given the choice, I would much rather live close to a nuclear power plant than a coal power plant.

I have far more sympathy with those who argue that countries with nuclear reactors have access to material for nuclear bombs. Sadly, far too many countries today would indeed jump at the chance to create and use nuclear weapons. Though this criticism doesn’t apply to the thirty-two countries who already have nuclear power, and therefore should not be an argument about increasing the use of nuclear power in the United States, I do think that proliferation is a viable concern with spreading the use of nuclear power in the world at large.

Thankfully, we may soon have the best of both worlds: thorium reactors may soon become a reality.

Thorium reactors, unlike uranium reactors, do not produce plutonium (and in fact, will happily, cleanly destroy plutonium as part of its reaction process), and as a result, their waste products remain radioactive for only 500 years. They’re also safer: the thorium fuel cycle is sub-critical, meaning that, in the absence of human intervention, it will burn out quietly, rendering Chernobyls and Three-Mile-Islands are impossible. Thorium is also far more plentiful than uranium, being up to 550 times more plentiful in the Earth’s crust, meaning that such a reactor would be even cheaper to operate. On paper, thorium should be perfect.

Yet thorium has a major flaw: because thorium reactors are sub-critical, they require small amounts of uranium and plutonium to keep the reaction alive, which results in a slight catch-22. Even though such a hybrid plant would be far safer than a pure uranium- or plutonium-based reactor, it accomplishes nothing to assuage anti-proliferation fears.

The good news is that this will change in the very near future. Cosmos Magazine has a great article on two new ways of powering thorium reactors—the second requiring no uranium or plutonium whatsoever, instead using a particle accelerator powered by the reactor itself to keep the reaction running. Such a reactor would offer cheap, clean, powerful fuel to power our world well into the future with minimal environmental or social repercussions.

I fully anticipate a long wait before thorium reactors make an appearance in the United States, but unless fusion power finally proves viable—something I don’t think even ITER will help achieve in the near future—thorium promises to be one of the best options for our future energy needs.

Yeah, that’s about right.

Bloomberg announced today that New York City will be deploying new cops to crime-ridden areas of Brooklyn in an attempt to decrease the city’s crime rate. That’s a really spiffy idea, and I support it, but, personally, I think that maybe stemming the mass exodus of qualified police officers—perhaps by increasing their salaries so they’re at least competitive with nearby cities and towns that have a lower cost-of-living—might be a better idea. In order to finance a pay raise, I propose a $100 fine for anyone on 34th St. walking slower than 2 M.P.H., and a $500 fine for gaggles of teenagers walking more than two abreast on narrow sidewalks. These two changes alone should bring in more than enough not only to increase officer pay, but to ensure the T line actually gets completed if federal funding evaporates again.

As the world gets more insane, I sometimes need a mental break. For example, President Bush covering U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.

Am I bad for liking this version more than the original?

It’s so nice when bad things happen to bad people.

Now if they could just do something about the other idiot in this affair…

A few days ago, I watched Who Killed the Electric Car?, a documentary covering the growth and decline of electric cars in the 90s. The movie focuses on the GM EV1 as its poster child, interviewing several EV1 drivers, sales personnel, and parts manufacturers. Because I had only a dim memory of the EV1, or even of the concept of electric cars being on the road, I found a lot of the documentary fascinating.

To be sure, the documentary has a clear message: the electric car was killed because it was too reliable (hurting dealer’s repair centers) and too damaging to the oil industry, and thus lost the support of an industry-kowtowing government. Yes, the “murder trial” at the end of the movie actually “convicts” consumers, big oil, car companies, government, the California Air Resources Board (which for some oddball reason isn’t part of the government, I suppose), and hydrogen fuel cells, but quite frankly, I don’t think there’s enough evidence in the movie to support that. Consumers in the movie practically want to have conjugal relations with their EV1s, and hydrogen fuel cells don’t even make an appearance until literally three minutes before they’re convicted. CARB and GM are presented throughout the entire movie as alternatively stupid and evil organizations. Despite the closing segment, the viewer knows who’s truly guilty. Not consumers; not the technology; just the car companies and big oil.

I don’t honestly think that’s fair. There were significant problems with electric cars as they existed at the time of an EV1. The biggest problem, and the reason that I can’t see myself buying an EV1 if they still existed, is that the 80-mile range really isn’t sufficient for a lot of Americans. The movie (and electric car proponents in general) like to point out that 80 miles is well above what the average American drives in a day. That’s true. What it’s missing, though, is the distribution curve. When I used to have a car, I drove on average about 20 miles per day during the week, but on weekends, when I would be out with friends or running errands, I could easily put on three times that number. A round-trip to downtown Indianapolis, excluding any other errands I might need to run, was 40 miles all by itself. Add in summer heat, idling in traffic, and a swing by a friend’s house, and you’re looking at trouble. Similarly, when my sister went to college, her average daily driving during the school week probably came out to only a few miles per day, but on weekends, when she came home, she could easily slap 160 miles on the odometer. Many of my friends over the years have had similar driving patterns. It’s the classic focus on mean without remembering to look at the standard deviation.

Of course, there’s no reason that anyone should have to drive such large amounts. The problem here is one of infrastructure. In Europe, certainly, you don’t have to drive nearly as much, nor do you in vast tracts of the Northeast. Instead, the trains take over, providing convenient mass transit for the medium haul. If the country had a decent rail system, I think that a purely electric car would have a much better shot. Since that’s realistically not going to happen in the near future, any successor to the gas-powered automobile is going to have to handle both short and medium distances.

Thankfully, there are green alternatives in the pipe that can do exactly that. The one I’m most enthusiastic about is the Chevy Volt, a re-envisioned hybrid. The Volt, currently just a prototype, has the ability to drive 40 miles off an electric charge, while gracefully falling over to gasoline, biodiesel, or (blech) E85.

Digression: E85 is a completely idiotic concept in the US until we eliminate the sugar tariff. I’m sick and tired of propping up corn farmers making horribly inefficient, environmentally damaging, and unhealthy substitutes for sugar products just because America’s addicted to growing corn. (End digression)

The result is a zero-emissions electric vehicle for daily chores that transparently becomes a traditional automobile for longer trips. I’m extremely enthusiastic about the future of the Chevy Volt concept, and very hopeful that it will enter production in some form very soon. This is what the EV1 should have been to begin with.

I should also point out that pure electric car technology itself has improved tremendously in the last ten years. The Tesla Roadster, for example, is a brand-new electric sports car that has outstanding performance characteristics and manages more than 200 miles on a charge—a distance that I’d argue is nearly sufficient for everyone. It’s only just starting to roll off the assembly line, so we’ll have to wait and see how efficient it is, but I’m hopeful it will do well enough in its first few markets to expand.

Overall, I have to recommend Who Killed the Electric Car?, if only because it does bring a lot of facts to light about electric cars that I doubt most people know. I wish it were slightly more coherent in its ending, but even with it, I think it’s a good watch.

From Slashdot, which is slowly redeeming itself, comes a link to Microsoft admitting that it bribed members of the Swedish ISO committee to vote for OOXML. Unsurprisingly, the Swedish ISO committee just voided its own vote. Due to time crunch, they will not be casting a vote at all in the Open XML ratification process.

I find it depressing but predictable that I’m unsurprised.

I think that the Wall Street Journal does a fairly good job covering technology from a consumer’s perspective, but I feel that they struggle whenever they try to cover more industry-focused issues, making outright mistakes and failing to understand what in the debate is actually important, which leads them to follow up (or fail to) on the wrong points. Today was no exception: in an article entitled “‘Office’ Wars,” they attempted to cover the politics revolving around Microsoft’s efforts to get their Open XML adopted as an ISO standard. The mistakes began cropping up depressingly early in the article:

To gain approval as an international standard, Microsoft had to bare the code that undergirds the Office file format, called Open XML.

Um, no. Microsoft created a brand-new file format called Open XML that is a totally different format from the ubiquitous DOC format. They then published a 5000-page specification of its supposed operation that is incomplete and inconsistent with their own Open XML implementation, which they have not had to lay bare. This not-actually-implemented-as-specified Open XML specification is the one Microsoft is trying to ram down everyone’s throats.

Jean Paoli, one of Microsoft’s top standards experts, says the company wants Open XML adopted as a standard to encourage rivals to use its format, not squelch interoperability. He points out that other vendors, including Apple Inc., are adopting it.

Apple supports reading an extremely limited subset of Open XML in TextEdit in its upcoming Mac OS X Leopard. The most recent version of Pages can also import a slightly larger subset of Open XML, but, so far as I know, can’t write it back out. Neither Pages nor TextEdit use Open XML as their native formats. I do not think that Apple’s behavior can honestly be construed as “adopting [Open XML].”

He says IBM is stirring up opposition to Open XML’s gaining approval from the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, to protect its Lotus Notes office suite, which uses the rival format Open Document.

Probably partially true, in the sense that Lotus Notes bundles a version of the open-source OpenOffice, which uses ODF as its native format, but since there actually are several word processors that work natively with ODF, I’m hazy how this could be construed to protect Lotus Notes. In fact, given that Lotus Notes used to ally itself with SmartSuite, which had a proprietary file format, I think this actually opens up Notes to more competition. Given that there are no word processors other than Word that support Open XML, I think Microsoft’s claim applies far more strongly against itself.

Open Document is already an ISO standard, but Microsoft says there’s room enough for more than one document standard.

Why? “Just because” isn’t a good enough reason. ODF has already been standardized for some time and has broad industry support. Only Microsoft Office uses something superficially resembling Open XML. This strikes me as a hilarious extrapolation of the old joke, “The only problem with standards is that there are so many to chose from.”

In addition, Mr. Robertson said, the technical committees should include lots of voices—and that means some on Microsoft’s side. “Where you find expansion in the committees, you will find expansion on both sides,” he said. “That’s OK because it represents the community a whole lot better.”

This is the “all ideas are equally valid” fallacy. If we are going to have a debate on whether we should require, by law, that people dress up in purple chicken suits and make monkey noises at 3 PM on the second Thursday of the month, no one would be particularly surprised if a committee were completely biased against the idea. Even if I tripled the size of the committee, having a purple chicken suit proponent likely would actually make the committee less representative, since the position would then be over-represented.

We have a similar situation with Microsoft’s Open XML. IBM, Sun, RedHat, Novell, Canonical, and Google, among others, support ODF. So far as I know, the only major company backing OOXML is Microsoft. Why does it follow that we should expect roughly equal numbers of OOXML proponents and detractors on any given committee?

I appreciate that the WSJ has recognized that the OOXML-ODF debate is an important one, and I’m glad that they’ll be increasing public awareness of it, but I still wish that they’d done a better job covering what’s actually going on. This is a case where both sides are not created equal, and fair reporting probably should not treat Microsoft as if they have equal merit.

Ars Technica reports that used CDs are going to be subject to waiting periods and resale restrictions in Florida, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and Utah. Ken Fisher writes:

In Florida, Utah, and soon in Rhode Island and Wisconsin, selling your used CDs to the local record joint will be more scrutinized than then getting a driver’s license in those states. For retailers in Florida, for instance, there’s a “waiting period” statue that prohibits them from selling used CDs that they’ve acquired until 30 days have passed. Furthermore, the Florida law disallows stores from providing anything but store credit for used CDs.

Billboard also has the story. For any of my old Duke Moot Court buddies who can’t quite believe this is happening, you can read Utah’s version of the bill. The bill begins by redefining pawn brokers to include any shops that sell secondhand merchandise (13-32a-102), and then enumerates what must be recorded at the time of transaction. To whit:

(1) Every pawnbroker or secondhand merchandise dealer shall keep a register of each article of property a person pawns or sells to the pawnbroker or secondhand merchandise dealer, except as provided in Subsection 13-32a-102 (17)(b) regarding secondhand merchandise dealers. Every pawn and secondhand business owner or operator, or his employee, shall enter the following information regarding every article pawned or sold to the owner or employee:

• (a) the date and time of the transaction;
• (b) the pawn transaction ticket number, if the article is pawned;
• (c) the date by which the article must be redeemed;
• (d) the following information regarding the person who pawns or sells the article:
  • (i) the person’s name, residence address, and date of birth;
  • (ii) the number of the driver license or other form of positive identification presented by the person, and notations of discrepancies if the person’s physical description, including gender, height, weight, race, age, hair color, and eye color, does not correspond with identification provided by the person;
  • (iii) the person’s signature; and
  • (iv) a legible fingerprint of the person’s right thumb, or if the right thumb cannot be fingerprinted, a legible fingerprint of the person with a written notation identifying the fingerprint and the reason why the thumb print was unavailable;
• (e) the amount loaned on or paid for the article, or the article for which it was traded;
• (f) the identification of the pawn or secondhand business owner or the employee, whoever is making the register entry; and
• (g) an accurate description of the article of property, including available identifying s such as:
  • (i) names, brand names, numbers, serial numbers, model numbers, color, facturers’ names, and size;
  • (ii) metallic composition, and any jewels, stones, or glass;

This law is completely asinine, inexcusable, and downright disgusting. It impedes the free market, effectively criminalizes what ought to be completely legal behavior, and has absolutely no positive benefit whatsoever to anyone except the recording industry umbrella organizations. Get this information onto the mainstream media so that people can start understanding what the RIAA actually stands for.

When I first started bitquabit, I wanted it to be strictly a technology blog. When people wanted to read something about Squeak or db4objects or Copilot, they could come here. When they wanted to read someone writing a meandering essay on farm subsidies and ethanol, they could go somewhere else.

That position is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. On the one hand, technology is inextricably tied to certain political agendas that, I feel, must constantly be discussed—patents and copyright chief among them, but also such topics as freedom of speech or the ethics of invention. Yet these topics are, well, boring, because basically every single prominent tech blogger has exactly the same position on these issues: patents are too broad, last too long, insufficiently investigated for prior art by the USPTO, and, at least in computing, do far more harm than good; copyright is great, but in its current forms last too long, fails in its original purpose, and violates the Constitution; and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and its siblings abroad are blatantly unconstitutional due to their de facto destruction of fair use, stifle free speech, and should be at best struck down and at worst kept from spreading to more countries. Because these positions are so widespread, they’re neither controversial nor insightful. Others expound these arguments far better than I and are more up-to-date on the latest goings-on in the beltway. In short, though these topics may be relevant, they are also well-covered and therefore not issues I feel compelled to discuss here.

That leaves The Ugly Topics—the topics nominally only distantly related to technology. Topics like the war, Sarkozy’s election, the heightening tensions in the last month in Israel, the rapidly intensifying atheist-believer debate, and global climate change. These topics, charged though they may be, have profound impacts on technology. Wars divert funding from general science and research, yet fuel technological innovation—provided that the technologies in question are usable for waging war. Sarkozy happens to be sympathetic to digital rights management software and does not seem to support the EU’s drive to force Microsoft to open its networking protocols and file formats. Israel is a miniature Silicon Valley and a major exporter of cryptography and encryption software. The atheist-believer debate has profound impact for artificial intelligence and, indeed, the purpose and future use of technology in general. Global climate change drives ever-more-powerful computing clusters in an attempt to simulate weather patterns, spurs green buildings and high-efficiency solar cells, and may usher in the return of nuclear power. Even if we ignore all of their greater significance, the topics are still relevant.

The problem, of course, is that I cannot discuss just the technology side. Some readers are already fuming that I can touch on the war and step right past all the people dying, others are annoyed that I’m ignoring the “interesting” parts of Sarkozy’s politics, and my good friends, who are well aware of my fascination with religion, are curious why I’ve never touched a single religious topic on this blog. These issues are all so big that I have to discuss parts of them that have nothing to do with technology if I want to cover their technological aspects at all. Yet by attempting to address any of these topics, I will divide my audience.

If I want to speak on these topics, yet doing so costs me readers who are interested in what I have to say on technology, does that make addressing these topics “bad”? Does my hesitancy, however brief, to speak my mind and lose those readers make me a coward? If I honestly care more for this particular blog to reach a technical audience than a political one, does that change the answer? If it did, would the answer change again if I were to split bitquabit into a personal blog and technical blog?

Where is the dividing line?