A true conversation is a creative force - you could almost say, *the* creative force - by which new things come into the world. - Steve Talbott, NetFuture % If you're going to answer the question at all, give good value. Don't suggest kludgy workarounds when somebody is using the wrong tool or approach. Suggest good tools. Reframe the question. - Eric S. Raymond % If you want to be understood, write clearly, use punctuation and capitalization conventionally, check your spelling and, oh yeah, prune unnecessary quoted material and *don't top-post*. :-) - Peter Hansen % Most of the time I don't know where I should be looking, which is why I'm looking in the first place. By the time I find the answer to my question, I'm exhausted and my head is spinning. - Patrick O'Brien % There are two kinds of pains in the ass: the obnoxious boor - to be avoided on all teams - and the person who never learned that grownups shouldn't ask "Why?" all the time. The latter is a treasure. - Dave Thomas % Communication needs some shared starting point, and while assuming more of a start than is present may induce misunderstanding, the reverse assumption inevitably means high verbosity. - Alex Martelli % I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say "Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?" - Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation % Like music and mathematical equations, computer language is just that, language, and it communicates information either to a computer or to those who can read it. ... For the purposes of First Amendment analysis, this court finds that source code is speech. - Judge Marilyn Hall Patel % When replying to a message, include enough original material to be understood but no more. It is extremely bad form to simply reply to a message by including all the previous message: edit out all the irrelevant material. - S. Hambridge, RFC 1855 % Q. Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? A. The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. - FreeBSD FAQ % Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. - John Perry Barlow, 1996 % Lately there's an abundance of improvised censors, and suppliers of free good advice. What's that, you're out of bad example? Ask again your usual wholesaler, surely scarcity is just momentary. - Nicola Larosa, Luglio 2005 % Welcome to the *real* Web 2.0. Now shut up and buy some stuff. - Richard S. Tallent, II, November 2005 % Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence. - Daniel Gilbert, December 2005 % If you can't answer a question within three steps, you haven't designed the answers right. - Dratz, February 2006 % The meteor that ended the Mass Marketing period and the Industrial Era was the Internet. But instead of setting the old world on fire and killing off species, the Net gave every living thing a better world in which to do business and make culture. - Doc Searls, March 2006 % We need to get marketing out of the website construction game. Company websites should provide the shortest possible routes between customers and useful information. Period. - Doc Searls, July 2006 % In reality, of course, there are costs and delays in the way the Net actually works. But the ideal toward which we must work is one in which those costs and delays round down to zero. - Doc Searls, October 2006 % E-mail can be saved by your ISP or by the IT department in your corporation. Gmail, for example, saves everything, even if you delete it. - Bruce Schneier, November 2006 % Being online demands a tremendous amount of discipline. You must shut out the world around you and focus exclusively on a glowing screen. You must sit in a chair for hours on end and will your body to remain still. You are at an altar, but you are both priest and supplicant. - Scott Jason Cohen, July 2000 % Layout should be pretty, not only for its own sake, but especially because it helps the reader in his task. For performance material like sheet music, this is doubly important: musicians have a limited amount of attention. The less attention they need for reading, the more they can focus on playing itself. In other words, better typography translates to better performances. - Lilypond engraving essay % The only way to solve [the deliberate bandwidth scarcity] problem is by taking back ownership of our own last-mile connections and creating a true competitive marketplace for backbone services. It's a move that would pay for itself almost instantly, but I doubt that it will ever be allowed to happen. - Robert Cringely, October 2007 % Forget information overload. You'll find inspiration, innovation, and connection in information possibility. - Anne Truitt Zelenka, October 2007 % In the short term, I recommend that you be using Firefox with [the] NoScript [extension]. Until we get things right, it seems to be the best we can do. - Douglas Crockford, November 2007 % La volgarità è la TECNICA della satira. Con questa tecnica, la satira esprime idee e opinioni. Censurare la satira (in nome del cattivo gusto o di altri princìpi volatili e capziosi) è censurare le opinioni. E` fascismo. Chi si attarda in disquisizioni sul buon gusto è un censore. Punto. - Daniele Luttazzi, Dicembre 2007 % We [will soon] look at books with spite and scorn and say "Oh my God, how tragic it is that we thought they were complete repositories of information." In fact, they are ten percent repositories and we've lost most of the content that these people had because all of the book information is linear content. - Clark Aldrich % I'm going to file [most emails] out of sight and read them once in a while. [...] I'm also planning to blog less, to twitter less, to stop reading RSS streams, etc. If I don't I'm going to turn into one of those trendy knowledgeable tech people who generate a lot of hot air and not much else. I don't want to be like that. - Terry Jones, January 2008 % You don't need to put your opinions into your blog. You're free to maintain careful neutrality, straddling the bland fence of noncom- mital objectivity, positioning yourself as broad-minded yet aloof. Your blog will totally suck, of course, but hey, it's your blog. - Steve Yegge, January 2005 % To all those so easily offended by a *word*: How about everytime I say 'fuck' and it offends you, you make a contribution (time, money, or resources) to some reputable organization that is out to positively change the world. Then you take the moral high ground. I can fuckin' live with that. - John Minnihan, October 2006 % When it comes to prose, a centralized group of editors does better than "the masses". [...] Technology helps in some places, but there's no replacement for a good editor. And I'm not talking about Emacs. - Jacob Kaplan-Moss, March 2008 % Tutti quelli che hanno i vostri dati si /cagano addosso/ a pensare che voi questi dati potreste metterli da qualche parte dove /tutti/ possono usarli, e non solo loro. È per questo che OpenID è stupendo, perché finalmente la rete ha detto a google, microsoft e yahoo: Io so' io, e voi non siete un cazzo. - Gabriele Renzi, Maggio 2008 % The internet too democratizes both production and consumption of media. [...] It too is upending the role of traditional gatekeepers and destroy- ing the older economics of scarcity. And it too is leading to a cottage industry of hand-wringing: "Why can't we just get a little bit of inter- net, but keep most things the way they were?" - Clay Shirky, March 2008 % My main social network today is my own website. Mostly because I know it's the one site that nobody is going to close on me. You work with these [social network] sites long enough, and you come to realize, if it belongs to someone else, it's going to die, eventually. - Stephen Downes, May 2008 % Defamation laws are really designed for a day when there was a restrict- ion on publication. It was to deal with the situation where a powerful publishing entity could write false things, and the victim had no recourse or way to respond. That's just not the case anymore. - Michael Masnick, June 2008 % Maybe putting a really awful map like this in a TV studio background is a subconscious, subliminal way of conveying a message to the viewing public: don't believe a word we're saying! - Strange Maps, July 2008