President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to upho...
The justice system in the West has a lot of problems,' Poe said, 'but at least there are rules. You have basic rights as the accused. You have your day in court. You don't have any rights when you're accused on the Internet. And the consequences are ...
New video gaming systems are coming out that track every joint of your body. It's basically going to become a normal thing for us to allow Microsoft to put a three-dimensional camera on top of your television set looking at you, which sounds like a B...
As a freshman in college, I was having a lot of trouble adjusting. I took a meditation class to handle anxiety. It really helped. Then as a grad student at Harvard, I was awarded a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, where my focus was on the...
You know, entropy is associated thermodynamically, in systems involving heat, with disorder. And in an analogous way, information is associated with disorder, which seems paradoxical. But when you think about it, a bit of information is a surprise. I...
For reasons that are both fair and foul - but mostly for fair reasons - we have come under the domain of a scientific-management system whose ambitions are endless. They want to manage every second of our lives, every expenditure that we make. And th...
Whomsoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to b...
Black English is something which - it's a natural system in itself. And even though it is a dialect of English, it can be very difficult for people who don't speak it, or who haven't been raised in it, to understand when it's running by quickly, spok...
As Congress debates overhauling the nation's health care system, it should not authorize a reform plan that would further our financial woes. We must avoid creating an unsustainable government program. There is no question that reform is needed, but ...
I actually think in some ways that it might be more challenging to be bipolar because it's so mercurial - it's so ever-changing. You can't get any traction. You can't build on a system. Whereas, somebody who has Asperger's, which is certainly a much ...
When I got out of high school, I thought, 'I'll take a year or two off and play the clubs, get this out of my system, and then go to med school.' More than 40 years later, I figure it's finally time to write about this crazy journey that's taken me a...
We're living at a time where if you do a Google search for a 'show, review and network,' you'll get 'The New York Times' and Pete Billingsley from a town you've never heard of on the same results page. It's kind of democratizing the process so that e...
Lou Bloom: You see, Rick, they've done studies, and they found that in any system that relies on cooperation, from a school of fish or say even a professional hockey team for example, these experts have identified communication as the number one sing...
Ethel: What are you talking about? Chas: The apartment. I have to get some new sprinklers and a back-up security system installed. Ethel: But there are no sprinklers here either. Chas: We might have to do something about that too.
I'd much rather see a world where, when you make some quirky comment on a blog or news story or you upload a video clip, instead of just a moment of fame for your pseudonym, you'll get 50 bucks. The first time that happens, you'll realise that you're...
It's rare that you have a policy issue that can be solved by throwing more money at the problem, but the technology to make bus service more frequent and equip buses with GPS systems that provide real-time schedule updates to bus stops exists and ope...
New York's niche is content, and content is becoming more valuable. Just think about what is more valuable: MTV or the cable system that you use to get MTV? Howard Stern or the radio station you use to listen to him? Ultimately, technology becomes a ...
But my view is that you need a system at the border. You need some fencing but you need technology. You need boots on the ground. And then you need to have interior enforcement of our nation's immigration laws inside the country. And that means deali...
Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features a...
I don't think Brian Cox does 'The Wonders of the Solar System' because he believes the world would be a better place if people understood about the rings of Saturn; I just think he finds physics extremely interesting. It brings him joy, and he wants ...
The iPod is a proprietary integrated product, although that is becoming quite modular. You can download your music from Amazon as easily as you can from iTunes. You also see modularity organized around the Android operating system that is growing muc...
