When I first joined Google in October of 2005, I was warned that I shouldn’t be offended if people were doing their e-mails while a meeting was going on.
Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.
History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to ‘protect’ their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression and other freedoms outlined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.
Yet in all those cases I finally steeled myself to seize the opportunity, and find a way to muddle through and eventually conclude that I had, in fact, chosen the right path, as risky as it seemed at the time.
Internet and government is Topic A in every nation, all around the world. There is the question of getting the Internet built. That involves persuading government to have regulatory policies. It involves new technology to bring the Internet to rural places.
In 1973, the only cryptographic technology we could get our hands on was classified.
There was something amazingly enticing about programming.
Information flow is what the Internet is about. Information sharing is power. If you don’t share your ideas, smart people can’t do anything about them, and you’ll remain anonymous and powerless.
We all know the Internet didn’t explode until it became a commercial enterprise. Space communication will probably have the same characteristic.
The Internet lives where anyone can access it.
At some point, you can’t lift this boulder with just your own strength. And if you find that you need to move bigger and bigger boulders up hills, you will need more and more help.
Although I’ve had several major career changes, I was extremely hesitant about making some of them.
Energy, health care and education are just three examples of areas in which information and information management are critically important. How are we using our energy? What appliances in homes or business are consuming the most energy? When do they consume it? Can the load be shifted? How efficient are these devices?
We live in a very complex world.
You should know that I’ve been hearing-impaired, not quite since birth, but I’ve been wearing hearing aids since I was 13, so I’m very conscious of the difficulty of voice communication.
There’s a tremendous amount of energy in Japan and, increasingly, in China.
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