There is something very American about Feynman breaking into safes during the Manhattan Project. It’s hard to imagine the authorities having a sense of humor about such things over in Germany at that time. Maybe it’s not a coincidence. Hackers are unruly. That is the essence of hacking. And it is also the essence of American-ness. It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America, and not France, or Germany, or England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside the lines. I lived for a while in Florence. But after I’d been there a few months I realized that what I’d been
...more
