A few days ago I was flying back from a vacation in Austria. On the first leg of the journey home, from Vienna to London, I flew on British Airways and, walking on to the plane picked up a couple of British Sunday Newspapers. When reading “The Sunday Telegraph”, evidently a respected paper, I was floored by the advertisement on page 12 of the main news section. The ad was placed by SPURT, which is an advocacy group supporting “unlimited aviation growth”. It had a picture of the CEO, and obviously was lobbying for airport …

Sergey Brin and Larry Page are of course the founders of Google.  That fact, in and of itself would be enough to respect them and praise them.  Simply based on influence, Google has become practically oracular in today’s world.  Not since the oracle of Delphi stood astride the rift in the ground has something had such power of affecting perception of the present and the future.  At least sometimes it feels that way.

When Sergey and Larry — and I use their first names with great respect, as when said together everyone knows who is being discussed — speak, a whole …

This week in New York I attended the OMMA Conference, produced by Media Post.  The acronym stands for On-line Media, Marketing & Advertising.  Basically this was a gathering of those who work in the Internet space and focus on delivering marketing messages to people.  The title of the conference was “The Internet:  Back on Speed”, which of course references the fact that we are now in the Internet 2.0 stage of development when broadband and video have started to deliver the promise of the Internet that was first glimpsed in the late 1990s before the bubble burst on …

In the last half of the twentieth century many of the major social, political and cultural trends in the United States started in California.  The worship of the car and the surrounding car culture, the glorification of suburbia via sitcoms, surfing, music, the drug and counter-culture,  free speech and student protest, progressive public higher education, the Silicon Valley explosion of technological innovation, and of course, right turn on red.  Later the negative issues of traffic gridlock, illegal immigration, brown outs and state budget deficits started first in California.  Now, on one of the most fundamentally important issues of the day …