Quotes About Technology

I hate e-mail," John says. Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. "What do you mean?" "The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don't observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it's really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it.

Bulgarian professor named John Vincent Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, who were building a machine that was intended to automate the solution of some especially tedious differential equations.

Neal Stephenson

THE LAY OF WALMART TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: "The Lay of Walmart" comprises two parts. Handwriting analysis confirms that both were written by the same author, self-identified as Tóki Olafsson, a skald

Y'know, watching government regulators trying to keep up with the world is my favorite sport.

Well, land sakes! Hiro says. Lookee here! He whips his blade sideways, cutting off both of the businessman's forearms, causing the sword to clatter onto the floor. Better fire up the ol' barbeque, Jemima! Hiro continues, whipping the sword around sideways, cutting the businessman's body in half just above the navel. Then he leans down so he's looking right into the businessman's face. Didn't anyone tell you, he says, losing the dialect, that I was a hacker? Then he hacks the guy's head off.

And once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling through skirts and lingerie and out labia and inner labia....It made him feel naked and weak and brave.

Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses—viruses generated from within itself.

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself—and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

But the rest of our lives will happen in the future, Randy, so we might as well get with the program now.

Fair or not, Tavistock Prowse would forever be saddled with blame for having allowed his use of high-frequency social media tools to get the better of his higher faculties.

Vyacheslav exited through New Caird's airlock, clambered down a stack of robots to the surface, and then made his way toward the site.

Well, that's good. I don't think human-written code exists anymore. It's code written by code written by code—turtles all the way down.

There's only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy's reticules, you mean," Osa said. "This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid–First Millennium A.R." "Exactly!" Sammann said. "Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned.

On the kitchen table a MakerBot was producing a small plastic part, watched intently by a young woman who was talking on her phone in a mix of English and Mandarin.

These are one-time pads.

Neal Stephenson

Dinah slipped her hand into the data glove, did the thing that made it connect to the Grabb's free claw, and waved. Tekla's green eyes flicked down in their sockets as she observed this. Still no emotion. Dinah was mildly offended. Was the Grabb not adorably cute, in its ugly mechanical way? Was the wave not an amusing gesture?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo," Enoch said.

Desktops encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on a piece of paper that only you get to see?

Its title was "Virtual-Space Cartography from Manifold-Based Traffic Analysis.

Neal Stephenson

So GUIs use metaphors to make computing easier, but they are bad metaphors.