This medium is the answer to the threat, and the values of this medium will determine how we answer the threat, just as the values of TV determined how we answered the 1960s, or radio and movies answered the 1930s.
This bill is nonsense and McCain, who once made some sense on Internet issues, knows it. He carefully introduced it just before the 109th Congress adjourned. Assuming Sen. Tim Johnson recovers, it is unlikely to get any hearing whatsoever from the 110th Congress.
I would argue, in fact, that Apple is now starting to take the desktop market share Linux was long-expected to grab, despite its proprietary nature. That's again because Apple sees the PC as a consumer electronics product, not as a computing product. The distribution channels now agree with it.
All these views of freedom, in the end, come back to the Internet. The Internet isn't a place or a process but a protocol. It's a way in which you can connect computers. It does not perfect man. It doesn't change man at all. It merely gives man another way to ask these old questions, another forum in which to battle them out.
A lot of "netroots" bloggers express constant consternation over this, but it's a very typical historical pattern. The pattern is the proof these thinkers are on the right track. A Thesis in its last days is believed by almost everyone, is treated as inviolate, even though it has become useless, refusing to even see the coming crisis, let alone a potential solution.
For the rest of my life, and your life, and the lives our children's childrens' children, any attempt by any American President to exert moral authority, to state right against wrong, to speak truth to power, will be dealt with summarily in the world's court of public opinion, with one word. Bush.
The aim of A-Tech Review is to become a virtual "trade paper" for what is variously called assistive technology, adaptive technology and accessibility technology. That means everything from the awkward-looking "mouse" some use when they have carpal-tunnel syndrome, to screens and interfaces that help the visually-impaired, to entire systems enabling quadriplegics to access a page like this. And everything in between. That's the beat.
The next crisis is so immense that we are doing everything possible to avoid looking at it. The harbinger, the destruction of a major American city, and its descent into barbarism, a “politics” that increasingly looks African in its viciousness and tribalism , with calls for reform unheard and only grasping for power understood – this is our future. This is what we must be fighting to avoid.
Trauma is usually what sets a year in your mind and your heart. And when you know where in time that trauma comes from you have a better chance of dealing with it, either turning them to your side or taking them out of politics altogether.
Always On is a "canary in the cold mine" for American technology generally. A decade ago, two decades ago, three decades ago, logical concept extensions like this would have been quickly seized by an army of hobbyists and entrepreneurs. Now those lower rungs on the innovation ladder are gone.
