Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.

For the biologists, and particularly for the medical scientists, there can be little indecision, for their war has hardly required them to leave the old paths

“The cat is out of the bag. The content people have no clue. I mean, no clue.” - Bram Cohen

As I did 20 years ago, I still fervently believe that the only way to make software secure, reliable, and fast is to make it small. Fight Features.

Civic education cannot be just a matter of teaching and persuading young people to participate in the existing system; it must acknowledge deep-seated and understandable critiques of politics.

Much like a Unix power user will compose multiple single-purpose tools into a complex piped command, a functional programmer will combine single-purpose function invocations into chains of operations (think Map/Reduce).

But this is the one that I want to get you: If you can bear to hear the truth you ’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, What it’s saying is: you say something that you think it’s true, and somebody out there takes what you’ve said and then twists it to trap somebody else who either admires you or doesn’t like you. What is said in the poem I didn’t understand, but being in the software free community I’ve really seen that. We work really hard to find the truth: what’s important, what will work, how can we move forward.

As Park says, "We need both kinds: people who can hack the technology, as well as people who can hack the bureaucracy."

the code is a black box, and what they enjoy is the program

Code is the tool. The program is the product.

The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge -- and pray God we have not lost it -- that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.

Research publication can both communicate and miscommunicate

Consequently, we are reaching out broadly to the research community, scientific publishers, universities, industry, professional organizations, patient-advocacy groups and other stakeholders to take the steps necessary to reset the self-corrective process of scientific inquiry. Journals should be encouraged to devote more space to research conducted in an exemplary manner that reports negative findings, and should make room for papers that correct earlier work.

Science has long been regarded as 'self-correcting', given that it is founded on the replication of earlier work. Over the long term, that principle remains true. In the shorter term, however, the checks and balances that once ensured scientific fidelity have been hobbled. This has compromised the ability of today's researchers to reproduce others' findings.

“Getting the data is much easier than making it useful,” said Deborah Estrin, a professor of computer science and public health at Cornell University.

Good people are leaving academic science, forced out by a lack of money, inequity in decision making, and hypocrisy in career recognition and advancement. Many are tired of playing a game whose rules change before you even know what the rules are.

by a seriously flawed reviewing system

"The margins of manuscripts often contain medieval and early modern reactions to the text, and these can cast light on what our ancestors thought about what they were reading," Williams explained. "The 'Black Book' was particularly heavily annotated before the end of the 16th century."

Today it’s a famous course, but in those days it was a laughable idea, alarmingly American.

…empowerment of individuals is a key part of what makes open source work, since in the end, innovations tend to come from small groups, not from large, structured efforts.

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” —Vincent van Gogh

some researchers feel that a dangerous precedent is being set. They argue that publishers wrongly characterize text-mining as an activity that requires extra rights to be granted by licence from a copyright holder, and they feel that computational reading should require no more permission than human reading. “The right to read is the right to mine,” says Ross Mounce of the University of Bath, UK, who is using content-mining to construct maps of species’ evolutionary relationships.

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