Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The Internet was supposed to be the greatest tool of global communications and means of sharing knowledge in human history. And it is. But it has also become the most effective instrument of mass surveillance and potentially one of the greatest instruments of totalitarianism in the history of the world.
Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters - all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing.
I think people respond to dystopian stories because they're ways of acting out anxieties that we have and fears that we have about the future. So much media's coming at you over the Internet, your brain gets overloaded. You don't know what to do with it. And one thing you can do with it is read a story.
Racism itself is difficult to measure. We can measure hate crimes - which are absolutely an indicator. We can measure reports of discrimination. We can measure the number of times hateful words are being used across the Internet. Those things all help us measure racism, but it can sometimes be nebulous.
The Internet is the hope of an integrated world without frontiers, a common world without controlling owners, a world of opportunities and equality. This is a utopia that we have been dreaming about and is a world in which each and every one of us are protagonists of a destiny that we have in our hands.
I will check the internet for at least an hour every morning scanning worldwide news to do with child abuse. So if you're constantly putting yourself in an environment where you're checking up on social economics or homelessness problems, if you keep yourself aware of it, you don't really have a day off.
Basically, the Internet is just the way now. It's the end-all, be-all of self-promotion. It's not like you got to burn CDs and pass them out or sell them. The Internet is a tool that reaches billions and billions of people. It's like a no-brainer to tie it in with self-promotion, or even label promotion.
Jobs offshoring began with manufacturing, but the rise of the high-speed Internet made it possible to move offshore tradable professional skills, such as software engineering, information technology, various forms of engineering, architecture, accounting, and even the medical reading of MRIs and CT-Scans.
I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my 'Creative Projects' folder - it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. Any time I have an Internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos.
I definitely feel like there's a lot of terrible things on the Internet, obviously. You can really pretty much find anything on there. It's pretty awful. And the crazy thing is that we don't even access that much of it - it's like the dark web or whatever. It's the other Internet that we don't even access.
I was surfing the Internet, and I came across a school in Atlanta where you could learn how to climb trees with ropes the way the pros do. It sounded terrific, and so I went down there, and I began to learn these kind of rarified techniques for how you get up and down trees while using special ropes and gear.
In a single generation, the Internet has given to virtually every person on the face of the earth the ability to communicate with fellow human beings on virtually any topic, at any time, and in every nook and cranny on the globe. This magnificent invention has done this without succumbing to government control.
I love being an enigma. Every time I'm tempted to respond to someone who tries to put me in a box, politically - you know, someone who gets on the Internet and says, you're pro-gun, or you're anti-gun - I stop and say to myself, 'This is great; this is what I wanted. I wanted to be the guy you can't figure out.'
On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.
I was standing on the shoulders of other science fiction writers like William Gibson, who had written 'Neuromancer' on a typewriter before home computers even really existed, and Neal Stephenson who wrote 'Snow Crash' in the early '90s and imagined an online virtual world before the birth of the modern Internet.
I love to talk about the drums and music. I started playing drums when I was probably six and played a lot until I was about ten or eleven years old. So, I guess five or six years where I played. I had a drum set at home, and I would just bang on it. I'd even go on the Internet and study basic beats and so forth.
It's hard to tell with these Internet startups if they're really interested in building companies or if they're just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don't really want to build a company, they won't luck into it. That's because it's so hard that if you don't have a passion, you'll give up.
I like that in 'Caprica' the virtual world is a new thing. The parents didn't have that growing up. And it's the same thing about the Internet and all the current technology. It didn't exist like it does now for our parents' generation. Kids aren't relating to their parents anymore, and I just find that so honest.
We had a show called NXT, and Daniel Bryan was my rookie, and I was his pro. And the object was for the pros teach the rookies what it's like to be a WWE Superstar. As soon as that hit the Internet, the Internet thought it was absurd: 'How dare WWE put Daniel Bryan as Miz's rookie? Daniel Bryan should be the pro.'
By 1988, I'm seeing this commercial phenomenon beginning to show up. Hardware makers are selling routers to universities so they can build up their campus networks. So I remember thinking, 'Well, how are we going to get this in the hands of the general public?' There were no public Internet services at that point.
I think about my own career, and when I graduated from college, the Internet didn't really exist yet. And so not having a specific plan, being able to be opportunistic at the end, is what enabled me to make some of my best decisions, which is to go to places that were growing but that I didn't plan to have happen.
The rise of a ubiquitous Internet, along with 24-hour news channels has, in some sense, had the opposite effect from what many might have hoped such free and open access to information would have had. It has instead provided free and open access, without the traditional media filters, to a barrage of disinformation.
Whether it's by helping us search for health-related information, connecting us with doctors through online portals, or enabling us to store and retrieve our medical records online, the Internet is starting to show the promise it has to transform the way people interact with and improve their own health and wellness.
In '77 there was no Internet, there was no Twitter or Facebook, and I think that, without being some old git who hates anything new, people's attention spans are too short. Back then you had 'Top Of The Pops' and 'Melody Maker,' and you had to make the effort to go to a show so that you absorbed the culture of music.
Today, if you have an Internet connection, you have at your fingertips an amount of information previously available only to those with access to the world's greatest libraries - indeed, in most respects what is available through the Internet dwarfs those libraries, and it is incomparably easier to find what you need.
I'm glad that I didn't have the Internet when I started writing. I started writing when I was 20 and didn't show a word of it to anyone until I was 28. I had the sense to keep it to myself. Now the temptation with blogs and such, they're just getting it out there; maybe it would have been best to keep it to themselves.
Thinking of that movie 'The Artist'; if anyone ever needed to reach anyone, I'm just thinking they didn't have cell phones, they didn't have Internet, they didn't have email, so I always wonder how it was back then where you had to be home if you needed to get a phone call; otherwise, people couldn't get a hold of you.
I use many different gadgets connected with computers; I use PCs, laptops and a Palm Pilot. I also use the Internet to visit websites, especially within Polish-language Internet. I usually go to political discussion groups and sites - of course, as I use my real name, people never believe that they are chatting with me!
The Internet rewards scale; by trading higher up-front costs for lower marginal cost, market leaders can invest in better technology and service. As a result, there is nothing online that is both great in quality and small in scale. Amazon wasn't originally a better bookstore than the small shops we mourn, but it is now.
Because the Internet is so new, we still don't really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that's what we're used to. So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you read on the Web.
We all agree on the core values of a free and open Internet. We simply may disagree on the appropriate regulatory framework for securing those values. And I would much rather have an open and honest debate about the appropriate regulatory framework as opposed to throwing misinformation out there to achieve political ends.
The important thing to remember with the Internet is that there are large companies that have an interest in controlling how information flows in it. They're very effective at lobbying Congress, and that pattern has locked down other communication media in the past. And it will happen again unless we do something about it.
My enthusiasm for L.A. stems from my father, who was a lecturer in American literature at the University of Birmingham. Through his work, our family did several house swaps with L.A. families. It was a dreadfully daring thing to do in the early 1980s; there was no Internet, so you had no idea of what you were getting into.
Broadband connections allow us to access more robust types of content, services, and applications - video chat versus email, or live streaming versus chat, for example. Yet if we look beyond our own personal use, we can see that broadband Internet access is not merely a convenience: it is a powerful force for social change.
When the Internet came along, at first it was just a medium for moving text around - books first, then pictures, finally video. Each time the bandwidth expanded, so did the capabilities of the medium, and each time it happened, the Internet cannibalized preexisting formats. And each time, those formats had to adapt. Or die.
When I was 18, I took a trip to Thailand with a friend. We stayed for a month. Bangkok was very raw for a teenager: there were no cellphones, no Internet, and the only music I had with me was this cassette by Liz Phair. I was writing a lot of poetry, and she embodied a talky style of songwriting that I found very accessible.
If you need five minutes every hour to look at tweets or to just surf the Internet, you need to schedule that into your schedule, allow yourself to do that. Because when people start procrastinating, what they've done is, they've tried to ignore that urge. They try to deny themselves time on Facebook or time surfing the web.
What's interesting about the shift from an industrial age to a technological age is that we keep inventing new media: movies, records, radio, television, the Internet, and now ebooks - and one of the things that's most interesting about the invention of a new medium is watching it reinvent itself as it penetrates the culture.
The Internet is the first technology since the printing press which could lower the cost of a great education and, in doing so, make that cost-benefit analysis much easier for most students. It could allow American schools to service twice as many students as they do now, and in ways that are both effective and cost-effective.
Back, you know, a few generations ago, people didn't have a way to share information and express their opinions efficiently to a lot of people. But now they do. Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they're thinking and have their voice be heard.
Predating the Internet and predating videos, you had an active imagination. You would hear sounds and then get mental pictures of what these sounds felt like to you. It engaged you and made you more invested in it. It made you want to get tickets to the show, buy the album, put the poster on the wall. Now it's sensory overload.
My venture investing career has three phases, all roughly 6-8 years long. The first, at Euclid, was software to Internet. The second, at Flatiron, was Internet to bubble. And the third, at USV, has been web 2 to mobile. I have always used a new firm to denote a new investment phase for me. Throw away the old. Start with the new.
I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real.
I think parenting these days is definitely different from when a lot of people grew up. As much blame as we give a lot of our kids for what they're not doing... I also try to give them as much credit for dealing with things that we didn't have to deal with. Bullying was one on one and face to face. Now it's all over the Internet.
As a source of innovation, an engine of our economy, and a forum for our political discourse, the Internet can only work if it's a truly level playing field. Small businesses should have the same ability to reach customers as powerful corporations. A blogger should have the same ability to find an audience as a media conglomerate.
Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened.
The Internet, sadly, has become a preying ground for trolls and just predators. And when you're in the position that I'm in, and you have a wife and a child who had just come into this world not too long ago, you start wondering whether or not that continued interaction and some of the threats and some of the nonsense are worth it.
We speak of 'software eating the world,' 'the Internet of Things,' and we massify 'data' by declaring it 'Big.' But these concepts remain for the most part abstract. It's hard for many of us to grasp the impact of digital technology on the 'real world' of things like rocks, homes, cars, and trees. We lack a metaphor that hits home.
In the 20th century, we had a century where at the beginning of the century, most of the world was agricultural and industry was very primitive. At the end of that century, we had men in orbit, we had been to the moon, we had people with cell phones and colour televisions and the Internet and amazing medical technology of all kinds.
With the Internet era and social media and politics being so out there with the lies, now you've got people denying things they're on camera doing, and then you've got people not really caring about the truth. You've got people supporting people who've done horrific things, but just don't want the other side to get any satisfaction.