Portal:Technology/Selected quote/1
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We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/2
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Technology and the machine resurrected San Francisco while Pompeii still slept in her ashes.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/3
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/4
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For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
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— Richard Feynman, Rogers' Commission Report into the Challenger Crash (1986)
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/5
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As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of the science. Whenever any result is sought by its aid, the question will then arise — by what course of calculation can these results be arrived at by the machine in the shortest time?
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/6
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Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/7
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Within a few years a simple and inexpensive device, readily carried about, will enable one to receive on land or sea the principal news, to hear a speech, a lecture, a song or play of a musical instrument, conveyed from any other region of the globe.
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— Nikola Tesla, "The Transmission of Electrical Energy Without Wires as a Means for Furthering Peace" (1905)
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/8
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The decisions we make about the Internet don't affect just the Internet – they are answers to basic questions about the relationship each citizen has to the government and about the extent to which we trust one another with the full range of fundamental rights granted by the Constitution.
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— Mike Godwin, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age (2003)
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/9
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We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
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— Thomas Edison, conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone (1931)
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/10
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Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.
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— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/11
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I was originally supposed to become an engineer but the thought of having to expend my creative energy on things that make practical everyday life even more refined, with a loathsome capital gain as the goal, was unbearable to me.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/12
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A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/13
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It is a good thing for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/14
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If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions they will be moved to act.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/15
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Pure cinema is complementary pieces of film put together, like notes of music make a melody. There are two primary uses of cutting or montage in film: montage to create ideas--and montage to create violence and emotions.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/16
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My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/17
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The same advances in biotechnology that help save lives, can also be used to develop dangerous biological agents and toxins that can take lives. The new global information infrastructure that is now the backbone of our economy can be used to spread knowledge of how to create and disperse biological weapons.
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— Jane Harman, "Introduction of the "Select Agent Program and Biosafety Improvement Act of 2008" (2008)
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/18
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The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological — technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/19
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A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/20
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Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today: because there are more people with greater per capita impact.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/21
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Technology will move faster than governments, so don't legislate before you understand the consequences.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/22
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What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/23
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As the world grows smaller, you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are; to understand that we're all basically seeking the same things; that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families. And yet somehow, given the dizzying pace of globalization, the cultural leveling of modernity, it perhaps comes as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish in their particular identities — their race, their tribe, and perhaps most powerfully their religion. In some places, this fear has led to conflict. At times, it even feels like we're moving backwards.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/24
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If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/25
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Cyberspace may give freedom of speech more muscle than the First Amendment does. It may already have become literally impossible for a government to shut people up.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/26
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Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/27
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You go to your TV to turn your brain off. You go to the computer when you want to turn your brain on.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/28
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Computing is not about computers. It is about life. We are discussing a fundamental cultural change: Being digital is not just being a geek or Internet surfer or mathematically savvy child. It is actually a way of living and is going to impact everything.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/29
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All forms of government ultimately are not going to succeed in trying to control or censor the Internet.
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Portal:Technology/Selected quote/30
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On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it. Now, this challenge may be new, but our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic.
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