Tuesday, April 18, 2006

There's an absence of actual doers. We have the deciders.

--- Steve Elrod, VP Scientific Affairs, TAP Pharmaceutical Products, a virtual drug company, quoted in feature on Drug Discovery in New Scientist, 6 Aug 2005, p. 57

The company outsources al preclinical bench-level work - including the discovery of new molecules. Elrod's also quoted as saying, "We have the competency, but not the capacity."
Country music is three chords and the truth

--- "I fall to pieces" songwriter Harlan Howard, cited by Nashville songwriter Ben Bowling in The rise of 'redneck' stirs up country music, Patrik Jonsson, Christian Science Monitor, 12 Oct 2005

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Now I finally know what we are going to do with all those cycles

--- science writer Fred Hapgood, in a mail exchange with Edward Castronova, cited by Castronova in Synthetic Worlds: The business and culture of online games (2005) p. 279
How ironic that those who devote many hours to MMPORGs are considered social misfits. Maybe the truth is that contemporary society has become so misfitted itself that anyone who wants to interact with others must pay money to enter an alternative society that has been constructed for the specific purpose of encouraging teamwork among strangers.

--- Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The business and culture of online games
(2005) p. 274

Monday, April 03, 2006

Securities analysts believe that companies make money. Companies make shoes!

--- Peter Drucker, in Brent Schlender, 'Peter Drucker Takes the Long View: An Interview', Fortune, Sep 28 1998, cited in Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital p. 124

Sunday, April 02, 2006

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.

--- Cory Doctorow, Microsoft Research DRM talk, June 17, 2004

Saturday, April 01, 2006

No one will sue you for patent infringement till you have money, and once you have money, people will sue you whether they have grounds to or not.

--- Paul Graham, March 2006, Are software patents evil?, an essay is derived from a talk at Google

Another one from this story: "Things always seem intangible when you don't understand them."