When certain bootleg companies started off and they would take maybe ten per cent of whatever they got and help fuel new bands, which I'm cool with, I think that's a good idea. Most of the record companies are not doing that.
The subtle generational cues that make one thing cool and another uncool aren't always obvious to a parent. My children are my dinner-table sounding board. I've come up with some wonderful ideas that they universally dismissed as 'lame.'
When you come to L.A. as a kid with your mom, you're lured into doing things that you think are cool and fun and a good idea, but they're cheesy and awful. And recording a pop single was one of them.
The idea that the Internet favors the oppressed rather than the oppressor is marred by what I call cyber-utopianism: a naive belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to admit its downside.
Civilization grew in the beginning from the minute that we had communication - particularly communication by sea that enabled people to get inspiration and ideas from each other and to exchange basic raw materials.
The idea that we are going to be able to take our entire society as it currently works and simply change the source of energy and make it sustainable is not actually congruent with reality.
If you're a pioneer and you come up with something that can change the world and you turn round and say 'I'm not going to share this idea with anyone,' then you only impact the few and not the many.
I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.
People always think that history proceeds in a straight line. It doesn't. Social attitudes don't change in a straight line. There's always a backlash against progressive ideas.
Countries that have the Internet already are not going to turn it off. And so the power of freedom, the power of ideas will spread, and it will change those societies in very dramatic ways.
Churchgoers in America are notorious for jumping into movements, even ideas that are hard to listen to. But when they actually have to change their lifestyle and do something about it, it rarely translates into action.
I think you have to be a niche player. You've got to find smaller ideas that are going to benefit in the conditions as they are. You can change the conditions and always try to find ways to make money in the conditions as they exist.
My government, you can be assured, will be less focused on personalities. It is about treating people with respect. I think complaining about the community not being able to see the wisdom of our ideas is the wrong approach.
The Internet has been seen in the West as the quintessential expression of the free exchange of ideas and information, untrammeled by government interference and increasingly global in reach. But the Chinese government has shown that the Internet can...
The idea of making access to safe abortions harder and more expensive and more difficult, having to travel across state lines - that puts women's health and lives in jeopardy, which is something I think no one wants.
I think the British people are very, very attached to the idea that the health service is free at the point of use. But there is no reason why every doctor, nurse and teacher in this country has to be employed by the state.
I was a total nerd growing up. I'd rather sit home and read a novel on New Year's Eve and say, 'Wow, I read the whole thing in one night!' That was my idea of a big time.
I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out.
Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns.
I don't like leaving work behind. I hate the idea that something might be happening on the drawing board at home that I am going to miss.
Though my grandmother had picked up modern ideas in America, she still had some conflicting 19th-century Irish notions. She believed that daughters, educated though they may be, should continue to live at home until they were married.
