If bin Laden is in fact publicly killed, then the US military will find itself standing around with its hands in its pockets, wondering what's supposed to come next.

The future is a process, not a destination. Richard Stallman is a guy my age. I sympathize with Richard rather more than I sympathize with Richard's open-source ideas, but the guy's a mortal human being and so is his social movement. Open-source is a means of production.

You don't get to cut that chain of evidence and start over. You're always going to be pursued by your data shadow, which is forming from thousands and thousands of little leaks and tributaries of information.

Competence doesn't seem like a big deal until you are forced to realize that your own government has none.

Maybe we're about to radically change the operating system of the human condition. If so, then this would be a really good time to make backups of our civilization.

I know that the human condition will be radically changed through technical means. Much of this change will be painful, monstrous and horrible. Most mutations are disgusting failures, most experiments are failures. I accept this and I don't find it frightening.

Everybody has a different Internet.