According to the IMF, the year 1981, when Hosni Mubarak took power, the average Egyptian citizen lived on $587 per year (measured in 2011 US dollars). Ten years later, in 1991, I was born and the average Egyptian lived on $869 per year. Ten years later, that number had grown to $1461, and the last year for which the IMF has data is 2007, with a per capita income of $1604 dollars per year. If we extend the average growth rate of 3.94% per annum to the present, the best estimate I can figure of the GDP today is about $1872 per capita. The long and short of this is that monetary standard of living has more than tripled under Mubarak.

According to the Egypt State Information Service, male life expectancy in Egypt has risen steadily, from 58.1 years in 1981, to 69.2 years in 2005. In the same time period, female life expectancy has risen from 60.6 to 73.6 years. If you don’t want to take data from the Egyptian government, tradingeconomics.com has a data set which is only trivially different, registering a male rise in life expectancy from 56.03 years to 67.84 years in 2005 and 68.41 in 2008 — figures which, while a year or two lower, still indicate that lifespans in Egypt were raised by more than a dozen years during the Mubarak regime(s).

And Google-compiled data from the World Bank shows that Hosni Mubarak took over when the infant mortality rate was 120 per 1000 live births, while the infant mortality rate two years ago — the latest data available on the graph — is 18 per 1000 live birth. Less than one-sixth as many babies are dying at the end of Mubarak’s reign than at the beginning.

Whatever one has to say about Hosni Mubarak, let no one say that Egypt stagnated in poverty under him.

So all Google did was hear and record what any Tom, Dick, of Harry walking through public space could easily hear and record.  Rather like if a video I made of the OSU campus happened to catch background sounds.  So although maybe it’s not classy to record it, the stuff is all public.  And Google listening is the worst of your worries if you do your business over unencrypted wi-fi.

Relax, folks.  A careful look at this story will show that Google isn’t who we should be worried about.  The only reason this even became a big story is because the German government made a big fuss about ridiculously non-threatening “snooping” as a way to sway public opinion toward feeling that the relatively free exchange of ideas and data on the internet is threatening and must be regulated by government.

But just as the solution to eavesdropping isn’t government inspections but rather talking quietly or sealing your message in an envelope, so also the answer isn’t paranoid regulation of Google, but rather using the easily available and widely used technology of encrypted networks.

That’s Rupert Murdoch’s take on web-based news.  For those who don’t know, Rupert Murdoch is a marketing mogul.  His understanding of how the news game works has swelled his net worth to approximately $4 billion.

Murdoch is planning to put up a pay wall around the online content of his newspapers.  Fair enough.  It may be that his profits will be helped by making people buy his content.  On the other hand, it may just hand over a greater market share to others.

What is very strange, though, is his feeling that Google and Microsoft are somehow robbing him of his profits.    It’s a strange thing for someone to post his newspaper content freely online and then be surprised when search engines point people toward that content.  Google’s not taking his stuff.  He been giving the newspaper content away.

Further, it seems that he definitely does not comprehend the incredible scope of the internet.  There are countless sites with news of all sorts on them.  It is possible that if Murdoch and other media folks can consistently generate content that a significant number of people find superior, they will pay for that content.

But thinking that walling off information will leave readers with nowhere else to go is just silly.  As more and more people wall off their information behind pay walls, the sites which keep their content free will receive more and more visitors, raising their advertizing revenues.

So any attempt by a news group to wall off their content will simply make providing free content more profitable for other groups.  Murdoch’s analysis ignores this.  News corporations just don’t have the necessary economic incentives to leave us with ‘nowhere else to go.’

Murdoch has made the most common mistake of economics:  basing his ideas on the unspoken assumption that an entire sector acts in unity, and not competition.  It’s the same horrifically flawed assumption that gave us Marxism–a class-warfare based system that assumed that employers weren’t competing against one another.

I was shocked to find an article I wrote on a completely unrelated topic showing up so on the search. So, um, thanks, Google.

Now, for each subject one might search for, there might be millions of pages, some more helpful to the average searcher and others not so helpful.  And so Joe’s program ranks all the pages on each subject in order of their helpfulness–starting from the most helpful to the least.

Now, Joe’s lists become quite popular, and a many people throughout the world, wanting to find pages, go first to Joe’s list for their search.  What this means is that Joe’s opinion of which sites are most helpful has a real influence on what information people use.

Now suppose that some people who owned their own websites and felt themselves quite important decided to complain to the government about Joe.  “Mister Government,” they say,”Joe’s lists don’t accurately show just how important our sites are.  Make him change the way he makes his lists.”

Now, Joe replies, “That’s ridiculous!  This list reflects what I feel people want to know when they’re looking for information.  My list has become quite popular and I’m millions of websites would like to be higher up on my rankings.  But I can’t please everyone.  If people don’t like the way my lists work, they can make their own lists.  I don’t make anyone come to my site.”

The wise path for a government would be to listen to Joe and leave him alone, ignoring the egos of those whine about Joe’s lists.  Let them make their own lists.

But the shocking thing is that this story’s true, except that instead of Joe, legal action is being taken against Google in this very way.

If you can’t believe this sort of thing would actually happen in this world, read this story.  Crazy.

But for the last two days, google.com has been the one website which will not load.  All others work fine.

I don’t like Yahoo because it’s messy.

So I’m using Bing now.  Although it’s not quite as clean as I’d like, it can do for me all the things google used to.  Bye bye, Google.

Some will whine that it’s just another annoying competitor in the world of social networking.  I mean, we’ve all got facebook already, so why would we want another?

Others will shiver in fear at the increasing size of Google, worrying that it is too large a company and that it has sinister plans for world domination.

But I’m glad to that Google’s taking on the social networking scene, for a number of reasons.  First, it’s competition.  There’s nothing like competition for making things get better.  And besides, without effective competition, facebook is pretty much in complete control of the networking market.

But beyond my economic feelings about the issue, let’s remember what makes google great:  unannoyingness and relevancy.  Google doesn’t constantly flash annoying images at you.  Facebook does.  Facebook floods us with irrelevant data and get our personal data hacked into all the time.  Google made it’s mark by providing secure programs and weeding out data we don’t want.

And most important of all–openness.  Google is one of the leading companies in the world for the promotion of open-source software.  And th beauty of open software standards is that they allow various programs to overlap, meaning that eventually we could have a set of various interacting programs that all compete for a place in a growing web composed of people working with a decentralized set of social networking tools.

And that won’t crash as often, or be as susceptible to attack.

I like it.  Hopefully we’ll soon all be outside of the closed box of facebook soon.

For anyone who might be reading along and wonder why I have the “No Copyright” page on my site, it’s because although I’m not actively campaigning for the end of copyright law, I definitely think that it’s beneficial for some types of information to be open:  free for use, copying, and distribution by all.  This concept of openness goes further than just making stuff available on the internet:  the concept, although not fully ironed out, includes ideas about availability, accessibility of sources, etc.  It is, in the best sense of the word “anarchy,” an informational anarchy characterized by collaboration, availability, and free choice.

Google is one of the pioneers of the open concept, and has used it to rapidly create one of the most effective massive companies in the world.  They’re still struggling through the concept of openness, and recently they’ve published on a post on their blog about “the meaning of open.”  If you’re interested in the concept of open software/standards/information, it’s a worthwhile read.

The open concept is also behind such useful and successful sites as Wikipedia, WordPress, OpenOffice.org, Open Library, Google Books, GNU, Creative Commons, Ubuntu, Mozilla, and others.  If you are unfamiliar with any of those sites, I encourage you to take a look at their websites.  These sites, along with many others, are changing the way information is used and distributed throughout the world, the end result being that it learning and using computers is more cost-efficient than ever before.

This site exists because I see the great things that openness is doing for students and computer users throughout the world, and I want to help move the Christian community towards the ability to reap the benefits of openness as well.  And why should we not.  Openness fits well with the ethos of the gospel:  “Freely you have received;  freely give.”  The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, which is smaller than all the herbs of the field.  But when it is growns, it becomes a tree, and is larger than all the shrubs, and the birds of the sky come and roost in its branches.

On this site, I take a quite radical approach toward openness.  Everything on the site, you may freely use.  Everything I create and make available here is a gift to all (whether it is valuable or not, is for the reader to judge).  On top of that, I try to keep track of the openness-oriented websites that are promoting the free use of information and software in the Christian world, so that the reader who is searching can easily find what he’s looking for.

If you’re not acquainted with the concept of openness, I encourage you to go read what’s on some of the links from this page.  Another thought-provoking read can be found here, on the Christians Against Copyright webpage.