It's hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don't think it's necessarily broader or smarter.
Without competition, the spectacular development of technology that we have seen in the last one hundred years in this country would not have happened.
Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.
I can't get my head around the fact that the technology of the first two movies, which are forty years prior to Star Wars, is so much better than any technology they had in Star Wars!
So as I look at transitioning to the communication platforms of the future, I see that the beauty of Internet protocols is you get the separation of the layers between service and technology.
Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.
The respect for human rights, essential if we are to use technology wisely, is not something alien that must be grafted onto science. On the contrary, it is integral to science, as also to scholarship in general.
I knew from the beginning that privacy was going to be a huge issue, especially with regard to applying Total Information Awareness in counterterrorism. Because if the technology development was successful, a logical place to apply it was inside the United States.
