Indecency

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency."

- Virginia Woolf

Consul

Consul: In American politics, a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given one by the Administration on condition that he leave the country (Ambrose Bierce)

Cosmopolitanism

the golden rule of cosmopolitanism - Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto; "I am human: nothing human is alien to me." The context is illuminating.

-- Terence

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.

~ François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

open source

n the Tech Bloom, you don't own the building blocks of a new innovation, even if you helped design them. Instead, you sell your convenient pre-packaged assemblies of bricks, your expertise as mortar for putting them together and a handful of new kinds of bricks you've invented as add-ons.

open source

all open source projects share four defining characteristics: they "share the goal" – as Thomas Goetz writes, "open source projects succeed when a broad group of contributors recognize the same need and agree on how to meet it"; they use distributed methods of working, so large numbers of people can work together across distances, creating an “architecture of participation”; they break huge goals into small problems, encourage innovative answers, recognize quality contributions and allow anyone to look for (and fix) problems; and they mandate that the results be freely-available to all.

"As Dr. Johnson once said, 'The grimmest dictatorship is the dictatorship of the prevailing orthodoxy,' and I am fighting that orthodoxy. It's not that I relish it. It's that I am not afraid of it."

- George Galloway

Doc Searls:

But subversion is not elimination. Nor is observation the same as advocacy.

Open source movement doesn't advocate ending corporate hierarchies. It advocates good code.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

- Albert Einstein

I don't think I'm getting more cynical, I've just got more evidence to back up my cynicism.

_Frank Zappa (1982)

Are you with the police?
No ma'am....we're musicians.
- The Blues Brothers

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.

-- Frederick Douglass --

I have heard what the talkers were talking.
The talk of the beginning and the end.
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself

If someone asks you who created the world, you should be honest and tell them the truth. It was Chuck Berry.

"I do not like experts," he said. "They are our jailers.... Experts are addicts. They solve nothing. They are servants of whatever system hires them. They perpetuate it. When we are tortured, we shall be tortured by experts. When we are hanged, experts will hang us.... When the world is destroyed, it will be destroyed not by its madmen but by the sanity of its experts and the superior ignorance of its bureaucrats."

John Le Carre from The Russia House

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

- Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973)