com dot Jankowski Tito + DIYbio

“On the contrary, many young people in the late 1960s saw computers as something evil, part of a
technological conspiracy where the rich and powerful used the computer’s might against the poor
and powerless. This attitude was not limited to students protesting, among other things, the now
exploding Vietnam war (a conflict fought in part by American computers). The machines which
stood at the soul of hackerism were also loathed by millions of common, patriotic citizens who saw
computers as a dehumanizing factor in society. Every time an inaccurate bill arrived at a home, and
the recipient’s attempts to set it right wound up in a frustrating round of calls usually leading to an
explanation that “the computer did it,” and only herculean human effort could erase the digital blot
the popular contempt toward computers grew. Hackers, of course, attributed those slipups to the
brain-damaged, bureaucratic, batch-processed mentality of IBM. Didn’t people understand that the
Hacker Ethic would eliminate those abuses by encouraging people to fix bugs like thousand-dollar
electric bills? But in the public mind there was no distinction between the programmers of Hulking
Giants and the AI lab denizens of the sleek, interactive PDP-6. And in that public mind all computer
programmers, hackers or not, were seen either as wild-haired mad scientists plotting the destruction
of the world or as pasty-skinned, glassy-eyed automatons, repeating wooden phrases in dull
monotones while planning the next foray into technological big-brotherism.”

Good book, you can buy it here on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Levy/dp/0141000511/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264542783&sr=8-2

back in california with stamps for japan, india, and thailand on my passport