Quotes About Information

At the other extreme, and far less threatening, will be the "house computer" of 2081. It will store all the information from all the books, musical recordings, and reminder notes that are now to be found in a well stocked home, and in addition, will filter the deluge of spoken, musical, and video information that will arrive every day at a typical home in that year, selecting and storing for later recall the information of interest to its owners.

There is strong evidence that intuitions are based on simple, smart rules that take into account only some of the available information.

Humans appear to have a need for certainty, a motivation to hold on to something rather than to question it. People with a high need for certainty are more prone to stereotypes than others and are less inclined to remember information that contradicts their stereotypes.3

Soft data, hard conflicts.

I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.

Everybody gets so much common information all day long that they lose their common sense.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential.

information is perishable, lasting no longer than the structure to which it refers, just as the bathwater I was sitting in as I recalled all this would no longer be my bathwater once it ran down the plughole.

In Silicon Valley it is assumed that information on slick professional websites is more trustworthy than that from amateur sites, because that is how techies think. But conspiracy theorists only trusted scruffy sites, since they presumed that the hated elites created the "smart" sites. This insight matters enormously if you want to debunk conspiracies.

Es cierto que la televisión, a diferencia de los instrumentos de comunicación que la han precedido (hasta la radio), destruye más saber y más entendimiento del que transmite.

Fazíamos uma televisão bárbara e vulgar, como pretende a natureza desse meio de comunicação.

Biography shows through, all the mitigating antecedents. People teem with their own information and I start to get the headache of interest in them.

It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that we've had over the last decade are basically the only ways that we've had to learn what our government is doing.

Your personal life is now known as Facebook's data. Its CEO's personal life is now known as mind your own business.

contrary to repeated claims from President Obama and the NSA, it is already clear that a substantial number of the agency's activities have nothing to do with antiterrorism efforts or even with national security.

Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide.

the last story laid out the PRISM program, which I had first learned about at home in Brazil.

Snowden had been clear from our first conversation about his rationale for distrusting the establishment media with his story, repeatedly referring to the New York Times's concealment of NSA eavesdropping. He had come to believe that the paper's concealment of that information may very well have changed the outcome of the 2004 election. "Hiding that story changed history," he said.

the NSA databases "store information about your political views, your medical history, your intimate relationships and your activities online." The agency claims this personal information won't be abused, "but these documents show that the NSA probably defines 'abuse' very narrowly.

He had come to believe that the paper's concealment of that information may very well have changed the outcome of the 2004 election. "Hiding that story changed history," he said.

Why do some details become "history"—included in schoolbooks, in scholarly dissertations, or in personal narratives—while other details are forgotten? What scale of information do we accept when we say that we know something about the past?

For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.

Two departments of the PLA—the General Staff Department's Third and Fourth Departments, respectively—are organized to systematically penetrate communications and computer systems, extract information, and exploit that information.15 It is far faster, cheaper, and more efficient for the PLA to steal new technology than to devote vast amounts of time and money to develop it.