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Secretary of State John Kerry offered a defense of freedom of speech, religion and thought in the United States telling German students that in America "you have a right to be stupid if you want to be."

"As a country, as a society, we live and breathe the idea of religious freedom and religious tolerance, whatever the religion, and political freedom and political tolerance, whatever the point of view," Sec Kerry told the students in Berlin, the second stop on his inaugural trip as secretary of state. "People have sometimes wondered about why our Supreme Court allows one group or another to march in a parade even though it's the most provocative thing in the world and they carry signs that are an insult to one group or another," he added. "The reason is, that's freedom, freedom of speech. In America you have a right to be stupid - if you want to be," he said, prompting laughter. "And you have a right to be disconnected to somebody else if you want to be. And we tolerate it. We somehow make it through that. Now, I think that's a virtue. I think that's something worth fighting for," he added. "The important thing is to have the tolerance to say, you know, you can have a different point of view."

Pay television has a simple model: If you want to watch one channel, you have to pay for dozens — or hundreds — of others, whether you watch them or not. That model drives lots of consumers nuts, but it has looked very, very hard to dislodge. Now one cable provider says it will try to break up the bundle: Cablevision has sued Viacom for “illegally forcing Cablevision to carry and pay for 14 lesser-watched ancillary networks its customers do not want.”

On the face of it, Cablevision is directly attacking the core bundling principle the industry has used for years, and continues to implement as pay-TV providers and programmers sign new, long-term deals. It is accusing Viacom of an “illegal tying arrangement in violation of the federal antitrust laws,” and if it is successful, the repercussions could be widespread and significant. But note that the conventional wisdom in the pay-TV industry is that “tying” rules aren’t applicable to cable bundles — people have tried repeatedly to break the bundle using the courts and failed.

A new nonprofit is launching a campaign to encourage American kids to code.

Code.org has tapped some of the technology industry's leading luminaries –- Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter and Square's Jack Dorsey and Microsoft's Bill Gates –- to lead the charge in a new video promoting the cool of coding. Code.org is working to make computer science classes available in more schools and create "the wizards of tomorrow." It was started by Hadi and Ali Partovi, technology entrepreneurs and startup investor and advisors. It's the beginning of an ambitious attempt to program new public policy. Silicon Valley is undertaking a more concerted political campaign than ever before to address the escalating demand for engineers at Silicon Valley companies as Congress weighs immigration reform.

Hundreds of Internet address suffixes to rival ".com" should be available for people and businesses to use by the end of the year, the head of an Internet oversight agency said.

The initial ones, expected in mid-2013, will likely be in Chinese and other languages besides English, said Fadi Chehade, CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. That will be followed within weeks by English suffixes that do not have competing bidders. Although the specific names won't be announced until late April, they will come from a pool of single-bidder proposals — among them, ".aetna," ''.cadillac" and other brand names sought by companies, regional monikers such as ".vegas" and ".quebec" and generic suffixes such as ".like" and ".vacation." Many proposed suffixes, such as ".app," ''.music" and ".tech," will likely take longer, however, because multiple groups have submitted bids to run them and must work out disputes.