Pico Iyer:

I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno's arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Jan Chipchase:

The money you turn down defines you as much as the work you take on.

Nick Romeo, on Frank Bruni:

He's not asking his readers to examine a cultural obsession with success, so much as assuring them that they can still impress others without attending highly selective undergraduate institutions. Just look at all the people who run huge companies or work at prestigious consulting or law firms, he says. Not all of them went to Ivy League schools! There are "myriad routes to a corner office," as he puts it. He never seriously considers the possibility that college might shape students into adults who are not interested in a corner office.

SLOMO:

It was kind of the zenith of my manhood.

I was in the cafeteria line behind an old man who was all bent over and everything. I had asked him how old he was, and he said he was ninety three. He was by himself, and he kept getting one thing after another, putting a lot of food on his tray. I thought I would wise off to him a little bit, so I said, "How does a strapping young man like me get to be an old codger like you?" And he looked at me and said, "Do what you want to!" And at first I was thinking, this old man just made more sense to me than anything I'd ever heard in my life. It's just, do what you want to.

Here's The Thing:

Alec Baldwin: You wanna know, the truth is, I wanna be more like you.

Jerry Seinfeld: Really? How --

AB: Because you are a very, happy -- you know I look at you, and I say to myself, everything is always, like, why aren't you doing what other people do?

JS: Right ...

AB: Meaning, like, the first thing people would say -- in the business -- I mean, even outside the business if they have some savvy about it, was, they'd say, did Jerry want to ramp up a production company and just *print* TV shows? How many sitcoms could you have launched with the imprimatur of your name on it?

JS: Forget it!

AB: You could have your own channel. The Jerry channel.

JS: Yeah, but I didn't take that bait.

AB: Why?

JS: Cuz I know what it is. I know what it is, that's why.

AB: What is it?

JS: You can't pull that over on me! Cuz I've sat in all the chairs, I've been in all the rooms. I know what it is. Look, Alec, you've been there, right?

AB: Yes!

JS: You can't trick me into thinking ...

AB: Thinking what?! Share with the people.

JS: ... that that's good.

AB: That's not good why?

JS: Because most of it is not creative work. And not reaching an audience. You wanna be on the water? How do you wanna be on the water? You wanna be on a yacht or you wanna be on a surfboard? I wanna be on a surfboard. I don't wanna deal with a yacht. That's a yacht. Some people want a yacht to say "See my yacht."

Sterling Hayden:

Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

Charles Dunlap, a retired Air Force JAG general:

I think the norm is evolving.

Mike Rogers:

I think we can work our way through this.

Alex Tabarrok:

Democracy constrains what governments do but it's a thin constraint easily capable of being pierced when stressed.

Devlin Barrettt and Danny Yadron:

Officials still are debating what lessons to learn from the attack and its aftermath. The administration seems to acknowledge more information needs to flow both ways.

Most of those who discussed the incident agree on one other matter. They expect other hackers to draw lessons from what happened to Sony, becoming more aggressive in how they target companies and the demands they make.

Charles Dunlap, a retired Air Force JAG general:

Some of those [non-uniformed] people might not realize it, but they are belligerents, they are targetable, and they are targetable in the same basis as active duty military.

The Economist:

"It became clear that no matter how ready you think you are, you are never ready enough," notes a draft report jointly compiled by the Estonian authorities and Microsoft.

Steven Bellovin:

We don't even have the right words.

Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen:

These were children who were driven everywhere in SUVs with carefully managed after-school activities. The researchers noted that the moms were also "staging" their children's development. They were trying to shape children who were creative, fun, outgoing, humorous, intelligent, and quiet all at the same time.

Alan Jacobs:

By enforcing surveillance as the normative form of care, the state effectively erases the significance of all other forms of care. Parents might teach their children nothing of value, no moral standards, no self-discipline, no compassion for others -- but as long as those children are incessantly observed, then according to the state's standards the parents of those children are good parents. And they are good because they are training their children to accept a lifetime of passive acceptance of surveillance.

Peter Gray:

One playmate was blindfolded; then one of the others would step forward and hit him hard on the face; and then, with blindfold removed, the one who had been hit had to guess, from facial expressions or other evidence, who had hit him.

Esther Perel:

When there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.

Jack Julian:

Alain Philippon, 38, of Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Que., refused to divulge his cellphone password to Canada Border Services Agency during a customs search Monday night at Halifax Stanfield International Airport.

Philippon had arrived in Halifax on a flight from Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic. He's been charged under section 153.1 (b) of the Customs Act for hindering or preventing border officers from performing their role under the act.

Hans de Zwart:

If your child is ignoring your calls and doesn't reply to your texts, you can use the 'Ignore no more' app. It will lock your child's phone until they call you back. This clearly shows that most surveillance is about control. Control is the reason why we take pleasure in surveilling ourselves more and more.

Rob Dunn:

Our shadows of shed life sustain multitudes.

Rachel Emma Silverman:

Under a Delaware law passed last summer, executors can now access online accounts without a court order, unless the deceased has instructed otherwise. So far this year, at least 13 states, including Florida, Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota and Washington, are considering versions of this digital data act.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Steven Levy:

The Internet is a vast lawn with billions of mole-holes.

Nicole Perlroth:

There is no indication that hackers have exploited the newly discovered flaw, and technology companies say they are working to fix the problem.

The Houston Chronicle:

There's just something about this technology that leads police to view transparency as the enemy.

The Economist:

A recent paper showed that the motion sensing gyroscopes in phones can be used to record speech even when the phone's microphone is switched off.

AVG:

This malware hijacks the shutting down process of your mobile, so when the user turns the power off button to shut down their mobile, it doesn't really shut down.

After pressing the power button, you will see the real shutdown animation, and the phone appears off. Although the screen is black, it is still on.

Graham Cluley:

The good news is that Microsoft doesn't have any evidence to believe that the flaw has been exploited publicly to attack its customers. The bad news is that isn't proof that it hasn't happened, or that it won't happen now online criminals have been given the nod that such an attack might be possible.

The Economist:

"It became clear that no matter how ready you think you are, you are never ready enough," notes a draft report jointly compiled by the Estonian authorities and Microsoft.

Mark Foulon:

It has become clear that Internet access in itself is a vulnerability that we cannot mitigate. We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.

Herb Lin:

Every boardroom should be contemplating the possibility that its company's computer systems will be destroyed and private email, salary information, and much more publicly revealed. Executives need to decide what it's worth to defend against these outcomes.

Jason Koebler:

The State Department says that John Kerry is the "first Secretary of State to rely primarily on a state.gov email account;" all predecessors used their personal email (if any).

Gemalto:

It has never been more important to follow security best practices and adopt the most recent technologies.

Danny Bradbury:

Fewer than one in four Chrome users follow SSL certificate warnings ... The problem goes beyond mere SSL certificate warnings, say experts. Many people seem to ignore more or less everything that their computers warn them about.

Facebook:

Although we are not aware of anyone abusing this certificate in the wild, it's a real risk and would be hard to detect.

Jason Szep:

In an interview with Reuters, Obama said he was concerned about Beijing's plans for a far-reaching counterterrorism law that would require technology firms to hand over encryption keys, the passcodes that help protect data, and install security "backdoors" in their systems to give Chinese authorities surveillance access.

Matthew Green:

Encryption backdoors will always turn around and bite you in the ass. They are never worth it.

Mike Rogers:

I think we can work our way through this.

Ari Oliver:

The lone trader does his analysis and doesn't worry about being taken because he is just one guy trying to make a few trades. And then his setup happens and he takes his position ... and the market does exactly the thing that will cause him the biggest loss. How can this be? he thinks. He is just one clown trying to clip a few ticks or points, here and there, not worthy of being a target. But he starts to suspect that maybe he is just one of a thousand clowns, or ten thousand, who are all doing exactly the same analysis at precisely the same time and taking the same positions, which are exploited by a better algo in a box somewhere with huge backing. This "thousandth clown theory" starts to gnaw at him, make him doubt.

Man, in SMBC:

I know that the babysitter's club won't cook and eat my children, but I'd just relax more if a profit-motivated third party provided confirmation.

Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel Rasmussen:

"We asked one kid to design his ideal room," another researcher told us. "And it had all sorts of covert elements: booby traps and CSI [from the Crime Scene Investigation TV series] secret doorways. Everything was communicating, 'Stay out!'" The anthropologists discerned that the box of poison mushrooms and the booby-trapped room were both reactions against the staging and surveillance happening in the children's lives.

Omid Safi:

How did we end up living like this? Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we do this to our children? When did we forget that we are human beings, not human doings?

Stanley Kubrick:

Either you care, or you don't. There's no in-between. And if you care, then go all of the way.

Emrys Westacott:

People are less likely to abuse the power [surveillance] gives them if they know that they, too, are vulnerable. Thus the deeper fear for many has to do with situations where surveillance and access to information is combined with an asymmetrical power structure.

David Banks:

Even if we lived in a world where everyone had to prove their position with statistical data, and there were monitoring stations evenly distributed across the country, we would still face the issue of what political sociologists of science call "organized ignorance." That is, powerful actors like governments and companies make a point to not understand things so that they are difficult or impossible to regulate. Whether it is counting the number of sexual assaults, or the amount of chemicals used in fracking, intentionally not collecting data is a powerful tool. So while I agree ... that people should base important decisions on sound data, we should also acknowledge that access to data is deeply uneven.

Lionel Trilling:

Perhaps at no other time has the enterprise of moral realism ever been so much needed, for at no other time have so many people committed themselves to moral righteousness. We have the books that point out the bad conditions, that praise us for taking progressive attitudes. We have no books that raise questions in our minds not only about conditions but about ourselves, that lead us to refine our motives and ask what might lie behind our good impulses.

Moral indignation, which has been said to be the favorite emotion of the middle class, may be in itself an exquisite pleasure.

We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes. Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellowmen the objects of our enlightened interest to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

Cormac McCarthy, "Blood Meridian":

At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

That the enemy is us, is never easy to take.

Gleb Pavlovsky:

In this kind of atmosphere, everything is possible. This is a Weimar atmosphere. There are no longer any limits.

Susannah Karlsson, of Brooklyn Defender Services, on Corrective Education Company:

It's a private company acting as prosecutor, judge, jury, and collector. That's remarkable.

Charlie Stross:

Some folks (especially Americans) seem to think that their AR-15s are a guarantor that they can resist tyranny. But guns are an 18th century response to 18th century threats to democracy. Capital doesn't need to point a gun at you to remove your democratic rights: it just needs more cameras, more cops, and a legal system that is fair and just and bankrupts you if you are ever charged with public disorder and don't plead guilty.

Doug Franklin:

A secure developer needs appropriate levels of both paranoia and understanding of the threat.

Krypt3ia:

We are losing the battle and it is not because China is hacking us all with advanced malware on par with Stuxnet. We all need to understand that what we see out of the media is hype and what we see out of the vendors is marketing and not necessarily what we really need.

Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson:

The hackers first hijacked a translation website that the insurer's customer representatives used when dealing with foreign clients, using it to implant malware on the company's computers, the person said.

Kyle Wiens:

It's entirely possible that changing the engine timing on his own tractor makes a farmer a criminal.

FCC:

Willful or malicious interference with Wi-Fi hot spots is illegal. In addition, we reiterate that Federal law prohibits the operation, marketing, or sale of any type of jamming equipment, including devices that interfere with Wi-Fi, cellular, or public safety communications.

Emrys Westacott:

What we should fear is not so much the technology as those who who are willing to misuse it.

Westley McDuffie:

Having the best tool on the planet will do nothing for your posture if you are a complete moron.

Michael Hayden:

We use[d] to love it when a target had great confidence that it was (unbreakably) secure!!

Leigh Alexander:

No matter what else is happening, suddenly you're thinking about the phone. Don't reach for the phone, you scold yourself automatically, fixing your gaze with effort on the tear-filled eyes of the person who is telling you something important about their life. And then you feel deservedly awful about yourself. What on earth could be happening in your phone that is more important than this? Something must be wrong with you.

David Kilcillen:

People don't get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.

Philippe Verduyn et al:

Passive Facebook usage undermines affective well-being.

Simon Kuper:

One per centers today announce themselves not by their clothes or accents but by their networks. People pull out their smartphones over dinner not just because they are addicted, bored or keen to show their busyness but because the phone is the physical manifestation of their networks.

Gemalto:

Our network architecture is designed like a cross between an onion and an orange.

Nicholas Weaver:

The Internet is supposed to lose packets.

Tim Wu:

It has been a tough year for what once passed as conventional wisdom.

Scott Atran:

If you want to find out who's going to fight and die, if you want to break up a particular terrorist cell, find out what they're eating and how they dress. Plots never occur in mosques: you have to be quiet in a mosque. They occur in fast food places, soccer fields, picnics and barbeques.

AQ:

Underwear should be the normal type that people wear, not anything that shows you're a fundamentalist.

Jonathan Mahler:

How could different people see the same article of clothing so differently?