...never really given much thought to reconciling (Score 1)

mlc's original statement addresses the issue of reconciliation. He/she asks us to accept it as truth that the author is involved in social justice projects, and that the author is also a geek. The issue of computer companies' ethical behavior is mentioned, but is secondary, it seems to me, to the essential issue of reconciliation. One has to unfold many layers of oneself far beyond just what criteria to employ when buying a computer to get at the core of what it means to be a geek and to be socially responsible. The Wall Street side of the corporate universe is, and has an obligation to be amoral. Corporations want their stock's value to appreciate, but there's much more to being a corporate persona than what Wall Street sees and knows about you. And all corporations are more or less moral in their treatment of employees, of consumers, of managers, of geographical neighbors, as well as of their stockholders. But, again, the issue is reconciliation, which must start in the heart of the individual (I claim, at the risk of sounding didactic and opinionated.) The reason why this may not be an easy effort is because of this "new economy" stuff, which admits that some people must be displaced from their jobs as computers make the survivors more efficient, and eliminate other tasks altogether. So, looking at the creation of jobs in exotic places where children or others who have never worked before now have jobs misses the point. Just as some jobs that are being made obsolete by computers were once vital and essential to the survival of the company, so OUR jobs can become obsolete, or can be arbitrarily described as obsolete, if the so called "profession" of management is not required to bring to the workplace the same knowledge which the managed employees possess. This discussion points to a more profound question about what is education and who is it that is being educated? I'd like to think that the engineering classroom has not been violated or corrupted by the monopolistic mentality which Microsoft has infused into our culture, but this is not the case. Unfortunately, many engineering professors aspire today to be better businessmen, and to form their careers after the medical doctor model of an applied scientist. The reason being that that's where godlike power is most intensely concentrated. This is very dangerous as it completely dismisses the notion that the classroom should be an environment where learning occurs by open discussion. It is not true that all the code that's ever going to be written has been written, for instance, and that a computer scientist need only figure out new ways to manipulate what's there. What we ought to be doing now is studying computer languages in much the same way that a linguist studies spoken languages. With an eye to origins, history, and development, and an ear for patterns of universality and diversity. In the realm of hardware, we need to form corporate partnerships which eliminate wasteful duplication of efforts, but which also preserve various technical styles of reaching similar goals. I cannot say enough about this in this small space. The pace of technological development must be slowed. For that reason I think the breakup of Microsoft is both necessary and good. Wall Street has its place, but it has no place in driving technological development. The responsibility for that lies in the hands of engineers and so-called "geeks," who are the creative people whose ideas, and whose knowledge is currency in its purest form. Traders (except for the wisest among them) don't give a damn about engineers. When engineers are given so much work to do that they never have time for speculative or playful thought their judgement becomes perverted, and colossal mistakes are made like the one which defrauded Sun Microsystems and Netscape in the name of giving customers the Internet Explorer which they "really wanted" all along. If you call yourself a geek and fail to see that Wall Street would install a dictator in office of the President of the United States if granted that opportunity, then there's no chance that you will ever reconcile being a geek with being socially responsible. Every company has some employees who are gamblers. And some among those gamblers are compulsive gamblers. And the entrepreneurial spirit requires that stockholders must be willing to take certain calculated risks. But the rewarding of employees with stock options doesn't just create some very wealthy employees, it also instills in all of us the notion that real life is portrayed pretty accurately in the casino atmosphere of Las Vegas. Computer logic is a powerful tool, and an area of study which is worthy of a lifetime of inquiry, but there are many other brands of logic besides computer logic, and we need right away to get back to where the humans are putting the logic into the computers, and not the other way around. We need to make damn sure that we are not knowingly designing computers and computer environments which will be used as weapons against innocent hard working people, because the weapons will most assuredly be turned against us by a very angry younger generation if we do not put our priorities back into focus.