Shareholders of public companies that engage in patent trolling should ask themselves if they’re really well-served by their management teams. Are they properly monetizing their R&D? Surely there are better ways to make money than to just rely on litigating patents. If I was a shareholder, I would take a hard look as to whether their management was competent.
— Lee Cheng, Chief Legal Officer, Newegg, quoted in Newegg nukes “corporate troll” Alcatel in third patent appeal win this year
If there ever was a dividing line between cyberspace and what we used to call the “real world,” it vanished last week.
— James Gleick, “Total Noise,” Only Louder: #Manhunt
Free software and free data work as one kind of ladder, continually looking back as well as forward, assimilating innovation and passing it down to where it wouldn’t otherwise reach.
—
Michal Migurski, week 1,846: ladders. He continues, “Left alone, innovation and capital accrue to where they are already in highest concentration.”
[via Robin Sloan]
What is called censorship when practiced by a government is content filtering when practiced by an organization.
— Bruce Schneier, IT for Oppression
…pedestrians who use computer navigation fail to envision, encode, and memorize the cognitive maps they otherwise would have. The cost of convenience, in other words, is spatial orientation.
— Eric Jaffe, Is Google Maps Changing Our Behavior? [via https://twitter.com/jsb/status/317983741303717888]
It’s not as if we all wake up one morning and decide we’re going to get rid of our landlines, but they just kind of decay away. I think cars will kind of disappear in much the same way.
— Maurie Cohen, quoted by Emily Badger in What the Steamship and the Landline Can Tell Us About the Decline of the Private Car [via Maggie Koerth-Baker]
…we should be wary of people like Portman, because they are policy makers who seemingly cannot project any feeling past their own cloistered experiences, who are only swayed when and if the issue suddenly aligns with their own self-interest. Are those the kind of hearts and minds we want directing national policy? I’m inclined to say no.
— Richard Lawson, What Rob Portman Learned
TED thinking assumes complex social problems are essentially engineering challenges, and that short nuggets of Technology, Edutainment, and Design can fix everything, fast and cheap. TED thinking’s got a hard determinism to it; a kind of technological hyperrationalism. It ignores institutions and society almost completely.
…Great Ideas demand precisely the opposite of TED thinking. They demand our lasting engagement, dedication and commitment; our time and energy; our frustration and infuriation; our suffering, passion, and pain — not merely our easy wonder and wide-eyed astonishment.
— Umair Haque, Let’s Save Great Ideas from the Ideas Industry [via Scott Berkun]
Brightly coloured brain scans are a media favourite as they are both attractive to the eye and apparently easy to understand but in reality they represent some of the most complex scientific information we have. They are not maps of activity but maps of the outcome of complex statistical comparisons of blood flow that unevenly relate to actual brain function. This is a problem that scientists are painfully aware of but it is often glossed over when the results get into the press.
— Vaughn Bell on the folly of armchair neuroscience in Our brains, and how they’re not as simple as we think
There’s no moral issue for me. I did the best science I could. I was struggling to survive and didn’t have the luxury of being a moral creature.
— Howard Moskowitz, quoted by Michael Moss in The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, on whether he had reservations about helping engineer “systems that helped food companies create the greatest amount of crave.”
(via Untapped Cities)
A journalist is just a heightened case of an informed citizen, not a special class.
— Jay Rosen, Look, you’re right, okay? But you’re also wrong. » Pressthink
