germany 3

In October 1997, Ram, my manager at IBM, strolled over to my desk and asked if I would like to visit the US. I’d never been there before. The impulse was to say “Yes”. But… I’d written the CAT exam once before. Didn’t get through. Applied once again. But thanks to my diligence, I’d given the wrong residence address, and never got my admission card, and didn’t bother following it up. This would be my third “attempt”. And I didn’t want to goof it up again. (I didn’t get through that one either, as it turned out.) ...

Now Google is complying with local laws by eliminating anti-Semetic sites from their French (google.fr) and German (google.de) sites. These sites still remain accessible through google.com, though. In the long run, I don’t think this state of affairs will continue. I hope we have one law across the world, at least where the Net is concerned. But more likely is an agreement on law guidelines, something like the WTO. Less likely and desirable is where tracking surfers’ country of origin becomes reliable. ...

After telling Yahoo to remove Nazi memorabilia from its auction site, France is now considering taxing computers and other recording devices to compensate artists for piracy. I mean, Paris and art is all fine, but this is crazy! And Germany’s apparantly already done this.