Quotes About Technology

Your mistake, Ng says, is that you think that all mechanically assisted organisms -- like me -- are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we were before.

pauses for a moment to get the answer queued up in his output buffer.

Even high-tech weapons systems cannot defeat organized small-arms fire on a massive scale.

With any job, there's some creative work that needs to be done—new technology to be developed or whatever. Everything else—ninety-nine percent of it—is making deals, raising capital, going to meetings, marketing and sales. We call that stuff making license plates.

In the old world, death had led to endless philosophical ruminations and spawned religions, but in Bitworld it led to one-star ratings from furious bereaved and threats of class-action lawsuits.

bimbo boxes with license plates from all the Burbclaves.

He is no longer connected to the network by a fiber-optic cable, and so all his communication with the outside world has to take place via radio waves

That's the thing about space," she said. "So many smart people are so interested in it that it's difficult to come up with a really new idea.

handing the briefcase over to a computer guy. Y.T. knows he's a computer guy because he has long hair in a ponytail and he's wearing jeans and he seems gentle.

The vehicle weighed something like six thousand pounds and had more moving parts than a silo full of Swiss watches.

mailing list, which is where all of the cool guys like John Cantrell hang out to discuss the very latest hashing algorithms and pseudo-random-number generators.

The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts—the only medium—that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media.

Smart, rabidly paranoid people are the backbone of cryptology

And he'd realized computers could be a tool to unite society.

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. Now, the first people to talk that way were libertarians.

In the old days a proposed system would have been given a three-letter acronym and bounced back and forth between different agencies and contractors for fifteen years before being launched into space.

It boiled down to Amistics. In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

Her coverall darkens, the colors shimmer through the electropigment like an oil slick, and then it's black.

Why couldn't I fill my hard drive with random bytes, so that individual files would not be discernible? Their very existence would be hidden in the noise, like a striped tiger in tall grass. And we could continually stream random noise back and forth to each other.

Van Eck phreaking

The automatic waffle machine emitted a piercing electronic beep, signaling it wanted to be turned over. Seamus reached out and flipped it. The Four were standing at the complimentary breakfast bar of their hotel in Coeur d'Alene. None of the others had ever seen an automatic self-serve waffle machine before, and so Seamus was giving them an impromptu demo of the best that America had to offer. "I'm

Cruft is forever. If you peel back the layers that have grown on top of other layers, and keep delving, and grep deep enough, you're going to find base code that was written by some Linux geek in the 1980s or something. File system primitives. Memory allocation routines that were made to run on hacked single-core IBM PCs that had never heard of the Internet.

music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery The Deliverator used to make

IARPA—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been running this thing until now—thinks other countries might have, or might soon have, access to . . . others like Erzsebet.