I do think we could do a better job of anticipating the software needs — Software

"Me, I just dont care about proprietary software. Its not "evil" or "immoral," it just doesnt matter. I think that Open Source can do better, and Im willing to put my money where my mouth is by working on Open Source, but its not a crusade – its just a superior way of working together and generating code."

"One of the difficulties in thinking about software is its huge variety. A function definition in a spreadsheet cell is software. A smartphone app is software. The flight management system for an Airbus A380 is software. A word processor is software. We shouldnt expect a single discipline of software engineering to cover all of these, any more than we expect a single discipline of manufacturing to cover everything from the Airbus A380 to the production of chocolate bars, or a single discipline of social organization to cover everything from the United Nations to a kindergarten. Improvement in software engineering must come bottom-up, from intense specialized attention to particular products."

"How can it be that we have so much software that is reliable enough for us to use it? The answer is simple; programming is a trial and error craft. People write programs without any expectation that they will be right the first time. They spend at least as much time testing them and correcting errors as they spent writing the initial program. Large concerns have separate groups of testers to do quality assurance. Programmers cannot be trusted to test their own programs adequately. Software is released for use, not when it is known to be correct, but when the rate of discovering new errors slows down to one that management considers acceptable. Users learn to expect errors and are often told how to avoid the bugs until the program is improved."

"You cant physically touch software. You can hold a floppy disk or CD-ROM in your hand, but the software itself is a ghost that can be moved from one object to another with little difficulty. In contrast, a road is a solid object that has a definite size and shape. You can touch the material and walk the route... Software is a codification of a huge set of behaviors: if this occurs, then that should happen, and so on. We can visualize individual behaviors, but we have great difficulty visualizing large numbers of sequential and alternative behaviors... The same things that make it hard to visualize software make it hard to draw blueprints of that software. A road plan can show the exact location, elevation, and dimensions of any part of the structure. The map corresponds to the structure, but its not the same as the structure. Software, on the other hand, is just a codification of the behaviors that the programmers and users want to take place. The map is the same as the structure... This means that software can only be described accurately at the level of individual instructions... A map or a blueprint for a piece of software must greatly simplify the representation in order to be comprehensible. But by doing so, it becomes inaccurate and ultimately incorrect. This is an important realization: any architecture, design, or diagram we create for software is essentially inadequate. If we represent every detail, then were merely duplicating the software in another form, and were wasting our time and effort."

"When done well, software is invisible."

"Software is like sex; its better when its free."

"O dread and silent mount! I gazed upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer, I worshipped the Invisible alone."

"Mister Toombs was willing to dissolve the Union to save slavery, Mister Phillips, to save liberty; while Mister Seward, denounced and derided by both, declared that the deepest instinct of the American people was for union. Reserved rights. State rights, limited powers, the advantages of union and disunion, were the cucumbers from which we were busily engaged in distilling light, overlooking the fact of nationality in discussing the conditions of union. We were speculating upon costume. We gravely proved that the clothes were the clothes of a woman, or of a child, without seeing that whatever the clothes might be there was a full-grown man inside of them. "The Constitution is a contract between sovereign States", shouted Mister Toombs, "let Georgia tear it and separate". "The Constitution is a league with hell", calmly replied Mister Phillips, "let New York cut off New Orleans to rot alone". "Oh, dear! it"s a dreadful dilemma", whimpered President Buchanan. "States have no right to secede, and the United States have no right to coerce. Oh, dear me! it"s perfectly awful! I"m the most patriotic of men, but what shall I do? what shall I do?" Separate! Cut off! Secede! It was of a living body they spoke, which, pierced anywhere, quivered everywhere."

"Its never a matter of ethics versus pragmatism; its a question of which informs the other. Humans have shown themselves capable of almost unlimited imagination and innovation—qualities that could be said to define human beings. People have used this capacity to do both great good and great harm. The point is that when humans set their minds to doing something, its frequently possible. It makes sense to first ask what people want to do and why, from an ethical standpoint, and then get to the pragmatic how-to questions. The very process of asking whats right is how people fill out ethics in praxis, to meet new demands and dilemmas, new social conditions and contexts. Anarchism, then, brings an egalitarian ethics out into the world, making it transparent, public, and shared. It maintains an ethical orientation, while continually trying to put such notions into practice, as flawed as the effort might be. When other people come into contact with this ethical compass, they will hopefully "get it" and incorporate the same values into their lives, because it works. It offers directionality to political involvement and buttresses peoples efforts to remake society. It turns surviving into thriving. Thats the crucial difference between a pragmatic versus ethical impulse: people, in cooperative concert, qualitatively transform one anothers lives."

"Thats... the big discovery of this principle of computational equivalence of mine. ...This is something which is kind of a follow-on to Gödels theorem, to Turings work on the ... that there is this fundamental limitation built into science, this idea of computational irreducibility that says that even though you may know the rules by which something operates, that does not mean that you can readily... be smarter that it and jump ahead and figure out what its going to do."

"The art of leading, in operations large or small, is the art of dealing with humanity, of working diligently on behalf of men, of being sympathetic with them, but equally, of insisting that they make a square facing toward their own problems."

"The establishment of "The Times" newspaper is an example, on a large scale, of a manufactory in which the division of labour, both mental and bodily, is admirably illustrated, and in which also the effect of domestic economy is well exemplified. It is scarcely imagined, by the thousands who read that paper in various quarters of the globe, what a scene of organized activity the factory presents during the whole night, or what a quantity of talent and mechanical skill is put in action for their amusement and information."