Growing up in a military family, you are raised on stories with real heros. Sure, you aren’t immune to the media and hearing about sports figures and actors and public figures, but in a military family, they are not typically revered as they are in regular society.

In military families you grow up hearing of Rickovers and Chesty Pullers… and Admiral James Stockdale’s.

The daughter of a Naval Aviator who served in ‘nam, I knew of James Stockdale before the rest of America knew of him… and America only knew him as a guy who ran with Ross Perot and happened to not look great on TV.

What a loss to any American if they never bothered to get to know who he really was… the brilliant mind and true hero, although I am sure he would not have been happy to be considered one… as true heros are also amazingly humble.

As the readers of my blog know, I have attended many a forum where the speaker was a POW from Vietnam. The last one I attended in April, where the gentleman spoke with such passion about the men he was imprisoned with in ‘nam. One of them was James Stockdale. Admiral Stockdale gave them hope when they felt there was none. He led where others would never have been able. He made them realize that it was alright to break at the hands of their captures… as nobody was immune.

My throat closes off in grief that this great man is gone. It is truly a great loss to our society. He was a hero among modern heros… and for his leaving us, I cry.

Go HERE for an article about his passing. If you want to know more about this great man… no need for me to link. Just google Admiral James Stockdale and you’ll find a wealth of information.

UPDATE: Link HERE for Admiral Stockdale’s official site.

I don’t believe in heaven or hell. I think when you die that’s it-the end. But at the same time we all achieve a certain amount of immortality. We are remembered for some time after our deaths for good deeds and bad. How long depends on how good or bad they were. Some have a place in history and their names are remembered for generations. There are some, that although their names were never very well known, did something that had a profound impact on how humans live. One such man died recently, Jack Kilby, the inventor of the integrated circuit.

For decades after Jack St. Clair Kilby got the revolutionary idea that has enhanced daily life for almost everybody on Earth, people used to tell the inventor of the microchip that he deserved a Nobel Prize. He always scoffed at the notion. “Those big prizes are for the advancement of understanding,” Kilby would explain in his slow, plainspoken Kansas way. “They are for scientists, who are motivated by pure knowledge. But I’m an engineer. I’m motivated by a need to solve problems, to make something work. For guys like me, the prize is seeing a successful solution.”

As it happened, Jack Kilby did eventually win the Nobel Prize — although the Royal Swedish Academy didn’t award it until more than 40 years after his 1958 breakthrough and after he had received almost every other honor and award an engineer can receive.

The man who was responsible for so much of the modern world remained incredibly humble to the end.

Kilby expressed amazement at the vast range of applications — calculators, computers, digital cameras, pacemakers, cell phones, space travel and so forth — that have developed around the tiny circuit-on-a-chip that he devised when he was the most junior engineer at Texas Instruments.

“It’s astonishing what human ingenuity and creativity can do,” he said. “My part was pretty small, actually.” Whenever people would mention that Kilby was responsible for the entire modern digital world, he liked to tell the story of the beaver and the rabbit sitting in the woods near Hoover Dam. “Did you build that one?” the rabbit asked. “No, but it was based on an idea of mine,” the beaver replied.

Already the technology that will replace Kilby’s silicon based microchip is being developed but his invention will remain the foundation of the digital world. Now that’s immortality.

“Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly.”

-Senator Robert M. La Follette

In his “Random Access” column, Washington Post reporter reports on a ‘Net tax proposal that’s floating around Congress:

Don’t rush out and start dumping fiber-optic cable in the nearest harbor, mind you. A new tax to subsidize rural high-speed Internet access is still at the discussion phase in Washington. According to early news reports, Internet service providers would be responsible for collecting such a tax, which means that it probably would show up in your monthly Internet service bill.

It would be collected through in the same manner as the Universal Service Fund, which is used to extend phone service to rural areas.

It sounds like a worthy measure, but I’m not sure it’s the best way to bring broadband to the boonies, especially considering how fast technology changes. What happens if broadband is brought to rural areas … just in time for the technology used to be rendered out-of-date?