Tom Vanderbilt:

Traffic is the most dangerous thing that most of us ever encounter.

Bruce Schneier:

The increased automobile deaths due to people deciding to drive instead of fly is 500 per year.

David Byrne:

Look around you. Bikes are everywhere: in glamorous ads and fashionable neighborhoods, parked outside art galleries, clubs, office buildings. More and more city workers arrive for work on bikes. The future is visible in the increasing number of bikes you see all over the urban landscape.

Tyler Cohen:

Manhattan streets are full of cars cruising around, looking for cheaper on-street parking, rather than pulling into a lot. The waste includes drivers' lost time and the costs of running those engines. By contrast, San Francisco has just instituted a pioneering program to connect parking meter prices to supply and demand, with prices being adjusted, over time, within a general range of 25 cents to $6 an hour.

Tom Vanderbilt:

After almost a hundred years in which driving has remained essentially unchanged, it has been completely transformed in just the past half decade.

Bradley Berman:

BMW estimates that one-pedal driving increases by 20 percent the amount of energy reclaimed when the electric drive motor switches into generator mode and pumps juice into the battery pack.

Joshua Brustein:

With Driving Safely, users enter their children's phone numbers, and the app automatically begins gathering information. A parent then sees the information from a car's dashboard, like how fast it is traveling or how much gas is in the tank. The system can be set to send alerts, so that users will be notified instantaneously if drivers they are tracking brake suddenly after sending a text, or are driving without seat belts.

The app also collects data over time to give what Mr. Dar described as a driver's "DNA score," showing how safely someone is driving. He pulled up a prototype app, showing two children from a fictional family side by side; one sibling was a slightly safer driver than the other.

Mr. Dar acknowledged that this sort of monitoring will most likely be more popular among those doing the tracking than those being tracked. So the system builds in a rewards system for drivers. If a driver maintains a certain DNA score over a period of time, for instance, his or her account would be credited with an extra allotment of text-messaging capability. Testing on the app is set to begin in June with a group of AT&T employees in Atlanta and their children.

Richard Clarke:

According to Congressional testimony last week, 94 percent of companies served by the computer-security firm Mandiant were unaware that they had been victimized.

By failing to act, Washington is effectively fulfilling China's research requirements while helping to put Americans out of work.

Erica Newland, of the Center for Democracy and Technology:

Can export controls be meaningfully extended in ways that reduce the spread of ... 'weapons of mass surveillance' without diminishing the ability of dissidents to connect and communicate?

Amrutha Gayathri:

In a statement released Thursday, Reza Taghipour, the Iranian minister for Information and Communications Technology, announced the setting up of a national Intranet and the effective blockage of services like Google, Gmail, Google Plus, Yahoo and Hotmail, in line with Iran's plan for a "clean Internet."

Christopher Mims:

Most of us leave Wi-Fi on by default, in part because our phones chastise us when we don't. (Triangulation by Wi-Fi hotspots is important for making location services more accurate.) But you probably didn't realize that, using proprietary new "nodes" from Navizon, any device with an active Wi-Fi radio can be seen by a system like Navizon's.

Matt Schwartz:

People tend to believe that Web operators will keep their data safe in perpetuity. They entrust much more than poetry to unseen servers maintained by system administrators they've never met.

Lloyd's Risk Index, on cyber insecurity:

Even large businesses need to ask if they really understand the nature of the risk to which they are exposed.

Alex Howard:

The simple reality is that in Washington, national security trumps everything.

Abu Muqawama:

Military cyberpower, once invisible to all but a few defense specialists, is slowly becoming visible. In some ways the current wave of commentary on Stuxnet is simply a delayed reaction to what should have been apparent once the electromagnetic spectrum was utilized by Abraham Lincoln to command the American Civil War: ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Bernardo Huberman and Christina Aperjis:

Why not pay individuals for their data?

Kate Murphy:

You know that dream where you suddenly realize you're stark naked? You're living it whenever you open your browser.

Cyrus Rangan, director of the toxicology bureau for the county public health department and a medical toxicology consultant for Children's Hospital Los Angeles:

All it takes is just a few swallows and you have a drunk teenager. There is no question that it is dangerous.

Jeff Hammerbacher:

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.

Tom Simonite:

Even as Facebook has embedded itself into modern life, it hasn't done that much with what it knows about us. Its stash of data looms like an oversize shadow. Everyone has a feeling that this resource will yield something big, but nobody knows quite what.

John Gruber:

Yahoo had a chance to buy Google in 2001 but then-CEO Terry Semel didn't pull the trigger. I don't think Instagram is the next Google, but Zuckerberg sure as shit doesn't want Facebook to be the next Yahoo.

Henry Blodget:

When talking about Zuckerberg's most valuable personality trait, a colleague jokingly invokes the famous Stanford marshmallow tests, in which researchers found a correlation between a young child's ability to delay gratification -- devour one treat right away, or wait and be rewarded with two -- with high achievement later in life. If Zuckerberg had been one of the Stanford scientists' subjects, the colleague jokes, Facebook would never have been created: He'd still be sitting in a room somewhere, not eating marshmallows.

Nathan Heller:

Today, more than fifty per cent of U.S. residents are single, nearly a third of all households have just one resident, and five million adults younger than thirty-five live alone.

Eric Klinenberg:

What matters is not whether we live alone, but whether we feel alone. There's ample support for this conclusion outside the laboratory. As divorced or separated people often say, there's nothing lonelier than living with the wrong person.

Stephen Marche:

In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.

Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are.

Kim Tingley:

To restore ecosystems to acoustic health, researchers must determine, to the last raindrop, what compositions nature would play without us.

In the United States, more than 80 percent of land is within two-thirds of a mile of a road.

Ted Thornhill:

They say silence is golden -- but there's a room in the U.S that's so quiet it becomes unbearable after a short time.

The longest that anyone has survived in the 'anechoic chamber' at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis is just 45 minutes.

It's 99.99 per cent sound absorbent and holds the Guinness World Record for the world's quietest place, but stay there too long and you may start hallucinating.

Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky:

What is wealth for? How much money do we need to lead a good life? This might seem an impossible question. But it is not a trivial one.

AP:

Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison has reached a deal to buy 98 percent of the island of Lanai from its current owner, Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie said Wednesday.

Stephen Cave:

A report issued last month said two-thirds of adults in the US were overweight or obese.

Terry Castle:

The "helicopter parents" who hover over nearly every choice or action of their offspring have given way to "snowplow parents" who determinedly clear a path for their child and shove aside any obstacle they perceive in the way.

David H. Freedman:

A report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development projected that two-thirds of the populations of some industrialized nations will be obese within 10 years.

Ryan Tomayko:

Telling people what to do is lazy. Instead, try to convince them with argument. This is how humans interact when there's no artificial authority structure and it works great. If you can't convince people through argument then maybe you shouldn't be doing it.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

"Mobutu Sese Seko":

When Obama makes an enemies list, there are footnotes. This is a baccalaureate committee, and some lucky Muslim is about to graduate a threat level.

Pico Iyer:

The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual.

Tony Judt:

The tendency of mass democracy to produce mediocre politicians is what worries me. The vast majority of human beings today are simply not competent to protect their own interests.

William Damon:

Our serious problem today is not simply that many people routinely tell lies. As I have noted, people have departed from the truth for one reason or another all throughout human history. The problem now is that we seem to be reaching a dysfunctional tipping point in which an essential commitment to truthfulness no longer seems to be assumed in our society. If this is indeed the case, the danger is that the bonds of trust important in any society, and essential for a free and democratic one, will dissolve so that the kinds of discourse required to self-govern will become impossible.

Andrew Hacker:

In 1972, altogether 22,887 tax returns were filed with today's equivalent of $1 million in income. By 1985, the number had expanded to 58,603. And in 2009, the most recent year for figures, this bracket had multiplied to 236,893.

While real earnings for the overall workforce have risen only 7 percent since 1985, professions like physicians and professors have done several times better. Incomes of lawyers and executives, for their part, have soared much further than anyone would have forecast a few decades ago.

Slavoj Zizek:

Today, immaterial labor is hegemonic in the sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th-century capitalism, large industrial production was hegemonic: it imposes itself not through force of numbers but by playing the key, emblematic structural role. What emerges is a vast new domain called the 'common': shared knowledge and new forms of communication and co-operation. The products of immaterial production aren't objects but new social or interpersonal relations; immaterial production is bio-political, the production of social life.

The proletarianisation of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is matched at the opposite extreme by the irrationally high remuneration of top managers and bankers (irrational since, as investigations have demonstrated in the US, it tends to be inversely proportional to a company's success). Rather than submit these trends to moral... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Chinese and Russian intelligence services and corporate hackers are using cyber attacks to steal hi-tech American research and development data, a US government report has said.

US officials have complained quietly for years about cyber attacks originating from China but this report offers the first such detailed public accusations from US officials.

The record came out to little to no fanfare earlier this summer on Drag City, and an awesome clip of "Fist Fight" can be heard on the label's site. The band also released an interview it supposedly did with Stabber fanzine back in 1984 that's well worth a read, especially for anyone with an interest in Black Flag, Minor Threat, or being 16 and mad.

In recent weeks, news stories quietly announced that major labels are making plans to discontinue the recording and sales of music CDs in late 2012. Yet, as MP3s have taken over the market as the prevailing way to record and purchase music, there are still many - millions even - who purchase and listen to CDs on a daily basis.

Vice president Dmitri Alperovitch, a highly regarded threat researcher whose work at the company helped give it a reputation for conducting cutting-edge research on hacking, quietly left last month, without the company issuing any announcement.

Alperovitch led a research team that produced several high-profile studies on suspected Chinese-government backed hackers during his tenure at McAfee.

Verizon quietly announced a change to its privacy policy last week that will allow the communications giant to collect information about its telephone customers' whereabouts and Internet surfing for use in business and marketing reports. It promises that this information will only be shared anonymously.

About a month ago, Microsoft quietly announced that it would stop making Zunes.

Late last week, as the world was getting ready for its Fall weekend, Google quietly announced it was shutting down Google Code Search, Jaiku, the University Research Program for Google Search, Google Labs, iGoogle's social features and, ... [ Read More (1.1k in body) ]

Worf:

There is the theory of the Mobius ... a twist in the fabric of space, where time becomes a loop ...

Ben Hammersley:

The freeing of public data over the past ten years has been driven by geeks, it's true, but their arguments were merely foreshadowing a general shift in the mindset of the population at large.

The you-show-me-yours-I'm-already-showing-you-mine deal is the next big movement. Nevermind government league tables: we want everything.

We expect everything. And we expect it on our own terms.

David Remnick:

Ten years after the attacks, we are still faced with questions about ourselves -- questions about the balance of liberty and security, about the urge to make common cause with liberation movements abroad, and about the countervailing limits. Only absolutists answer these questions absolutely.

Paul Ford:

Why so many people in real estate? Because ... locked away inside the brick walls and ballustrades there is a trillion dollars ... And when a number has that many zeros, people look to fill them.

We too wanted our cut, our large box of air and our sunset, and the comfort of 30 years of obligation to a huge and terrible bank. To fill in the zeros for ourselves. So it was with glad hearts that one afternoon at a strange legal office deep in Brooklyn, in a windowless room at the back, we pushed checks across a table. They handed us the keys, and then everyone -- including my wife and I -- went home.

Katharine Mieszkowski:

Geeks talking amongst themselves on Usenet about how Usenet should best be run, while having fun with homonyms: Almost 20 years later, has anything really changed?

Lapham's Quarterly:

Thirty to sixty million -- the estimate of buffalo in the United States in the early 1800s. 1,200 -- the estimate some ninety years later.

100 years of East London style in 100 seconds.

Adam Gopnik:

If you and I had the self-discipline to plan our meals and lay out our ingredients thoughtfully, we could soon be making electric eel powder with goat-... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Patrick McKenzie:

Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals.

Robin Sloan:

The sight of the stark new Google Reader ... made me feel, for a moment, utterly alone.

Matt Taibbi:

If America is now circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain.

Kevin Fox:

I believe this has happened because Google Reader was held to a mandate of refreshing Google products under a common style guide, but from what I've been told it had no full-time user experience resource to apply that guide in a way that made sense for the nuances and needs of that particular product.

This product is important to me, and for many it fulfills the need for a source-centric news consumption product that has been overshadowed by the overwhelming push of 'social stream' products such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. While those products are important, they don't meet the same needs that Google Reader was designed to, and Reader should not fall by the wayside, a victim to fashion.

Brian Shih:

Google released the previously announced set of changes around G+ integration and UI updates today, and boy is it a disaster.

It's almost as if Google wants to demonstrate that, yes, they don't really get platforms.

Tyler Cowen:

Google, why did you wreck it so?

Lisa Agustin:

From an information design perspective, I'd think making the design cleaner would mean maximizing space for original content. Rather it seems they did the opposite, with a thicker/more spacious header bar that pushes content further down the page.

Steve Yegge:

I hate ... plussing, or whatever it's called ...

Occupy Google Reader:

If I wanted Facebook I'd use it.

Christina Hendricks:

No man should be on Facebook.

Jim Collins:

Thousands of people could have done the same thing that Mr. Gates did, at the same time. But they didn't.

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Seth Godin:

Saying no to loud people gives you the resources to say yes to important opportunities.

Patrick Haggard:

We feel we choose, but we don't.

Arnab Gupta:

We don't look for data, we look for signal.

Christopher Beam:

If you have an idea for an app, do it now. Throw it up online. Find an audience. Worry about quality later.

Frank Rieger, a spokesman for the Chaos Computer Club, on R2D2:

We were surprised by how bad the quality of the code was.

Ray Ozzie:

I love being around people who just don't believe things can't be done, or don't know that they can't be done, and just build whatever the concept requires.

Eddie Schwartz, chief information security officer at RSA:

Stop whining and get busy.

Steve Yegge:

Monitoring and QA are the same thing.

Ginia Bellafante:

In 1969, there were 78,000 auto thefts in New York City, which amounts to 215 a day.

Erin Nealy Cox, a former U.S. federal computer crimes prosecutor:

It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

Nick Bilton:

It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.