You go to developing countries today and you'll find automobiles that you haven't seen since you're childhood and that's because they really are valuable, they're taken care of, they're repaired, and when something breaks, they just don't buy a new one, they actually fix it.
I'd like to describe a sort of life 20 years ago as being a fried egg. There was a yolk and a white and the white was maybe work, and the yolk was life. Today, it's more of an omelet. It's more mixed and it's more interspersed and I think that that's a more interesting state of being and for some people, they'll say well I want the crisp, fried egg approach to life.
I'm not against paying at all. What I'm against is the complexity of paying. And you very often go to a website and you try to click on something and sometimes it will even say it's free, but you have to fill out this form.
Computer science departments have always considered 'user interface' research to be sissy work.
The best way to guarantee a steady stream of new ideas is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways.
Taxes will eventually become a voluntary process, with the possible exception of real estate - the one physical thing that does not move easily and has computable value. The US has a jump-start on the practice, in that 65 percent of local school funds come from real estate taxes - a practice Europeans consider odd and ill advised. But wait until that's all there is left to tax, when the rest of the things we buy and sell come from everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere.
The notion of collective contribution, like the Wikipedia, is a very powerful one.
National law has no place in cyberlaw. Where is cyberspace? If you don't like banking laws in the United States, set up your machine on the Grand Cayman Islands. Don't like the copyright laws in the United States? Set up your machine in China. Cyberlaw is global law, which is not going to be easy to handle, since we seemingly cannot even agree on world trade of automobile parts.
Juan Enriquez will change your view of change itself.
Scale will get you strategy.
The cost of electronics in a modern car now exceeds the cost of its stall.
Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.
My goal is not selling laptops. OLPC is not in the laptop business. It's in the education business.
Giving the kids a programming environment of any sort, whether it's a tool like Squeak or Scratch or Logo to write programs in a childish way - and I mean that in the most generous sense of the word, that is, playing with and building things - is one of the best ways to learn.
Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing.
This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.
To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn't require paper.
Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.
Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.
In the world of computers and just devices in general, the lifespan, or the shelf life, is relatively short just because technology moves so fast and the costs drop so quickly and the power, whether it's computing power or memory rises very, very quickly.
I've spent my whole life worrying about the human-computer interface, so I don't want to suggest that what we have today is even close to acceptable.
Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they ... can never be without some element of education.
There is a belief that children drop out of school because they're needed by their families to work, or the little girls are needed to take care of younger siblings. It turns out that's not really true.
Big companies are looking closer term, and even the most technological companies spend less than 1% of sales on research. Startups have suffered the burst bubble.
Think of it: the lowest common denominator in being digital is not your operating system, modem, or model of computer. It's a tiny piece of plastic, designed decades ago by Bell Labs' Charles Krumreich, Edwin Hardesty, and company, who thought they were making an inconspicuous plug for a few telephone handsets. Not in their wildest dreams was Registered Jack 11 - a modular connector more commonly known as the RJ-11 - meant to be plugged and unplugged so many times, by so many people, for so many reasons, all over the world.
