Jean-Henri Fabre:

Behold them entering upon their promised land, their reeking paradise. Eager to arrive, do they drop from the top of the wall? Not they! .... The newborn worms, thanks to a slight viscidity, cling for a moment to the wire gauze; they swarm, wriggle, release themselves and leap into the chasm. It is a nine inch drop at least.... This confidence in the unknown factor of the precipice, with no indication but that of smell, deserves fuller, investigation. From what height will the flesh fly dare to let her children drop?

...

At the surface of the soil, exposed to the air, the hideous invasion is possible; ay, it is the invariable rule. For the melting down and remolding of matter, man is no better, corpse for corpse, than the lowest of the brutes. Then the fly exercises her rights and deals with us as she does with any ordinary animal refuse. Nature treats us with magnificent indifference in her great regenerating factory: placed in her crucibles, animals and men, beggars and kings are one and all alike. There you have true equality, the only equality in this world of ours: equality in the presence of the maggot.

Paul Seabright:

There are important lessons to be learned from the crisis. But we'll learn them better if we realize that the intellectual and political architects of the system that failed us were not naive at all, but immensely clever and subtle; it was their cleverness and subtlety that undid them. And that is bad news for all of us, for naivete can give way to learning, but cleverness has no obvious higher state.

Above all, like historians assessing the Maginot Line, we must avoid comforting ourselves with the judgment that the system's architects were naive and that therefore we might hope to do much better. Far more important is to be aware that defenses are vulnerable precisely where they are strongest and to be prepared to respond creatively and calmly when they fail, as they surely will again.

Feilix Salmon:

For better or worse, the computers are now in control. Over the past decade, algorithmic trading has overtaken the industry. From the single desk of a startup hedge fund to the gilded halls of Goldman Sachs, computer code is now responsible for most of the activity on Wall Street. (By some estimates, computer-aided high-frequency trading now accounts for about 70 percent of total trade volume.)

WSVN:

The Miami-Dade Police Department recently finalized a deal to buy a drone, which is an unmanned plane equipped with cameras. Honeywell has applied to the FAA for clearance to fly the drone in urban areas.

Michael Chabon:

"Tom Sawyer" is exciting and funny and often surprisingly tender, even capital-R Romantic, and the classic bits -- the fence, the Bible study tickets, the cave, the murder -- appear to have lost none of their power to delight and scare children who dwell in a world of childhood so alien from that of Tom and Huck, half-feral in their liberty, alongside whom my own children seem like dogs in a run, no longer even straining at their cable.

Charles Murray:

When my eldest daughter, then perhaps eight years old, came home with her first Maryland standardized test scores, showing that she was at the 99th percentile in reading and the 93rd percentile in math, her mother's first words -- the very first -- were "What's wrong with the math?"

Michael Chabon:

To attempt to live up to your children's expectations -- to hew to the ideals you espouse and the morals that you lay down for them -- is to guarantee a life of constant failure, a failure equivalent with parenthood itself.

Shaun Ellis:

I moved to the wild. The first time I got up close to a wolf, within around 30 metres, any fear I had quickly turned to respect. I stayed in a den area, a remote spot where wolves look after their young, and very soon one pack began to trust me. I lived with them day and night, and from the start they accepted me into their group. I ate what they ate, mostly raw deer and elk, which they would often bring back for me, or fruit and berries. I never fell ill and my body adapted quickly to its new diet.

I stayed with the same pack for over a year, watching pups grow to adulthood. I never missed human contact during that time.

I felt a tremendous sense of belonging with the wolves.

Bill Murray:

You show me an actor doing a shit movie, I'll show you a guy with a bad divorce.

Paul Krugman:

By all means, let's listen to each other more carefully; but what we'll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are.

Matt Drance:

It's always your friends who stab you in the back.

John Dvorak:

Facebook is actually the logical end-point of what AOL should have become.

Marshall Kirkpatrick:

Facebook isn't just photos like Flickr, it isn't just newsfeeds like Google Reader. It isn't just video like YouTube. It's a whole lot of everything ...

Fred Wilson:

25x to 50x EBITDA for one of, if not the premier Internet company in the world is not crazy.

Jameel Jaffer:

People used to be the custodians of their own records, their own diaries. Now third parties are custodians of all that. Everything you do online is entrusted to someone else -- unless you want to go completely off the grid, and I'm not even sure that is possible.

Matt Liebowitz:

Security experts say the solution is simple, if a bit confusing: Use fake information to fill in the answers to identity-challenge questions when setting up or changing an online account.

Scott Rosenberg:

It's almost always better to correct than to unpublish.

Decius:

In my experience the answer to bad speech has always been more speech.

Seth Godin:

Some say that the problem of our age is that continuous partial attention, this never ending non-stop distraction, addles the brain and prevents us from being productive. Not quite.

The danger is not distraction, the danger is the ability to hide.

Alex Pareene:

When this is the bed you make, you can't be too shocked when monsters hide under it.

Evan Williams:

In the beginning, it was like a million little islands, some of them were bigger islands. If you create something on the web, you're your own island and you try to get people to visit your island.

On the mobile phone, you don't have your own island. You're renting land.

Adam Honore, the research director at Aite Group:

[Unstructured data] is the next wave of trading.

Ruth Simon And James R. Hagerty:

23% of all mortgage borrowers in the US are underwater.

Decius:

Imagine if they all walked.

Charlie Stross:

We're now on the threshold of truly understanding how little we understand.

David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

Moritz Stefaner, Dario Taraborelli, and Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia:

As Doc Searls recently put it, Wikipedia is, like the protocols of the Net, "a set of agreements". A Web protocol defines the way in which computers communicate with each other and make decisions to ensure successful transactions. Wikipedia policies have the same purpose, but instead of transactions between machines, they regulate human decisions. An important part of these decisions bear on what topics are suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia and what topics are not. The present project looks into the nature and shape of collective decisions about the inclusion of a topic in Wikipedia.

Decius on Wikipedia, in 2003:

I've found myself using this more and more recently.

k, in 2005:

The handling of libelous or outright false content is something Wikipedia certainly has to deal with somehow. I think registration is an OK minimal requirement, honestly.

Andrew Keen, in 2009:

In the future, I think there will be pockets of outrageously irresponsible, anonymous people ... but for the most part, we will have cleansed ourselves of the anonymous.

Threat Level, in 2007:

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Notabilia: Visualizing Deletion Discussions on Wikipedia

Clay Shirky:

Bad discourse isn't a behavior problem, it's a design problem.

Douglas Rushkoff:

We are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren't the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.

This week's news that Goldman Sachs has chosen to invest in Facebook while entreating others to do the same should inspire about as much confidence as their investment in mortgage securities did in 2008.

Matt Taibbi:

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

Jeff Atwood:

I've been told many times that Google isn't a monopoly, but they apparently play one on the internet. You are perfectly free to switch to whichever non-viable alternative web search engine you want at any time. Just breathe in that sweet freedom, folks.

[But] Google, the once essential tool, is somehow losing its edge. Is the next generation of search destined to be less algorithmic and more social?

Marco Arment:

I doubt we'll see real progress. Instead, I expect Google's unwillingness to address this issue to create a critical-mass demand -- and hopefully, then, a supply -- of good content, reference information, and product recommendations.

Declan McCullagh:

Howard Schmidt stressed today that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. "I don't have to get a credential if I don't want to," he said.

Joel Rosenblatt:

Apple was accused in a lawsuit of allowing applications for those devices to transmit users' personal information to advertising networks without customers' consent.

Apple iPhones and iPads are set with a Unique Device Identifier, or UDID, which can't be blocked by users, according to the complaint.

The case is Lalo v. Apple, 10-5878, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose).

Clarence W. Dupnik, the Pima County sheriff:

Pretty soon we're not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people willing to subject themselves to serve in public office.

Jerry Weinberger:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Jerry Weinberger:

Our pursuit of happiness first makes us unhappy, and then makes us poor because it makes us corrupt, which then makes us even more unhappy.

For a smart and lucky person in civilized society, the wise thing to do is to work hard and then retire as early as possible.

Alain de Botton:

The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulse, is something we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people and ideas. We require periods of fast in the life of our minds no less than in that of our bodies.

Jay Rosen:

Ninety percent of everything is crap, but that's nothing novel. There's just more everything now.

Lydia Davis:

When you're very young, you're usually happy -- at least you're ready to be. You get older and see things more clearly and there's less to be happy about.

Evgeny Morozov:

The environment of media scarcity produced voters who, on average, were far less partisan and far better informed about politics than are today's voters.

Peter Maass:

It little matters whether we fill our tanks at BP or Exxon stations. What matters is that we visit gas stations less often.

John Allen Paulos:

Unless we know how things are counted, we don't know if it's wise to count on the numbers.

Robert I. Sutton:

Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much.

David Gelernter:

Internet culture is a culture of nowness. As we learn more about now, we know less about then.

Nicholas Bakalar:

People start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. But by the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.

Ben Bernanke:

When you are working, studying, or pursuing a hobby, do you sometimes become so engrossed in what you are doing that you totally lose track of time?

That feeling is called flow.

If you never have that feeling, you should find some new activities -- whether work or hobbies.

Clay Shirky:

I've recently gotten away from the daily news cycle. I've got a weekly clock cycle and a monthly clock cycle. Time is a precious commodity. Increasingly, I'm trying to maximize it.

Martin Marks:

I am busy now;
The Internet has stolen
So much precious time.

Lisa Moore:

It has always been this way. Finite. But at forty-five you realize it.

Trevor Butterworth:

The statement that "a good watch is a watch that tells the time well" only has meaning in a society where timing is everything, where we have ritualized and sanctified time keeping.

Zadie Smith:

The more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.

James Bridle:

Everything should have a history button.

David McRaney:

Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don't have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted.

Barack Obama:

In a big, messy democracy like this, everything takes time. And we're not a culture that's built on patience.

Wendy Kaminer:

I wish the issues were vetted ... but I think they're not, because voters don't have the time, or the energy, or the information.

Billy Hoffman:

Your Time is the most valuable thing that you have. There is nothing more important than how you spend your time.

Penelope Trunk:

Stop talking about time like you need to save it. You just need to use it better.

Paul Graham:

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you.

Merlin Mann voice:

Is that really a good use of your time? What did you make today?

Keith Alexander:

The Internet is fragile.

Decius:

Someone recently told me that they wanted me to look at something in order to understand it, not hack into it. I'm a security vulnerability researcher. I don't understand the difference.

Andy Greenberg:

The exploitation of lawful intercept is more than theoretical.

US-China Economic and Security Review Commission:

Nearly 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic -- including data from the Pentagon, the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other US government websites -- was briefly redirected through computer networks in China last April. Computer security researchers have noted that the capability could enable severe malicious activities.

James Miller:

The cyber threat has outpaced our ability to defend against it.

Dave Winer:

Everyone has a scam. This year the scam is to grab all the user's data and resell it.

Matt Warman:

Users could sue websites for invading their privacy and would have a right to be "forgotten" online, under new proposals from the European Union.

Julia Angwin:

One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business of spying on Internet users.

Tony Judt:

The question is not going to be, Will there be an activist state? The question is going to be, What kind of an activist state?

Declan McCullagh:

A federal judge has ruled that border agents cannot seize a traveler's laptop, keep it locked up for months, and examine it for contraband files without a warrant half a year later.

An unnamed intelligence official:

Every day, every week that goes by, there's just one more week of information that we're not collecting. You sit there and say, 'This is unbelievable that we have this gap.'

Fred Wilson:

Privacy is pretty black and white. It either is or it isn't. And trying to have it both ways won't work.

Tom Cross:

We need to balance privacy interests with the state's interest in monitoring suspected criminals.

Howard Schmidt:

We seek to enable a future where individuals can voluntarily choose to obtain a secure, interoperable, and privacy-enhancing credential (e.g., a smart identity card, a digital certificate on their cell phone, etc) from a variety of service providers -- both public and private -- to authenticate themselves online ...

Steven Bellovin:

People often suggest that adding strong identification to the Internet will solve many security problems. Strong, useful identification isn't possible and wouldn't solve the security issue; trying to have it will create privacy problems.

Eric Schmidt:

The explosion in online consumer monitoring is increasing friction about how strict privacy limits should be. And it's going to get a lot worse.

Pete Warden:

Do we actually prefer that our information is for sale, rather than free? Or are we just comfortable with a 'privacy through obscurity' regime?

Richard Wiseman:

We are far more like somebody watching ourselves than somebody in charge of ourselves.

danah boyd:

Just because technology can record things doesn't mean that it brings attention to them. So people rely on being obscure, even when technology makes that really uncertain. You may think that they shouldn't rely on being obscure, but asking everyone to be paranoid about everyone else in the world is a very very very unhealthy thing.

Margaret Talbot:

The unobserved life is so totally worth living.