Andy Bishop's Profile

In recent decades, wedlock has fallen victim to a divorce rate near 50 percent. Second and third marriages contracted after divorce suffer an even bleaker success rate. Moreover, failure breeds failure, as children of divorce carry their experience of dysfunctional family life into their own adult years. Little wonder that many young Americans shy from making the mistakes of their parents.

Part of the reason is economic. Today, men and women alike typically carry heavy burdens of personal debt through their 20s, 30s and beyond. Theoretically, two can live as cheaply as one, but not if both are burdened by payments for college expenses and auto loans.

What needs to be fixed are the expectations and the commitment that couples bring to living together. Marriage can be revived, but only by one courageous, committed couple at a time.

Schmidt didn't think the timing was right and, worse, he didn't want Google to get into a potentially bruising battle with the world's largest software maker.

His change of heart shows how far Google has come since Page and Brin started the Mountain View, Calif.-based company in a Silicon Valley garage nearly 11 years ago.

Schmidt now believes Google can withstand whatever counterpunches Microsoft might throw as the company sets out to make computers cheaper to buy and more enjoyable to use with an operating system tied to Google's 9-month-old browser, Chrome.

The operating system, due out in the second half of 2010, threatens to chip away at Microsoft's market share in the low end of the PC market

Yet Page couldn't resist taking some veiled shots at Windows. Without mentioning Windows, he suggested Microsoft's operating system is becoming archaic as people spend more and more of their computer time in a Web browser.

That said, the Chrome operating system also could put Google into direct competition with Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) , a computer maker whose board of directors includes Schmidt and another Google director, Arthur Levinson. The Federal Trade Commission already is taking a look at whether Schmidt's and Levinson's overlapping with Google and Apple threaten to diminish competition.

Although Google won't charge for the Chrome operating system, Schmidt said it could easily pay off by driving down the cost of computers so people can afford to buy more machines and surf the Web more often. Google wants people to spend more time online because it is the biggest seller of Internet ads -- the main source of its more than US$20 billion in annual revenue .

Most of Google's income flows from short text-based ads appearing alongside search results and other online content.

Landing on the moon provided encouragement, he said, hope that Americans could still solve problems. The country had a giant goal and accomplished it with a giant step.

Theories that the landing was a hoax began circulating a few years later after the publication of Bill Kaysing’s 1974 book, “We Never Went to the Moon.” Four years later, the movie “Capricorn One” came out, challenging the landing once again. A 1999 Gallup poll found that 6 percent of Americans believed the Apollo 11 landing was faked.

“Why does the moon hoax theory still have legs?” he said. “Those people are so far out into the ozone. … The flag waved? Pu-leeze. NASA wouldn’t be so stupid.”

Adding to the distrust is that the science cannot be explained in a sound bite,

And watch out for those members of the flat earth society too.

I named the album "Beautiful Seed" because a seed is a wonderful metaphor for our lives. We are all like seeds. Seeds grow unseen in the soil and then sprout. Some seeds become the biggest, most majestic trees and others grow to eventually bear wonderful fruit, and yet others, grow to provide shade. We are like trees.