How religion and science intersect, or whether they can, is a subject worthy of a conference like Pop!Tech, a venue for dangerous topics.

Evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins, he of the Selfish Gene and Memetics, doesn't have much use for religion. He sees it as unscientific and dogmatic. The current attack on evolution – a theory accepted by most scientists as extremely well-grounded – by some religious groups has highlighted differences. The cover story in the November issue of Wired magazine ("The New Atheism: No Heaven. No Hell. Just Science. Inside the crusade against religion.") lays out his position.

But neither technology nor religion is going away, says Martin Marty, a religious scholar and ordained Lutheran minister. We have to find ways to have them live together, he says.

After hearing their presentations, I wonder if Dawkins may have had more in common with Marty than it seems.

Marty spoke of religion exploring mysteries, not with the idea that they are unanswerable, but in the sense that as one answer is obtained it only leads to more questions, more mysteries to unravel.

That seemed to be close to Dawkins's view of the scientist as humble explorer, always ready to give up positions outgrown when new evidence suggests new truths.

We live in a "middle world," Dawkins says, in which we experience only a limited part of reality. We see a rock as a solid object, not as mostly empty space with atoms whizzing around, because it has been a useful way for us to see it. We may have trouble getting our heads around quantum mechanics, the quite different set of laws that govern the world of the extremely small, because – as he puts it – our brains haven't had to evolve to confront those ideas.

In other words, he explains. if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. The universe is "queerer" than we can imagine.

What we call science and religion may be different paths to unlocking these truths that, for now, seem beyond comprehension.

Kevin Kelly is a big thinker on technology and culture, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Marianne Weems is artistic director of The Builders Association, a New York-based theatrical group. Hasan Elahi is a performance artist. What were they all doing on stage together at Pop!Tech Thursday morning?

Each, I think, was telling us in his or her own way how we live within a cloud of technology all around us. It's up to us to decide what use to make of it, and we'd better understand what it's doing if we're going to do that.

Try getting your head around a few of these ideas from Kelly: The basic computing power of the Web is going to exceed that of all 6 billion or 8 billion humans sometime between the years 2020 and 2040. Technology wants some of the same things evolution wants: to be everywhere, to become more complex, to become interdependent with other technologies. There are no bad technologies, Kelly says, only bad human parents who don't teach them the right rules of behavior (cue Asimov's three laws of robotics.) "Our job as humans is to parent our mind children."

With technology everywhere, we're more defined by what technologies we choose not to use. We have extraordinary choice and freedom in that way.

While Kelly cogitates, Weems is looking at how our encounters with technology can be expressed in theater. One video clip from a stage performance shows call center answerers in India, who learn American accents and cultural references by watching US television. But that makes for a strange life in which they develop two personae, one Indian and one American. Simple fiber optic phone lines have made them electronic American immigrants – sort of.

Elahi lives to embrace technology. An American citizen who was grilled by the FBI after 9/11, he struck back by making his life an open book. He wears an ankle bracelet that lets viewers see where he is at any moment. He records his airplane flights, his meals, even the restrooms he visits. And, just for fun, he sometimes flies to a country and then stays in the waiting area for several days, never actually passing through customs. What a puzzle that must present to anyone watching and trying to figure out what he's up to!

Airports are like the Guantánamo Bay holding area for American detainees, he says. Nowhere. A limbo land without a country. His reaction as a "technology artist" to the issue of privacy in a world with more and more electronic eyes and ears is to let them watch and listen all they want – perhaps the flood of banal information will make its own statement about watchers and watching.

That's a pretty provocative group to end the first morning at Pop!Tech. And all of them well worth learning more about and following their future projects.

What is Pop!Tech? We’ll let the institute's website toot its own horn.

Suffice it to say, if you’re interested in how science and technology are changing the world, hiking up to Camden, Maine, in October (this year Oct. 19-21) for the three-day conference is akin to Christmas coming two months early. Many of the presentations dazzle and delight, others are merely intensely interesting! And as always there are plenty of surprises – nearly all of them pleasant! Last year I headed home energized with lots of topics I wanted to learn more about.

This year Andrew Zolli, the conference organizer, has put together a lineup of presenters that includes some big names, including Tom Friedman of the New York Times, whose book on 21st century global economics, “The World Is Flat,” is extraordinarily popular and influential. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, has popularized one of the fundamental concepts of Web commerce, the “long tail” that allows myriad tiny niche markets to prosper. It’ll be interesting to see whether they rehash their ideas or share new insights. I’m guessing the latter.

Other big names include genetics pioneer Craig Venter and Silicon Valley's John Sculley. But many presenters are less famous. I’m looking forward to hearing from Losang Ragbey, “who is leading a one-woman educational revolution in Tibet,” and Fatima Gailani, “who helped coauthor the Afghan constitution and runs the Red Crescent Society in that country,” according to preview materials.

This year’s theme is “Dangerous Minds,” and, if last year is representative, one or two speakers will make attendees squirm in their seats. Last year Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" painted all religions and religious believers as antiscientific and basically responsible for what ails the world. A Christian woman sitting next to me was troubled that no one was presenting a counter-perspective. This year Mr. Harris’s mentor, Sir Richard Dawkins, he of the "selfish gene" theory, will speak. But I see that Martin Marty, a respected theologian, is also on the bill, so perhaps calls for more balance were heeded.

This is only my second visit to the Pop!Tech conference, so I’m a newbie. It is also a first: My initial blogging experience as a Monitor journalist (readers are urged to be kind and patient!). Attending last year led to several stories I wrote for the Monitor. But I also realized that much more happened that was pretty darn interesting, the kind of “notebook items” that don't fit easily into the paper's print edition.

Once the meetings start, Pop!Tech plans to make nearly everything that happens available free on video (if you have a broadband connection) at live.poptech.org. So if you can't be one of the few hundred crowded into the beautiful Camden Opera House Oct. 19-21, you can still experience a lot of what happens. There’ll be plenty of bloggers weighing in, too, and maybe even some print coverage. I'll point you to any that catches my eye. And I hope you’ll drop back here for my take on the action starting Thursday.

Apple opened its latest retail store last week, on New York's Fifth Avenue, and I was there.

I should clarify: I traveled five hours by bus from Boston and waited in line for 18 hours (much of it in unrelenting wind and rain) for the chance to be one of the first inside the sparkling Manhattan store. I wasn't alone. In fact, when I arrived at 12:30 a.m. Friday to line up in front of the 32-foot glass cube, there were already 12 people ahead of me. They'd come from Germany, Scotland, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and elsewhere to be there for the store's opening.

Not long after I plopped down my stuff to claim my spot as number 13, I couldn't help feeling a bit foolish. What was I doing, having just worked a full day and spent five hours on the Fung Wah bus, camping out on a New York street corner? Was it really worth it? I came to question my sanity even more about two hours after I arrived, with my cellphone battery dead (after assuring friend after friend on my phone that I was not, in fact, crazy), the urge to sleep started to creep in, and raindrops dampened my plan to snooze.

But I'd come prepared – or so I thought. My overnight bag had a pair of waterproof pants and a jacket, two changes of warm clothes, a pillow, a book, my Apple iBook computer, and a Crazy Creek-style camping chair. If I had it to do over, I would've traded the pillow, book, and camping chair for my yellow rain boots, as the rain made it impossible to sit or recline and stay dry – even with an umbrella. So I stood. For 18 hours.

It was miserable. But even at 3:00 a.m., with rain pouring down, when a few members of our newly-bonded crew toyed with the idea of paying $375 for a Fifth Avenue hotel room, we never really thought of giving up. We were squirming in discomfort, yes, but we weren't giving up.

As day broke after the long, wet night, a renewed spirit of "we can do this" pulsed through our ranks, even as the rain continued to fall. Passersby on their way to work would stop and ask us what we were doing. The CBS Morning Show brought excitement and activity (and free coffee and pastries) to the plaza where we were stationed. A few reporters and camera crews stopped by to interview some of us, though notably missing in the early morning and overnight hours was the ironically named Stormy Shippy, the "first person in line." He'd spent the night in a hotel, only to come back in the morning looking rested and refreshed to claim his place in line. Those of us that had spent the night braced against the elements in line weren't so thrilled about that, but there was enough of a consensus that it wasn't that big a deal that no one told him to beat it.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed up in the morning too, to check out the sparkling cube with a group of executives. His presence was even more of a morale booster, as most in the group of overnighters rank him somewhere between rock star and prophet. The sight of him brought out cameras all around, even from behind the cube, shooting through, to get a glimpse of him. This shot is my favorite. I'm the guy in the background wearing the Red Sox hat.

As the 6:00 p.m. opening hour drew nearer, more people started to show up – a lot more. Apple doesn't release attendence numbers, but one person estimated the line to be .45 miles long at the height of the opening frenzy.

What were we thinking? Isn't it just a computer store? I don't know that there's a definitive answer to those questions, but what I can tell you is that I decided to make the trip just to be a part of the experience. It wasn't so much about being first into the store, or about snagging one of 2,500 nifty T-shirts. It wasn't really even about the prospect of bringing home a "Lucky Bag" filled with Apple swag (which Apple for some reason decided not to offer at this opening). Call it crazy, a waste of time, or foolish, but what motivated most in line was just their fondness for Apple, and I think that's OK.

What is it about Apple that inspires me and the complete strangers I bonded with that night to go to such lengths for their favorite brand? Borrowing from Apple's popular "Think Different" ad campaign of a few years back, I think it's our "differentness." In a world of Windows users, where Apple's meager market share means its fans are often the odd ones out, events like the store opening are a chance to band together to celebrate our choice to be different. For this Red Sox fan, the parallels are obvious. Like Red Sox Nation circa 1918-2004, Apple fans stay faithful because they know they've got the best thing going, no matter what everyone else is saying. Last week's glitzy Apple store opening – in New York, the home of "The Evil Empire," no less – was an Apple fan's 2004 World Series.

We're seeing them much more these days – gadgets and gizmos squished and mashed together to form new supergadgets. From the cameraphone, once considered cutting edge and now the favorite of celebrity stalkers everywhere, we've gotten to the all-in-one cellphone-camera-PDA-e-mail-Web device. But are some manufacturers taking things a bit too far?

The Swiss Army knife, perhaps the original all-in-one gadget, went high tech in 2004 with the introduction of the Victorinox SwissMemory, a little red pocketknife with a gigabyte of flash memory storage built in. The SwissBit S.beat goes further down the path to digital domination with the introduction of a line MP3 player-equipped knives in capacities of up to four gigabytes. Talk about a bummer if you forget to put that one in your checked baggage!

If you prefer driving to flying, the gadgetmakers have you more than covered. Motorola's v325 with VZ Navigator is one of what are sure to be many cellphones with GPS navigation capabilities built in. I can see the appeal here: You're talking on your phone in the car already, so why not stare at it for directions, too? What? Driving? Focusing on the road? No problem....

The iPod is spawning its own kind of gadget convergence. As it has evolved, it has gone from storing and playing just five gigabytes of music, to holding 60 gigs of music, photos, movies, and whatever else one needs to tote around town. Car integration is big in this category too. FM transmitters broadcast your tunes to your car radio, sometimes charging your player at the same time. Whole companies base their businesses around accessories for the iPod and portable devices like it.

A host of major automakers are playing nice with the iPod, too, offering factory-installed hookups for the popular music player. That makes sense to me, as do developments like the new Infiniti G35's built-in hard drive. What doesn't make sense are the car- and computermakers trying to go the other way: Enter the Ferrari and Lamborghini-themed laptops (complete with engine-noise start-up sounds!) What!?

The home has seen even more gadget convergence. First we saw the combination VCR/TV. Then the DVD/TV and DVD/VCR launched. Now you can get a refrigerator with a TV or even a blender with an integrated recipe database and LCD. Home-theater seating comes with built-in speakers or a high-tech rumble function. TVs have long been in more rooms than just the den, but they're now in the bathroom, too. And of course, there's the multifunction remote, which has gone from simply controlling a TV and VCR to being the central command center of one's entire house.

Do people really want these things? I mean, is there really someone out there saying, "Gee, if only I had a combination flashlight/toothbrush/garlic press"? Of course not. A lot of these "innovative" devices are the answer to questions never asked. Who needs a TV on their refrigerator? 

But some of this gadget convergence is really cool. Take, for instance, SanDisk's new Secure Digital flash memory cards that have a built-in USB connector. No more searching for your digital camera's cable, or fumbling with a card reader! Or, how 'bout Kidde's combination smoke and carbon monoxide detector? Brilliant! Better still, DuPont's new smoke detector that integrates with a common light socket, so you never have to replace the batteries.

Innovations like these provide convenience and convergence that people can really use. Here's hoping there are more combo gadgets out there like them, and fewer like these.

No more heading out to the movie store in that blinding snowstorm for that must-have new release. No more cursing your postman when your titles don't arrive on time. No more "I'll wait til it's on cable." For the first time, major movie studios have signed deals with websites that allow people to buy movies online and download them directly to their PCs, as soon as they're released on DVD.

The two sites, Movielink and Cinemanow, have partnered with studios such as MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox, Disney, Miramax, NBC Universal, Sony, and Lions Gate Entertainment, ensuring that just about all popular new releases will be available online. The sites have been around since around 2000, but until this point, had only offered movies on an "on demand" or pay-per-view basis - for about $3 for a 24-hour viewing period - and had released them long after they arrived on movie store shelves.

This new development has been hailed by some as a revolution in home entertainment, but the complaints have already started pouring in.

The obvious question, "How much?" has become a sore spot on online message boards: $20 to $30 is considerably more than consumers pay for a new DVD at discount retailers or at online stores like Amazon.com. Besides, when they're downloaded from the Internet, movies don't include all the packaged extras that come with a DVD - documentaries, booklets, and other special features. And the complaints don't stop there.

The movies' format annoys some. The 1.4 gigabyte or so movie files (dial-up users proceed at your own peril) downloaded from the sites have digital rights management (DRM) software embedded in them that limits what users can do with them. That puts a damper on copying the films to recordable DVDs, sharing them with friends, or playing them on more than three different computers. Also out of the game are Mac users. The DRM technology is Windows-only, meaning "switchers" will have to wait it out until the iTunes store makes the transition to selling movies, whenever that is.

I don't think these services will catch on, but price, lack of extras, or Mac compatability aren't to blame. At this point, the "PC as digital hub" vision hasn't quite caught on enough for people to be comfortable making their computer their primary source of entertainment. Those who invest thousands in home theater systems just don't (for some reason) want to watch movies on a computer monitor (at $30 a pop, no less). Perhaps less important to the average viewer, but even more critical in principle, is that when you buy a DVD, no one follows you home and tells you where you can watch it. You're not told what brand player to use, or that you're not allowed to share it with a neighbor – imagine the revolt that would happen if that were the case. But that's exactly what this DRM technology purports to do.

Until the movie companies find a way to deliver films in a format as portable, universally adaptable, and transparent as DVD, the polycarbonate discs, however "90s" they may seem, will reign supreme – even if that means trips to the video store in a snowstorm to get them.

I consider myself a pretty technologically "with it" guy. I read technology magazines, contribute to online tech bulletin boards, and keep up with a slew of tech blogs. I even find myself drooling over the latest-greatest product releases from time to time. People who know about my ... oh, I guess I can say it ... obsession, often come to me for advice on what to buy. They know I track product releases and troll the rumor mills enough to give them an answer, or at least point them toward someone who can. So when a friend asked whether I was going to upgrade my iPod when Apple released a rumored 3.5-inch touch screen model, she was shocked at my response. "What, you don't have an iPod?"

Now, there are lots of reasons out there that people have for not having one of the personal music/video players – disdain for Apple being chief among them. But I don't hate Apple – in fact, I'm a big fan of their products. I love the clean, smooth, efficient design of their computers, OS X operating system, and yes, iPod.

The other common dig on the iPod (and personal audio players in general) is the isolating effect they have on their owners and the people around them. I'm not a social crusader – you won't see me yank out someone's 'buds just to say hi – but look around you the next time you ride public transportation, walk down a city street, or even take an elevator. Those ubiquitous white earbuds are everywhere. And the ears they're plugged into belong to people completely unaware of (and utterly unconcerned with) their surroundings and the people who fill them.

I also don't subscribe to the school of thought that rallies against Apple for its exclusive online music store. You see, Apple's iTunes music store is the Web's largest and most popular, but the songs one downloads from it are protected by Fairplay, Apple's proprietary digital rights management technology. As such, they are not playable on portable music players other than Apple's iPod. Methods for converting songs purchased on iTunes have arisen, but doing so may be a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This may be an unpopular view, but I think Apple has gone through the work to gather the licenses and music label partnerships necessary to sell music online, so it should accordingly be able to govern – to an extent – how its customers listen to its music.

So why my reluctance to purchase an iPod? Most of all, it's a lifestyle choice. I can't really think of a time during my day when I'd use one. My commute is by bicycle, so listening to music then is out of the question (biking to work in Boston is an exciting enough proposition that I need all of my senses engaged). What about listening at home? My stereo is plugged into my laptop computer (where all of my music is stored), so an iPod wouldn't bring any new benefits. Work? No. Grocery shopping? Please. I know I'm in a small minority, but I just can't justify bringing a digital audio player into my life.

Also, I can't say I understand the inclusion of a video capability in the latest iPod. I watch movies on the plane when I travel, but on my laptop, whose 14-inch screen I consider to be more than adequate. But a 2.5-inch display? It reminds me of the original Nintendo Game Boy, whose screen, to be nitpicky, measured 2.6 inches diagonally. Now, I know the new iPod's screen is supposed to be vibrant, bright, and engaging, but I just don't see the appeal of watching a movie - or TV shows at $1.99 an episode - on it. Is this a feature people were asking for?

There's also the argument that the iPod doubles as a great portable hard drive. While that's true – iPods come in capacities up to 60 gigabytes – I've had success finding other portable storage for far fewer dollars per-gigabyte than the iPod's $299 for 30, $399 for 60.

Now, I don't mean for this column to discourage people from buying an iPod – I think they're a great product for people who will use them. But I'd encourage potential buyers to question their reasons for wanting one – just because Steve Jobs pulls an iPod out of his jeans pocket doesn't mean you'll be able to make room for it in your life. While each of the arguments against owning an iPod – their ubiquity, tendency to isolate, high cost, and questionable usefulness of their features – has its merits, the one way to know whether an iPod or other portable music player is right for you is to think about how – or whether – you'll use it. Plenty of people will be able to fill lists with numerous uses for one. Just not me, not now.

You've seen the ads, read the reviews, heard the hype. Personal biases aside, the question remains: Is it time to switch from a Microsoft Windows-based computer to an Apple running Mac OS X? Unfortunately, the answer to that question has grown more complex and nuanced than ever before. Here's why.

Intel Macs

On June 6, 2005, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that his company's Macintosh computers would be pulling a 180 and switching from IBM PowerPC processors to Intel processors over the following two years. Fast-forward to January 10, 2006, when Jobs introduced the first two Mac systems to make use of Intel dual core processors.

The revised iMac and new MacBook Pro were touted for their speed boosts, but the switch to Intel processors hasn't been easy. Apple spent years constructing a universal (IBM and Intel processor-compatible) version of its OS X operating system, and has designed iLife, its proprietary suite of video, picture, and music lifestyle programs, to work on both processors. But to run on the new Intel Macs, other companies' software must be converted to what are called Universal Binaries. The process involves anything from minor tweaks to major overhauls, depending on how a program is written.

Now, Apple wouldn't introduce a new computer that supported such a small amount of software on its first day, so in the meantime, older software can still run, but through a special transcoding program called Rosetta, which runs behind the scenes. Though it enables users to use their old software, Rosetta is a considerable performance sapper. In the first user tests, performance, which Jobs had claimed would be four to five times as fast as Apple's older systems, wasn't much faster at all.

This doesn't mean the new Macs aren't worth switching to; it just means that it will take some time before the real performance benefits of the Intel switch kick in. Besides, they're great computers. Even before the Intel switch, The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg proclaimed the iMac G5 (the new Intel iMac's predecessor) the "gold standard of desktop PCs." When the software catches up with it, that standard will only be raised.

Mac security issues?

Part of the reason Apple users are so proud of their computers is that there has never been a confirmed worm or virus on the OS X operating system. Never, until now. Last week a worm that infects Mac applications was discovered. It has since been shown to be relatively benign - infecting computers only if users download a file, decompress it, open it, and is logged in on their computer's Administrator account, as Andrew Welch of Ambrosia Software describes it. Even if a user succeeds in getting his computer infected, the only thing the worm does is try to replicate by sending itself to people on the user's local iChat buddy list. It's not a big threat, and users have to be ignoring some pretty basic computer security rules for it to affect them at all.

Another piece of OS X malware discovered this week is more serious. Rather than relying on user error (or carelessness), it exploits a default feature of the Safari Web browser and requires no user interaction. Safari will automatically open "safe" and commonly used files like movies, images, or ZIP archives after downloading, which is convenient. Now, the operating system won't launch a file automatically if it determines that there is "active" content in it - an executable file, for instance. Sounds good, right? As Heise online reports, the problem arises when a line of code that identifies the active content is removed. "If this line is omitted, Safari no longer recognizes the content as potentially dangerous," and executes it, per the default setting's instructions. This exploit is scarier than the one last week, because it doesn't require the user to do anything but visit a site with Safari in its default setting.

Though the exploit hasn't been abused by any websites yet, it wouldn't take much to disguise a malicious script in this method, potentially erasing data or damaging programs. The easiest work-around is to use an alternate browser like Mozilla's Firefox, which doesn't support the automatic opening of files. Or, if you're using Safari, deactivating the "Open safe files after downloading" preference works, too.

Windows Vista

All potential Mac switchers have probably had experience with Windows, and the next generation of the operating system is right around the corner. Not content to let its mammoth market share slip away, Microsoft has been hard at work developing Windows Vista, the successor to Windows XP. The new Windows, set to ship either later this year or early in 2007, promises beefed-up security, a better default Web browser to compete with Firefox, snazzy integrated graphics, and a host of other new improvements.

But the news on Vista hasn't all been positive. Reports surfaced last week that the new OS will come in eight - count 'em - eight, versions. Choosing among them could be a tough task in itself. Also, to experience the full scope of Vista's features, users must be running some pretty high-end hardware: the graphic interface alone would prove too taxing to tussle with on many of today's systems.

So what's a home computer user to do? As backwards as it may sound in today's latest-greatest world: wait. Jumping in on the ground floor of any new product release just because it's "faster," "better," or any other superlative found in marketing copy, isn't the smartest move. If you're itching for an Intel Mac, it's best to wait until more programs can run natively on it. If you're on the fence about Windows vs. Mac OS X, wait until Vista launches (at which point the Intel Macs will run much more software natively) and do a comparison then.

This may be a stretch, but it really feels as if Google just added its googol-th feature. It's an instant messaging add-in to the wildly popular Gmail e-mail service, and it blurs the line between the two popular Web communication mediums. I was an early adopter of Gmail, and in the past few days have experimented with the chat feature, trading instant messages with friends. It's pretty slick, but using it, I can't help wondering: Have we grown too complacent trusting Google with so much of our lives?

Now, I want to make clear off the bat, there's nothing about Gmail's IM feature that makes it particularly alarming. One difference between it and other popular messaging services like AIM and MSN Messenger is that they run in a standalone program, and it launches right in a Web browser, which is convenient. But the main thing that sets Google's apart is that it is by default set to save a record of IM conversations in users' e-mail inboxes. That may sound helpful, but it sends up a red flag to a privacy expert.

To understand the privacy issues, it's important to grasp how Gmail works. It's like pretty much every other free Web e-mail program, except that Gmail scans users' in-box messages and cross-checks the data collected with a database of paid advertisements. When a content match is found, text ads are inserted to the right of messages. They aren't invasive – most of the time I don't even see them – and occasionally I find one of interest and even (gasp) click on it. For example, if your friend has written to you about her new car, you're likely to see a listing for buying used cars, displayed to the right of her e-mail. It's no big deal – even helpful, maybe – to have contextual ads, but things start to sour when you think about the methods used to implement them.

Where does that data go?

When e-mails are scanned (which Google insists is done only by machine), are they stored? Nowadays it's not just e-mails (which people tend to write with a measure more discretion), but instant messages that are being scanned – and stored – by Google. How long does that data stick around? That question becomes even more important when one takes into account the recent efforts of the US government to subpoena queries from Google's bread-and-butter search engine. Though the company declined to cooperate in that case (and those were only searches), what's to say they'll continue this tack in the future?

Now, many out there will say that Google has prided itself in protecting its users' privacy - just look at its refusal to bow to the government's request for data. One of the company's lauded and oft-quoted "Ten things Google has found to be true" is that it's possible to make money without doing evil. That may seem comforting - and to be fair, the company treats its users very well – but the honest truth is that Google is a business, plain and simple. However great their services are, the company is still out to turn a profit, data you submit is being collected, and your definition of evil may not match theirs.

This is not meant to be a Google bashing session. "Free" has become the dictum of the Internet. From e-mail to blogs, photo storage to newspapers, Web users expect increasingly more handouts when surfing. Whether you're using search, e-mail, instant messaging, social networking, blog publishing, photo hosting, news aggregating, direction finding, video sharing, or using other gratis Web services, know that the companies that offer them are collecting data. Now, personally, I won't be dropping my Gmail account anytime soon, but it's important to realize that, as with lunches, there's no such thing as a free Web service.

I heard Carly Fiorina speak at an Comdex convention in Las Vegas about 18 months ago. She was in the midst of shepherding a rough merger of her company, Hewlett-Packard, and Compaq. Yet she seemed to relish talking about the future of HP. She showed us many of the then-unseen commercials that have become familiar: the crook who is seemingly picked up by a mouse and deposited in a police van, etc. Her performance, given in the midst of a pressure-packed situation at her company, was impressive.

Now, a year and half later, after HP increased net income in its last quarter by 34 percent on a record total revenue of $20 billion (a 12 percent increase over the same period last year), Charles Cooper of CNet.com wonders why "Carly keeps getting the big dis." (Meanwhile, Ms. Fiorina has decided to pick a fight with Dell computers. HP's strategy for challenging Dell: "selling PCs without worrying about profit.")

Fiorina still catches an awful lot of flak--some of it deserved; much of it not--for her handling of the job. But I don't think that any of the talk has dented her sense of self-esteem. After all, this is someone with a pretty large ego--and much ambition. If the HP-Compaq combination proves itself, Fiorina will be written up in history books as the executive who rescued HP from a rendezvous with mediocrity.

So why do so many people tend to dismiss the job Fiorina has done? Mr. Cooper has an idea - would she be looked on differently if her name was Charlie instead of Carly? In the testosterone world of technology and business, it seems Fiorina's gender might be a problem for some of the old guard in the industry.