The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

The idea is to make the goat secrete spider silk into its milk.

"They're just goats. [Pause.] Mostly."

We're actually reaching a level where you find yourself imagining questions that a year ago you couldn't even formulate.

According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?"

Science can be effectively regulated, if we possess the political will to do so.

They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?

A health director ... reported this week that a small mouse, which presumably had been watching television, attacked a little girl and her full-grown cat ... Both mouse and cat survived, and the incident is recorded here as a reminder that things seem to be changing.

Damn McDonalds for creating so many fast food nations!

It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don't matter, that is much worse.

Fight the cult of process.

Money will keep talking, the public interest will keep walking. The great battles, in short, are still ahead.

Stop looking over your shoulder and invent something!

Great, world-changing things always start small. The ideal project is one where people don't have meetings, they have lunch.

"The whole idea of bigger being better, I just don't think that's the case anymore."

The hardest part isn't inventing the solution but figuring out how to get people to adopt it.

I like to focus on banal, boring issues like standards, protocols, and IPR because I delight in showing how supposedly arcane technical problems actually turn out to be political.

People who have better tools win.

Never underestimate the value of a good tool properly employed. But don't expect it to solve everything, especially over the long term. Your enemy is watching you, he has read his Claude Shannon, and he has some good tools of his own.

People will do stuff today that they would not do even a year ago.

Everything seems to devolve into Friendster, sooner or later.

Technology has made it easier than ever to count your friends -- but that doesn't mean you should.

Teens need a sense of being able to get away. Really away.

I have two questions.

1) What's so wrong with the real world that makes everyone want to get away from it?

2) If everyone is so eager to "escape", who will ever fix the problems?

I try to work on things that won't happen unless I do them.

It's ironic that entrepreneurism preaches chaos, while staunch corporate management theory preaches control. The typical organization is constantly vacillating between those states. It's never one or the other, and the tension is constantly changing on a daily basis. It's that tension, muscle pushing against bone, that gets things done.

You can't change the fact that it is human nature for people to carve up a problem and try to own things, for the complexity to accrete in corners, and for the vocabulary of the project not to make it all the way across.

I'm 41 now so I've decided I need to develop my grumpy side. So here's a rant about the sorry state of pop music.

Pablo Picasso: "Mediocre artists borrow; great artists steal."

Any time you skip a commercial ... you're actually stealing the programming.

"It is a case of bootleggers bootlegging bootlegs."

Maybe people aren't buying the latest crap because it sounds just like the crap they bought ten years ago.

Music is just background noise for whatever it is that you're really doing.

Music used to be an event, not a product. For the iPod generation, music as Art is being increasingly devalued, even as it becomes pervasive to the point of ubiquity.

... a deal for licensing of music online ...

Audiences scale, communities don't.

What am I going to use it for?

The steady stream of celebrity death should ensure plenty of free promotion -- elaborate outside advertising isn't necessary when the passing of even culturally marginal figures receives extensive what-does-it-all-mean metareporting in the nation's newsweeklies.

The Internet may be a mould-breaking new medium but, like all the media that came before it, someone has to pay for it, and that usually means, one way or another, users.

Needless to say, blogs are addictive. They are not, however, the most economical use of your time.

The live audience cheers for Krusty as the show comes to an end and Krusty exits the stage.

Off stage, the Fox producer approaches Krusty, smiling and holding a piece of paper. In a soft, serious voice, he says, "Krusty, the ratings were good -- Raymond re-run good."

There will be some things that people will see.
There will be some things that people won't see.
And life goes on.

A brave man would see catharsis in all this misery; a wise man would not be so hasty.

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

For many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being.

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.

It is unclear whether many of these interlocking relationships served any economic purpose.

It was bold, it was risky, it was expensive. And it was wrong.

How did such a triumph of engineering leave so much corporate wreckage?

What actually drove the company and others like it into the ground was an epic miscalculation ...

52% of Americans think dinosaurs and humans lived together.

What kind of D&D character are you?

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

You often learn who you are by realizing who you are not.

Cynicism will lead you to the truth. Or vice versa.

"We wanted the best, but it turned out as always."
-- Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russian prime minister, 1992-1998; now, a billionaire oligarch

A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.
-- Louis Kahn

"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."

Al Qaeda is not an organization. It is a scene.

Ideas should never become ideologies.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

I could have done that. I could have done that while doing all the other things that I do. Why didn't I?

MORAL: Many a plan has just one flaw: No one has the courage to try it.

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...

Damn I need funding for this ...

Now I have a reputation. I can be selective about what I go do.

He did what an increasing number of senior managers uncertain of their job prospects are doing: He set himself up at his own company.

There are 260 million people in America, and you are one of them.

No matter who you are, you have the potential to be so very much less.

Tomorrow is closer than you think.

"If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don't think anything of personalities, or emotional conflicts, or of money, or of family distractions; if you just think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even though the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and start taking the first ten, and stay making twenty after, it is amazing how quickly you get through those five thousand steps. Rather, I should say, through the four thousand nine hundred and ninety. The last ten steps you never seem to work out. But you keep on coming nearer to giving the world something well worth having."

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

WashPost editor: "It's a useful service, but it's not going to drive me to the unemployment office tomorrow."

This region has grown accustomed to high-technology highs and lows over four decades, but the current dot-com collapse has lasted longer and cut deeper. And the recently affluent technology workers who had come to believe in the "long boom," the idea that prosperity would be permanent, are quietly giving up their flashy signs of success to make ends meet.

Architectures and institutions are often shaped to fit one another, but they are still different sorts of things.

"You could buy your own used DNA synthesizer and make whatever you ... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Did Texas execute an innocent man?

You can't eat panda ... they are too greasy!

More than 80 percent of the male smallmouth bass in the Potomac are producing eggs.

The crucial questions in history often turn out to involve things that people at the time simply did not understand.

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

As David Li himself said of his own model: "The most dangerous part is when people believe everything coming out of it."

$500 can build things that change how people live.

The implicit assumption of these arguments about strategy is that there is, somewhere out there, a workable strategy. That there is some way to navigate our political system such that you enact wise legislation solving pressing problems. But that's an increasingly uncertain assumption, I think.

A survey last year by the business daily Nikkei found that only 25 percent of Japanese men in their 20s wanted a car, down from 48 percent in 2000, contributing to the slump in sales.

A common mistake of very smart people is to assume that other people's minds work in the same way that theirs do.

By the age of five, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

All too often, creativity goes hand in hand with mental illness. Now we're starting to understand why.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in May that births to unmarried women have reached an astonishing 39.7%.

Your algorithmic mind can be ready to fire on all cylinders, but it can't help you if you never engage it.

Fully 88% of the EU's stocks are overfished.

You can make an argument that the end of the housing crash is near. But that's not what I found at the auctions.

There will be 25 million fewer cars on the road in the US in the next five years.

The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press is over.

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.

It's becoming traditional at this point to argue that perhaps the financial crisis will be good for us, because it will cause people to rediscover other sources of value. I suspect this is wishful thinking, or thinking about something which is quite a long way away, because it doesn't consider just how angry people are going to get when they realize the extent of the costs we are going to carry for the next few decades.

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

By some measures, America already has a lost decade in its rearview mirror. A couple more would mean a lost generation. Worst of all, it would mean my generation. I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

Free is just another price.

Sometimes the best way to understand the present is to look at it from the past.

This is not my home.

Much of the daily material of our lives is now dematerialized and outsourced to a far-flung, unseen network.

The "naked transparency movement" is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff.

In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information.

More than half of respondents said government should be "wholly" or "very" responsible for protecting an individual's online privacy.

We have to look at today's economy and say, "What is it that's really scarce in the Internet economy?" And the answer is attention.

Authenticity is a snark -- although someone will always go hunting for it.

I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media -- and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can't think of a single thing I lack.

We often say we are listening, but actually we are rehearsing in our head what we are going to say when our partner is finished.

Remember kids! In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant.

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

I am not screened because I look like a terrorist. I am routinely screened because I look like someone who will readily comply.

We are a cyber nation.

Deliberate practice is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating genius. For one thing, you need to be smart enough for practice to teach you something.

Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real.

Not many people know eggs freeze.