Valve's Gabe Newell:

Each developer's responsible for thinking about how to measure and optimize customer satisfaction.

Atul Gawande:

The difference between triumph and defeat, you'll find, isn't about willingness to take risks. It's about mastery of rescue.

Jennifer Tilly:

Sometimes I'll go easy on some really old guy, and then he just really sticks it to me a half-hour later. He's really ungracious about it, and I think, Oooh, I should have never let him live. I should have snuffed him out when I had the chance.

John Flowers:

The way it works is, we give away the product for free, then lure advertisers with the promise of connecting them to millions of people who hate to pay for things. Amazingly, it works.

Charles Wheelan:

Some of your worst days lie ahead. If you are going to do anything worthwhile, you will face periods of grinding self-doubt and failure. Be prepared to work through them ... one year after college graduation, I had no job, less than $500 in assets, and I was living with an elderly retired couple. The only difference between when I graduated and today is that now no one can afford to retire.

Nick Foster:

Making things is hard. Really hard. Don't let anyone tell you anything different.

John Marbach:

Stop building your idea. Start solving a problem.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Michael Braun, the former chief of operations for the D.E.A., told me a story about the construction of a high-tech fence along a stretch of border in Arizona. "They erect this fence," he said, "only to go out there a few days later and discover that these guys have a catapult, and they're flinging hundred-pound bales of marijuana over to the other side." He paused and looked at me for a second. "A catapult," he repeated. "We've got the best fence money can buy, and they counter us with a 2,500-year-old technology."

Shawn Henry, FBI executive assistant director:

We're not winning.

I don't see how we ever come out of this without changes in technology or changes in behavior, because with the status quo, it's an unsustainable model. Unsustainable in that you never get ahead, never become secure, never have a reasonable expectation of privacy or security.

Clay Johnson:

Your clicks have consequences.

James A. Lewis:

There's a kind of willful desire not to admit how bad things are.

George Hotz:

If they were that good, they wouldn't have got caught.

Richard Bejtlich:

The median number of days between the start of an intrusion and its detection was 416.

Nicholas Kristof:

Antibiotic-resistant infections kill more Americans annually than AIDS.

Tom Vanderbilt:

If a pattern can't be observed, it probably just means you haven't looked long enough.

Benjamin Sandofsky:

There are no silver bullets to solve essential complexity. Trying to abstract away essential complexity only makes things more complex.

Colin Powell:

Tell me what you know.

Tell me what you don't know.

Then tell me what you think.

Always distinguish which is which.

Graham Morehead:

Their numbers were better than ever. Their lives were hell.

Carl Honore:

Our addiction to speed is backfiring on us.

Speed becomes a form of denial. It's a way of running away from those deeper, tangled problems. Instead of focusing on questions like who am I, and what is my role here, it all becomes a superficial to-do list.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi:

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI is the story of 85 year-old Jiro Ono, considered by many to be the world's greatest sushi chef. He is the proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat, sushi-only restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station. ... For most of his life, Jiro has been mastering the art of making sushi, but even at his age he sees himself still striving for perfection, working from sunrise to well beyond sunset to taste every piece of fish; meticulously train his employees; and carefully mold and finesse the impeccable presentation of each sushi creation.

Elizabeth Kolbert:

Lots of people offer the notion that parenthood will make them happy. Here the evidence is, sadly, against them. Research shows that people who have children are no more satisfied with their lives than people who don't. If anything, the balance tips the other way: parents are less happy.

We regard pleasure and pain differently. Pleasure missed out on by the nonexistent doesn't count as a harm. Yet suffering avoided counts as a good, even when the recipient is a nonexistent one.

Ben Hammersley:

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

Om Malik:

The biggest mistake we make in life is that we end up spending most of it trying to be who we are supposed to be instead of who we want to be.

Marge Simpson:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

Tim Kreider:

Life is too short to be busy.

INRIX:

As part of the 2011 Full Year Scorcard Analysis, INRIX has analyzed the most congested corridors in the United States by metro for the year. Here, we present the analysis of the 150+ most congested corridors with reports of traffic congestion during peak periods as well as in the worst hour of the week. In addition, there are comparisons and trends from 2010 to 2011.

Renault:

2012, the iconic Alpine A110 turns 50. To celebrate the event, Renault has designed a concept car: Renault Alpine A110-50. dedicated to performance and driving pleasure.

Tim Kreider:

It isn't generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It's almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they've taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they've "encouraged" their kids to participate in. They're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they're addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter.

The Editors of n+1:

Systems of accreditation do not assess merit; merit is a fiction created by systems of accreditation. Like the market for skin care products, the market for credentials is inexhaustible: as the bachelor's degree becomes democratized, the master's degree becomes mandatory for advancement. Our elaborate, expensive system of higher education is first and foremost a system of stratification , and only secondly -- and very dimly -- a system for imparting knowledge.

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.

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.

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.

Jen Paton:

In this limitless Web, there is always someone who will agree with us, supply the arguments and evidence we need to support what we thought anyway, playing on our emotions in a way that may or may not be honest. This may not necessarily lead us closer to truth.

Prachi Patel:

Magnetic hard disks will soon be able to store one terabit (a trillion bits) per square inch. The technology, called heat-assisted magnetic recording, involves heating the magnetic regions on a disk that hold individual data bits, allowing those regions to be made tinier. Seagate says the method promises to keep increasing storage density, and it could lead to 60-terabyte hard drives. The company is targeting 2015 for its first commercial product featuring the technology.

Carl Zimmer:

Shaving a cubic millimeter of brain tissue would yield a petabyte of data.

But better technology alone won't get Seung to his connectome. "The challenge is analyzing them," he says. Toward that end, he'll need a lot more eyeballs. The more people who can proofread his connectomes, the faster his maps will grow. As a result, he and his colleagues have set up a website where the public can pitch in.

"We're trying to gamify it," Seung says.

Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt, and Liang Wu:

Do humans want everything to be like a game?

An exchange:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."