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God Is My Palm Pilot
Is technology the tool of the devil? The primrose path to a better life? Or something in between?
Bowling Outside the Lines
'If Buddhism helps them, so be it, but maybe they just need to be better Christians or better Jews.'
What Does It Mean to Be Human?
Within the next 20 years, we'll see the evolving convergence of humans and machines.
A Fig Tree of One's Own
Grameen Bank operates beyond the bottom line to benefit those at the bottom of the line.
I Crave Control
In late January, Norwegian police raided the home of a 16-year-old student who rattled the U.S. movie industry with a software program he co-authored that breaks the security code on DVDs, the latest generation of video players. Jon Johansen, who hails from Larvik, Norway, had posted the program on his father’s company Web site, and it quickly spread like wildfire across the Internet. The son and his father, Per Johansen, face up to three years in prison and stiff fines if convicted.
Only one week earlier a freshly launched Canadian Web site called iCraveTV was hit with strong legal action initiated by an alliance of U.S.-based movie studios, TV networks, and sports leagues. iCraveTV is one of the first Web sites to broadcast complete TV signals over the Internet, showing uncut, uninterrupted streams of 17 broadcast television stations from the United States and Canada.
Under Canadian law, such rebroadcasting is apparently legal, at least for cable and satellite broadcasters. iCraveTV claims the Net is just like cable and that it, too, should have the right to offer TV. As far as the U.S. broadcasters are concerned, it’s blatant copyright infringement, and they aimed to make a legal example of iCraveTV to dissuade copycats. In late February iCraveTV settled the lawsuit by agreeing to stop rebroadcasting TV programming, at least for the time being.
"This kind of cyberspace stealing must be stopped, wherever it occurs, because it violates the principles of U.S. copyright law," Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) chief executive Jack Valenti said following the iCraveTV lawsuit, a message he repeated nearly verbatim a week after Johansen’s arrest.
What's Your Price?
Ten principles for saving a corporate soul---and (who knows?) maybe your own.
Grounding the Ivory Tower
Spinning Stories: Visions
Reflections from a teller of tales. An Interview with Tom Winton
A Follower of Jesus
The chief of El Salvador's national police stares intently across the table. Though the mere mention of the colonel's name strikes fear into the heart of many a Salvadoran activist, at this particular moment he is looking rather perplexed and unsure of himself. For seated on the other side of the table is Athol Gill, who, having just introduced himself as a Bible professor from Australia, continues to explain that he has traveled from the other side of the globe to find out why the national police have tortured and imprisoned a local Baptist pastor.
The colonel's confidence waxes while announcing that the pastor is a communist, then wanes again as the calm Aussie asks if serving the poor is always a crime in El Salvador. By the end of the hour, the colonel is signing a declaration that the Salvadoran Baptist community will be permitted to continue its ministry with the poor without fear of reprisal.
As incredible as it may seem in view of the final result, only two hours before Athol and I had sat in a hotel room in San Salvador with virtually no idea what we might say to the colonel. We had hopped on a plane and headed directly for El Salvador within days of hearing of the arrest and brutal treatment of the pastor. Yet that was the easy part. Now we were faced with the daunting task of how, with mere wit and moral suasion at our disposal, to battle forces that were armed with arrogance and impunity.
We could only come up with one strategy: Athol would negotiate with the colonel while I would take my time translating messages between them, thus buying Athol precious time to think on his feet. As we then looked at each other nervously, he remarked with a wily smile, "We will make the road as we walk it."