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[In June 2015, I gave a commencement address to the graduating class of High Mowing School in New Hampshire. I wrote many drafts for the talk, all toward extemporizing the final thing. My experience with Linux and open-source hackers had an influence on it and gets credit as well. That's why I'm sharing it here.—Doc] more>>

Whatever your opinions about Do Not Track, set them aside for a minute and just look at what the words say and who says them. Individuals—the people we call "users" (you know, like with drugs)—are the ones saying it. In grammatical terms, "do not track" is spoken in the first person. more>>

The history of computing can be traced by the popular buzzwords of the day. In fact, at some point we should run a contest where everyone submits their 5 all-time favorite computer industry buzzwords. There have been dumb terminals, smart terminals, client server, thin client, peer-to-peer, virtualization, containers, cloud, paas, saas, iaas…the list, and the acronyms stretch to the horizon. more>>

Sometimes a gift just falls in your lap. This month, it came in the form of an e-mail out of the blue from Jared Nielsen, one of two brothers (the other is J.R. Nielsen) who created The Hello World Program, "an educational web series making computer science fun and accessible to all". more>>

I'm writing this in a hotel room entered through two doors. The hall door is the normal kind: you stick a card in a slot, a light turns green, and the door unlocks. The inner one is three inches thick, has no lock and serves a single purpose: protection from an explosion. more>>

A friend who works in one of the big banks recently told me that any new-fangled approach to identity and payments is going to have a hard time getting traction while credit cards continue to work as well as they do. "Using credit cards is too easy, too normal, too entrenched in Business As Usual", he said. They used to say the same thing about Windows. more>>

In mobile we are losing the free world called the Web and the Net. How do we save it? more>>