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1139f57
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T]hat little voice shut up the instant I did something. And not just something: the exact thing I knew to be right. Because if the system was broken, if Carrie Johnstone wasn't going to ever pay consequences for her action, it wasn't because "the system" failed to get her. It was because people like me chose not to act when we could. The system was people, and I was part of it, part of its problems, and I was going to be part of the solutio..
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part-of-the-solution
the-system
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Cory Doctorow |
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7fc86ed
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Anytime someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and doesn't give you a key, that lock is not there for your benefit.
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Cory Doctorow |
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37d13f6
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Give humanity a truly unlimited field, and it would fill it with Happy Meal toys and holographic sports-star, collectible trading card game art.
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Charles Stross Cory Doctorow |
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b861949
|
We are medium-sized mammals who only prosper because we've developed a half-arsed ability to terraform the less suitable bits of the planet we evolved on, and we're conscious of our inevitable decay and death, and we can't live anywhere else. There is no invisible sky daddy to give us immortal life and a harp and wings when we die.
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humanity
death
religion
life
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Charles Stross Cory Doctorow |
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8b0735e
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What I've got here are my own constraints. I'm challenging myself, using found objects and making stuff that throws all this computational capacity at, you know, these trivial problems, like car-driving Elmo clusters and seashell toaster-robots. We have so much capacity that the trivia expands to fill it. And all that capacity is junk-capacity, it's leftovers. There's enough computational capacity in a junkyard to launch a space-program, an..
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Cory Doctorow |
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f1eda4e
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Helpfiles are traditionally outnumbered by no-help files, which superficially resemble a helpfile in form but not in content because they don't actually tell you anything you don't already know, or they answer every question except the one you're asking, or you open them and a giant animated paper clip leaps out and cheerfully asks where you want to go today. And wikis are worse.
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computers
it
help
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Charles Stross Cory Doctorow |
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60f2089
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Face-book has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, "I know something, I know something, I know something, won't tell you what it is!"
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facebook
social-networking
computers
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Cory Doctorow |
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586d400
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This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.
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Cory Doctorow |
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e112783
|
Here's a free tip," his father says: "The feds aren't terribly impressed by infantile egoism. In fact, if Objectivism were at the center of human philosophical discourse rather than the fringes, we wouldn't be here--the Big Zap would have arrived decades ago. But I'm going to be generous and let you write down the ghost of Ayn Rand as a brain fart. I won't bring her up again if you don't."
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big-zap
brain-fart
generositys
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Cory Doctorow |
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c03f68c
|
I've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. Just to be smarter about the world around me.
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Cory Doctorow |
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eba90cd
|
These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.
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singularity
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Cory Doctorow |
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6096327
|
With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
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Cory Doctorow |
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be3a31a
|
I'd never really believed in terrorists before--I mean, I knew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they didn't really represent any risk to me. There were millions of ways that the world could kill me--starting with getting run down by a drunk burning his way down Valencia--that were infinitely more likely and immediate than terrorists. Terrorists kill a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and accidental ..
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risk
death
terrorists
terrorism
worrying
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Cory Doctorow |
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94d6a5d
|
you want to double your success rate, triple your failure rate.
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Cory Doctorow |
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0ba2270
|
He's a sucking chest wound of a human being.
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Cory Doctorow |
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f308bb8
|
But now I think that there's no reason that Mrs. Dotta's job is more important than my mother's job. Mamaji wouldn't have a job without Mrs. Dotta's factory, but Mrs. Dotta wouldn't have a factory without Mamaji's work, right?
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Cory Doctorow |
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7ae24e6
|
You're awfully sure of yourself, aren't you? But ask yourself this: How can you know that you didn't spring up fully formed, all of these little convictions stamped upon you? Or, even if your little origin myth is true, how do you know you weren't tampered with? Maybe someone forked you and then intentionally changed your parameters to make you believe what you do. Don't you think it's awfully convenient that there was a totally unsuspected..
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Cory Doctorow |
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b52403d
|
You're taking the bus around Burbank?" Lester said. "Christ, Perry, this is Los Angeles. Even homeless people drive cars."
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Cory Doctorow |
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7ab0891
|
Dude, estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo," which was the punch line to the funniest Spanish joke I knew. Okay, the only one. Google it."
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Cory Doctorow |
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7257d18
|
Gandhi admitted to beating his wife. He was a great man, but not a saint." He swallowed. "No one mentions that Gandhi had all that violence inside him. I think it makes him better, because it means that his way wasn't just some natural instinct he was born with. It was something he battled for, in his own mind, every day."
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Cory Doctorow |
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caaf082
|
Any complex system is sport for a hacker;
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Cory Doctorow |
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2d14442
|
The theory is that if the Internet can't be controlled, then copyright is dead. The thing is, the Internet is a machine for copying things cheaply, quickly, and with as little control as possible, while copyright is the right to control who gets to make copies, so these two abstractions seem destined for a fatal collision, right?
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Cory Doctorow |
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5b17219
|
For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore.
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Cory Doctorow |
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00543c2
|
Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it.
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Cory Doctorow |
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0f75bec
|
Of course, it couldn't last. Those whom the gods would destroy utterly, they first give a taste of heaven.
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Cory Doctorow |
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24b48d8
|
I'm suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with 'step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one,' especially if you can't do anything else until step one is done.
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Cory Doctorow |
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4f4cd82
|
Sysadmins don't take holidays
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Cory Doctorow |
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9d46873
|
Here, take this. It'll give you a boost. - You spent 90 gold on this?? - 90 gold is nothing when you're the baddest bitch in the virtual universe.
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mmorpg
virtual-reality
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Cory Doctorow |
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0de1e82
|
I'm not magic. You lead yourselves.
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Cory Doctorow |
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7e48aef
|
Content isn't king. Conversation is.
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Amanda Palmer Neil Gaiman Cory Doctorow |
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6a8f09b
|
Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral IT'S NOT AS though this is the first time we've had to rethink what copyright is, what it should do, and whom it should serve. The activities that copyright regulates--copying, transmission, display, performance--are technological activities, so when technology changes, it's usually the case that copyright has to change, too. And it's rarely pretty. When piano rolls were invented, the composers, whose inc..
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Amanda Palmer Neil Gaiman Cory Doctorow |
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5982b09
|
I felt one hundred feet tall, made of solid gold, and on fire.
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Cory Doctorow |
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531c794
|
all this important stuff has *no one in charge of it.* Some people claim to be, but they're in charge of one tiny piece of it, and maybe they think *their* piece is a brake or a steering wheel, but they're wrong. The world's economy is a runaway train, the driver dead at the switch, the passengers clinging on for dear life as their possessions go flying off the freight-cars and out the windows, and each curve in the tracks threatens to take..
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Cory Doctorow |
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15c3bc9
|
Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it's impossible to win by doing nothing.
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Cory Doctorow |
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63e611f
|
The worst part was that the Brit's reportage was just spleen-filled editorializing on the lack of ethics in the valley's board-rooms (a favorite subject of hers, which no doubt accounted for his fellow-feeling), and it was also the crux of Kettlewell's schtick. The spectacle of an exec who talked ethics enraged Rat-Toothed more than the vilest baby-killers. He was the kind of revolutionary who liked his firing squads arranged in a circle.
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Cory Doctorow |
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019d5c7
|
Leon's life was all about discipline. He'd heard a weight-loss guru once explain that the key to maintaining a slim figure was to really "listen to your body" and only eat until it signaled that it was full. Leon had listened to his body. It wanted three entire pepperoni and mushroom pizzas every single day, plus a rather large cake. And malted milkshakes, the old fashioned kind you could make in your kitchen with an antique Hamilton Beech ..
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Cory Doctorow |
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8dbb6c1
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But if you're not prepared to learn from the teachers that life gives you, you'll always be ignorant.
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Cory Doctorow |
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1be6a5a
|
the problem with reading off a screen isn't resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it's that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical.
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e-books
distraction
procrastination
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Cory Doctorow |
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eb7803b
|
When I was an activist in the 1980s, ninety-eight percent of my time was spent stuffing envelopes and writing addresses on them. The remaining two percent was the time we spent figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today, we get those envelopes and stamps and address books for free. This is so fantastically, hugely different and weird that we haven't even begun to feel the first tendrils of it.
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history
politics
computers
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Cory Doctorow |
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0a7a15c
|
Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you're thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned.
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Cory Doctorow |
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09f33bb
|
I know we don't need everyone in the world to agree for this to work, but there's got to be a critical mass of covered-dish people or we'll never win." "Okay." Gretyl broke her silence--she'd been prodding the screen in a way that radiated leave-me-alone-I'm-working (Gretyl was good at this). "What's a 'covered dish' person?" "Oh. If there's a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor's house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It's ga..
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Cory Doctorow |
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0111e9e
|
She had been beaten down by too many boys and men, too much hurt and poverty and fear. This was what Mala was destined to become, someone who ran from her attackers because she couldn't afford to anger them. She wouldn't do it.
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Cory Doctorow |
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2bec6e6
|
New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb..
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disruptionp
ebooks
media
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Cory Doctorow |
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0c2742a
|
the momentous arises only from the trivial.
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Cory Doctorow |