Who should be America's CTO?

Vote now and tell us

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

Posted in Odds and Sods, 29th August 2008 16:00 GMT

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Ted Dziuba

Think of Ted as the antidote to the Lessig candidacy. Like Larry, he's been funded by Google - but there the similarity ends. While a Lessig CTOship would mean lots of blogs and wikis, and really expensive consultants to make sure Federal drones use them, a Tech Czar Dziuba would surely take an axe to sloppy Javascript and grossly baroque MySQL implementations. At Uncov and now as a Reg columnist, he's the scourge of Web 2.0 FAIL. Instead, Ted espouses old-fashioned engineering values like uptime, resilience, data integrity and choosing the right tool for the job. But don't hold that against him. Would he run? It's Friday afternoon, and we couldn't be bothered to ask. But we will, soon.

Jeff Merkey

"I love British girls!" is how Jeff Merkey greeted us on our one and only interview with him. "They've got the biggest tits in the world!" We've been impressed ever since. A former Novell CTO, Merkey's feuds are the stuff of legend: targets include Wikipedia, Groklaw, Slashdot and Bruce Perens (because Linux is used by terrorists). After Merkey's son fell ill from E.Coli poisoning after eating spinach on a Delta Airlines flight, Merkey sued both the airline, and its food supplier Natural Selection Foods (the latter for emotional distress). Merkey argued that use of the brand Natural Selection "...[implied] that the Plaintiff's 23 month old son...will be subject to Charles Darwin's theories of Natural Selection by virtue of not possessing an immune system capable of combating E.Coli and its deadly HES-inducing shiga toxins". A Merkey CTOship would not be dull.

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