My problems are sort of more on a nuisance level. I can't stand scratchy clothes, I've got to have soft kinds of cotton against my skin, and I don't know why some 100% cotton t-shirts itch and others don't; it has something to do with the weave.
If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that t...
I'm regarded outside New York University as a looney tunes leftie, self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university, I'm regarded as a typical, old-fashioned, white male liberal elitist. I like that. I'm on the edge of both; it makes me feel comfo...
Let's face it: if you and I have the same capabilities, the same energy, the same staff, if the only thing that's different between you and me is the products we can get, and I can get a better product than you, I'm going to be a better chef.
Urban Fantasy is a subgenre pretty much designed for teenagers. It's pretty twee, but I adore it. I've been trying to come up with an Urban Fantasy comic ever since I'd read the Nancy Collins 'Sonja Blue' series years ago.
I think that Microsoft will increasingly feel margin pressure from Linux as well as people saying: well actually the applications that really matter to me are not on my PC. And so they're going to be able to extract less of a monopoly rent, so to spe...
One of O'Reilly's advantages is that we have a network of thousands of user groups to whom we give free books, to whom we advertise our products, and they spread the word. If you don't have that database, it's hard to get the attention of the market.
There is people who make stuff with words. There is people who make stuff with programs. And I really believe that that whole creative culture, people didn't realize how creative programming is. And anybody who's done it of course knows that not only...
The fact that there's all these really messed-up people on the Internet is not a statement about the Internet. It is a statement about those people and what they do, and we need to basically say that you guys are doing something unacceptable and not ...
The repressed memory is like a noisy intruder being thrown out of the concert hall. You can throw him out, but he will bang on the door and continue to disturb the concert. The analyst opens the door and says, If you promise to behave yourself, you c...
Something I'll always remember - when I was a kid, I shook hands with Orville Wright. Forty years later, I shook hands with Neil Armstrong. The guy that invented the airplane and the guy that walked on the moon. In a lifetime, that's kinda wild when ...
Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin, and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen; such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven on Earth.
Computer hacking really results in financial losses and hassles. The objectives of terrorist groups are more serious. That is not to say that cyber groups can't access a telephone switch in Manhattan on a day like 9/11, shut it down, and therefore ca...
If you go to a coffee shop or at the airport, and you're using open wireless, I would use a VPN service that you could subscribe for 10 bucks a month. Everything is encrypted in an encryption tunnel, so a hacker cannot tamper with your connection.
I think a cyber-terrorism attack is overblown, though the threat exists. I think al Qaeda and other groups are more interested in symbolic terrorism, like what they did to the World Trade Center - suicide bombers or something that really has an effec...
I'm still a hacker. I get paid for it now. I never received any monetary gain from the hacking I did before. The main difference in what I do now compared to what I did then is that I now do it with authorization.
I could pose as a Yahoo rep claiming that there's been some sort of fault, and somebody else is getting your e-mail, and we're going to have to remove your account and reinstall it. So what we'll do is reset the current password that you have - and b...
What happens with smaller businesses is that they give in to the misconception that their site is secure because the system administrator deployed standard security products - firewalls, intrusion detection systems, or stronger authentication devices...
My hacking involved pretty much exploring computer systems and obtaining access to the source code of telecommunication systems and computer operating systems, because my goal was to learn all I can about security vulnerabilities within these systems...
Protecting yourself is very challenging in the hostile environment of the Internet. Imagine a global environment where an unscrupulous person from the other side of the planet can probe your computer for weaknesses and exploit them to gain access to ...
If I needed to know about a security exploit, I preferred to get the information by accessing the companies' security teams' files, rather than poring over lines of code to find it on my own. It's just more efficient.
