A product is usually created to improve people's lives; otherwise, why buy it? I'm no genius, but I am an American, and gosh-darnit, I consume, so I know what I'm talking about.

The guard rails on a highway may restrict some folks from driving the way they want, but those rules mostly end up saving the lives of those other drivers who understand that living in a society means behaving in a commonly beneficial way.

Let me go out on a limb and suggest that those who see hints of a new class ideology developing around information technology are not necessarily wild-eyed. "Bit-twiddlers" are neither exactly proletariat nor bourgeoisie. They may not own the means of production in the sense that Marx argued, but they certainly do have significantly control over those means, in a more profound way than the term "symbols analysts" or "knowledge workers" captures. As a rough generalization, they value science and technological problem-solving elegance equally at least with profit.

I tend to be very relaxed on stage, but the nerves have to come out somehow.

What's hard, it seems, is living up to the words spoken by Jesus Christ, who preached naught but love and mercy and justice and humility.

Anyone who thinks they stand apart from society and defies all which govern its existence has less in common with the lone wolf patriot standing up to dystopic forces of oppression - a myth - and more in common with the disease known as cancer - a harsh reality.

We fight wars from progressively great heights and distances, the blessings of technology steadily removing the personal human element from what was historically an extremely personal experience.