“There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state, that which happens when you don’t do anything. If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come. To ask what causes poverty is like asking what causes cold in the universe.

“We used to fight for the right not to reveal information about ourselves. The “new privacy” is about fighting for the right to spread your personal information all over very public forums but still control how it’s used.

“A patent is really a license to be sued.

“Lots of the ‘web 2.0’ feature set doesn’t fit well with traditional normalised database schema design. [For example] Denormalization (or heavy caching) is the only way to generate a tag cloud in milliseconds for hundereds of millions of tags.

“Half the value of a robust add-in ecosystem lies in product guidance—users are taking it upon themselves to fill the gaps and holes in your product, and audience metrics tell you exactly which holes truly needed filling.

“To prevent overinvestment in speculative directions that may end up as dead ends, departments should ensure that different points of view about unsolved problems, and rival research programs, are represented on their faculties.

“Working on nasty little problems makes you stupid. Good hackers avoid it for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers.