The Semantic Web isn't inherently complex. The Semantic Web language, at its heart, is very, very simple. It's just about the relationships between things.

Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.

If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

The role of radiologists will evolve from doing perceptual things that could probably be done by a highly trained pigeon to doing far more cognitive things.

People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it's an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security.

PowerPoint doesn't kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it.

Having been trained as a computer scientist in the '90s, everybody knew that AI didn't work. People tried it. They tried neural nets, and none of it worked.

The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.

More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason - including blind stupidity.

You can drive a car by looking in the rear view mirror as long as nothing is ahead of you. Not enough software professionals are engaged in forward thinking.

I can't look at 'WALL-E' or 'Finding Nemo' or 'Up' and look at in the same way as people outside of the company would look at it. Each one of them had angst.

Every one of our films, when we start off, they suck... our job is to take it from something that sucks to something that doesn't suck. That's the hard part.

I am scared that if you make the technology work better, you help the NSA misuse it more. I'd be more worried about that than about autonomous killer robots.

Having a highly homogeneous background, education, values, preferences, etc, in the very early team is better than not - cuts down on time-wasting arguments.

Our ultimate goal is extensible programming. By this, we mean the construction of hierarchies of modules, each module adding new functionality to the system.

We deal with all varieties of information. Somebody's always upset no matter what we do. We have to make a decision; otherwise there's a never-ending debate.

Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don't fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it.

The only phrase I've ever disliked is, 'Why, we've always done it that way.' I always tell young people, 'Go ahead and do it. You can always apologize later.'

Technology is an inseparable part of humanity and for true progress to occur, the two must walk hand in hand, with neither one acting as servant to the other.

It's a romantic notion that you're going to have one brilliant idea and then everything is going to be great... but the execution and delivery are what's key.

The initial organisation, we called ourselves the Network Working Group, consisted of 6 to 10 people. We then quickly grew to 30 people and then to 50 people.

In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds.

We're at unique point in history where the things that we are building are going to significantly impact our social, political, economical, and personal lives.

All you need is lots and lots of data and lots of information about what the right answer is, and you'll be able to train a big neural net to do what you want.

Science is supposedly the method by which we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. In computer science, we all are standing on each others' feet.

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.

From the point of view of physics, it is a miracle that [seven million New Yorkers are fed each day] without any control mechanism other than sheer capitalism.

The multiplier effect is a major feature of networks and flows. It arises regardless of the particular nature of the resource, be it goods, money, or messages.

You can have successful teams where people hate but deeply respect each other; the opposite (love but not respect among team members) is a recipe for disaster.

The idea that one might derive satisfaction from his or her successful work, because that work is ingenious, beautiful, or just pleasing, has become ridiculed.

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling -- the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. (Or, sometimes known by] Grove [the head of Intel] giveth and Gates [the head of Microsoft] taketh away.)

Let me just say that, if you ever have the choice of putting your words in powerpoint or having them carved into 30-foot high marble, I'd say go for the marble.

If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web.

It was the summer of 1998. At that point, we were just scrounging around to find resources; we had stolen these computers from all over the department, sort of.

I did a handful of photo shoots and I never made any money for it just because I was trying to build a portfolio. I decided that that's not what I wanted to do.

I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language.

No matter what, the way to learn to program is to write code and rewrite it and see it used and rewrite again. Reading other people's code is invaluable as well.

You can give a great film idea to a mediocre team and they may screw it up, but if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will turn it into a great film.

There have been concerns about the long-term prospect that we lose control of certain kinds of intelligences. I fundamentally don’t think that’s going to happen.

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.

The two-way street of Total Information Awareness is the road that leads to a more transparent and complete picture of ourselves, our governments, and our world.

Good engineering is characterized by gradual, stepwise refinement of products that yields increased performance under given constraints and with given resources.

I used to say that if you gave me a trillion dollars to build a sentient or conscious machine I would give it back. I could not honestly say I knew how it works.

Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.

When I read commentary about suggestions for where C should go, I often think back and give thanks that it wasn't developed under the advice of a worldwide crowd.

My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.

I'll never know everything. My life would be a lot worse if there was nothing I knew the answers about - and if there was nothing I didn't know the answers about.

Believe me, you don't want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or policy are being hashed out.

When you take a director off a project, that makes a person feel humiliated because everyone knows it. But we're responsible because we put them in that position.

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