Beyond the hype, style, and speculation, the truth is that the iPad is really just another tablet device. A really big PDA, where a touchscreen does what a laptop's keyboard used to do.

I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.

Open source is a beautiful way of collaborating; but what's happening on the free Internet is more akin to the 'crowdsourcing' of journalists and other content creators by advertisers who no longer have to pay them - only the search engines that parse their articles.

In the industrial age and in analog clocks, a minute is some portion of an hour which is some portion of a day. You know, in the digital age, a minute is just a number. It's just 3:23. It's almost this absolute duration that doesn't have a connection to where the sun is or where our day is.

Time has always been used against us on a certain level. The invention of the clock made us accountable to the employer, gave us a standard measure and stopwatch management, and it also led to the requirement of interest-bearing currency to grow over time, the requirement of the expansion of our economy.

As a professional journalist who nonetheless champions a 'people's' Internet, I am happy to compete against the thousands of amateur bloggers out there reporting and commenting on the same stories I do.

Global warming, you don't win it. It's this weird steady-state issue that's going to be with us for a few thousand years.