Quotes About Technology

If the Cloud Ark survived, it would survive on a water-based economy.

Yes. It's really only since wireless networks got fast enough to stream pictures to portable devices that everything changed," Enoch said, "and enabled each individual person to live twenty-four/ seven in their own personalized hallucination stream.

They have parallel-parked their bimbo boxes in identical computer-designed Burbclave street patterns and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the loglo wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture.

It was a smart cane. When he grabbed the handlebars it would help him stand up. It would then steady his locomotion even on the roughest terrain, adding its six legs to his two.

When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves. The

there didn't seem to be any computer-driven process that couldn't be improved upon by humans crawling around on the actual structure and writing on it with grease pencils.

But the basic premise of Eutropianism is that technology has made us post-human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net, and headed towards omnipotence.

Allegedly there was a Google Docs spreadsheet where it was being kept track of, but no one could agree on where it was.

The modern world's hell on haiku writers: "Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that onto the second line!

The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who recognizes it more readily than his own mother's date of birth: It happens to be a power of 2—216 power to be exact—and even the exponent 16 is equal to 24, and 4 is equal to 22. Along with 256; 32,768; and 2,147,483,648; 65,536 is one of the foundation stones of the hacker universe, in which 2 is the only really important number because that's how many digits a computer can recognize.

My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater.

The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.

Remember, these things are designed for amateurs." "Tell me about it," Ivy snorted. "The user interface is so easy to use, I can't do anything.

The FBI hates and fears strong crypto.

they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies—yes, the entire medium of cinema—to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T'Rain and see what they were missing.

Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists' uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn't work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.

Talking to a black-and-white on the Street is like talking to a person who has his face stuck in a xerox machine, repeatedly pounding the copy button, while you stand by the output tray pulling the sheets out one at a time and looking at them.

The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read.

She was just in the process of proving them all desperately wrong. But at this phase, the all-male society of bitheads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial and superficial. It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.

After that it had all been oral history for about a thousand years, since there had been no paper to write on and no ink to write on it with. Memory devices were scarce and jury-rigged. Every single chip had been used for critical functions such as robots and life support.

You spend too much time goggled in," she says. "Try a little Reality, man.

If you had to give a name to the whole apparatus, what would you call it?" "Hmmm," Waterhouse says. "Well, its basic job is to perform mathematical calculations—like a computer." Comstock snorts. "A computer is a human being." "Well . . . this machine uses binary digits to do its computing. I suppose you could call it a digital computer." Comstock writes it out in block letters on his legal pad: DIGITAL COMPUTER.

John Hackworth withdrew some tickets from his breast pocket and asked them to illuminate themselves; but they were printed on old-fashioned paper that did not contain its own energy source, and so he finally had to use the microtorch dangling from his watch chain.

He overrides the warning buzzer, jams the stereo over to Taxiscan, which cruises all the taxi-driver frequencies listening for interesting traffic. Can't understand a fucking word. You could buy tapes, learn-while-you-drive, and learn to speak Taxilinga. It was essential, to get a job in that business.