UpFront

The radio market is now clearly driven by greed and corruption rather than creativity and talent. Something must be done to bring attention to this, and I strongly believe that swift federal action is necessary.

—Sen. John McCain, on record companies paying stations to play their music.

Greed is never good.

—Linus Torvalds

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

—Albert Einstein

Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated.

—M. C. Reed

2,500 statue miles is .0134 light seconds. If we take 10 gigabits/sec (OC192C) as a gigabyte/sec (rounding), we get 13.4 megabytes in flight at 2.5 gigabits/sec (OC48C), divide by 4 and get 3 megabytes in flight.

—Mike O'Dell

Windows has noticed you have changed your mind. Windows will reboot to recognize this change.

—Gates_throws_tantrum, on Slashdot

Irony is so dead.

—Don Marti

Human reality is socially constructed. That is, most of the “facts” that determine our daily lives are socially constructed facts, which are true as long as enough people believe them to be true. The right to own property, the right to not be murdered, indeed the right to continue to live at all; all of these are socially constructed rights, which are true only as long as enough of us believe in them.

—Rusty Foster

There's no matter on the Web and thus no distance. It is a purely social realm; all we have are one another and what we've written. And what we've written has been written for others. The Web is a public place that we've built by doing public things.

—David Weinberger

We hackers were actively aiming to create new kinds of conversations outside of traditional institutions. [The Net] wasn't an accidental byproduct of doing neat techie stuff; it was an explicit goal for many of us as far back as the 1970s. We intended this revolution.

—Eric Raymond

When you've commodity chips strapped together with commodity drives hooked together with fast Ethernet interconnects, then you want a commmodity OS, and Linux is it.

—John K. Thompson

Humans are destined to be party animals, and the technology will follow.

—Linus Torvalds