Technology Companies

"Parents need awareness to know the benefits of technology and support their children. Technology is based on two things; skills and equipment. But it was good to see parents working hard to support their children through the technology learning journey. It was not easy, but during Covid-19 people learnt a lot,”"

"Change is not easy, and some resisted. However, after it became a rule, every lecturer adjusted and universities have changed to use a model platform. Covid-19 became like an accelerator,”"

"Girls should be passionate about what they study as passion drives them to thrive in the field. I assure them that hard work pays and nothing comes without trying. It is important to be confident, have a persistent spirit, and collaborate with others."

"Several Republicans including Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) criticized Texas’ near-total ban on abortion Sunday because of its provision empowering private citizens to sue those who aid and abet abortions—potentially signaling the legal tactic could face resistance from within the GOP as more states plan to copy Texas’ law. The Maryland governor specifically pointed to the law’s “problem of bounties,” as the Texas law—known as Senate Bill 8 (SB 8)—says government officials cannot enforce the law, but rather directs private citizens to file lawsuits against anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion and stipulates they can earn at least $10,000 in damages if they win. Kinzinger said on CNN that while he’s “pro-life,” what he “doesn’t like to see” is letting “everyone being able to tattle” and the fact that under SB 8, private citizens are “deputized to enforce this abortion law” against even potentially Uber drivers that transport a Texan to their abortion."

"Authorities in the Indian capital, Delhi, have banned international taxi-booking service Uber after a driver allegedly raped a female passenger. A transport department official said the company had been "blacklisted" for "misleading customers"."

"Uber, which is growing in popularity in India, has been accused of failing to conduct adequate checks on its drivers. "(The) Transport Department has banned all activities relating to providing any transport service by the www.Uber.com with immediate effect," news agency AFP reported, quoting from a government statement. The ban means any Uber taxi in Delhi will now attract a fine or even be impounded, officials say. The company is still accepting bookings on its app and it is not yet clear how the ban will be enforced since Uber taxis do not carry any visible branding. Before the ban was announced, Uber described the incident as "horrific" and said it would do everything "to help bring this perpetrator to justice". "Our entire team's hearts go out to the victim of this despicable crime. We will do everything, I repeat, everything to help bring this perpetrator to justice and to support the victim and her family in her recovery," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said in a statement. He said Uber would "work with the government to establish clear background checks currently absent in their commercial transportation licensing programs"."

"In the Silicon Valley, there is the view that is widely shared in the world. And it is materialist and reductionist, for which the human being is a machine and reality is describable by the classical physics]] of objects moving in space-time. It is also the deception of today's artificial intelligence, which is more 'logo' to sell than the real thing. In this view, consciousness and experience are classified as simple phenomena that can be measured and described mathematically, when in fact they are not. This is why the current description of artificial intelligence is actually misleading."

"Consider California. Its wealth was initially built on gold mines. But today it is built on silicon and celluloid - Silicon Valley and the celluloid hills of Hollywood."

"Design came to Silicon Valley on the heels of engineering, and there were no reliable guides or even a clear sense of what it meant to "design" a variable attenuator or a helical-scan video recorder—much less of their relevance to the consumer market. Steinhilber reflected that "When I started out in the design field in New York most of our work was for the "white goods" industry (major appliances). When I moved to Ohio I had to learn the language of the machine-tool industry. But here was an infant field whose vocabulary was still in gestation. They were making it up as they went along." ... The first generation of practitioners approached this terra incognita on the basis of creativity, intuition, instinct, and taste, and they sought out inspiration from wherever they could find it: HP's Carl Clement traveled to MIT to experience "creative engineering"; Myron Stolaroff retreated to a cabin in the Sierra Nevada where he administered LSD to eight fellow Ampex engineers in an effort to unlock their latent creativity. At the Stanford Research Institute, computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart dabbled in the human potential movement and enrolled his unwitting staff in est seminars. ... With every new technological lurch the need for a more specialized set of professional skills became apparent, but also, paradoxically, for a wider vision."

"The chip industry gave the region a new name when Don Hoefler, a columnist for the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began a series in January 1971 entitled "Silicon Valley USA." The forty-mile Santa Clara Valley, which stretches from South San Francisco through Palo Alto to San Jose, has as its commercial backbone El Camino Real, the royal road that once connected California's twenty-one mission churches and is now a bustling avenue that connects companies and startups accounting for a third of the venture capital investment in the United States each year. "Growing up, I got inspired by the history of the place," Jobs said. "That made me want to a part of it.""

"The décor was standard-issue Silicon Valley tech: industrial shag carpet, exposed ceilings revealing ventilation ducts and fire-retardant-covered steel beams, and the odd piece of home-brewed installation art: an imposing Lego wall featuring the blocky murals left by employees, another wall papered with the vaguely Orwellian posters the in-house printshop churned out."

"... I realize that my career at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (better known as Xerox PARC) has afforded me a much wider view of civilization. In particular, it has provided me with endless opportunities to meet with visitors from all parts of the world and in turn to visit nearly all parts of the world. Everyone takes Silicon Valley seriously now. With these visits, hardly a day goes by that I don't get asked to explain the magical brew that makes up Silicon Valley. What is it? What makes it so special? Can it be copied? If not, why not? And if yes, how? And what about that famous culture? What does it feel like to work for a large East Coast company and yet be a part of the Valley? Does this give me a different perspective—having to bridge those two quite different cultures daily? And how are those cultures different?"

"... I really do think, and not just because I happen to be writing a book about it, that the business of creating and foisting new technologies upon others that goes on in Silicon Valley is near the core of the American experience. The United States obviously occupies a strange place in the world. It is the capital of innovation, of material prosperity, of a certain kind of energy, of certain kinds of freedom, and of transience. Silicon Valley is to the United States what the United States is to the rest of the world. It is one of those places, unlike the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but like Las Vegas, that are unimaginable anywhere but in the United States."

"... I am always skeptical of copying things. ... Just like you shouldn't try to copy Microsoft or Facebook, copying Silicon Valley is probably also the wrong idea. ... One reason it's the wrong idea is that we don't even actually know what makes Silicon Valley work. Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's non-compete agreements are not enforced in California. Maybe it is that there are these crazy network effects. ... All kinds of different explanations ... one can give. Even if we wanted to, I am not sure we know what makes it work. And then, I think, even more fundamentally when you are copying something, you are setting yourself up to be defined in a lesser way. If you are the Oxford of Iceland, that's not quite Oxford ... The something of somewhere is often the nothing of nowhere."

"Ronald Reagan was right. The high-tech revolution was an only-in-America story. And he and so many others were right to laud people like Jobs and Gates and Hewlett and Packard as entrepreneurial heroes. Silicon Valley could never have come to be without the presence of visionary, audacious business leaders. Reagan and his conservative allies also were right when they argued that overly regulated markets and nationalized industries could present big hurdles to entrepreneurial markets—many of the globe's would-be Silicon Valleys attest to that. Yet, in its celebration of the free market, the individual entrepreneur, and the miracles of a wholly new economy, the Silicon Valley mythos left out some of the most interesting, unprecedented, and quintessentially America things about the modern tech industry. For these entrepreneurs were not lone cowboys, but very talented people whose success was made possible by the work of many other people, networks, and institutions."

"Sunday I had information from some of our former intel people that there was extremely compelling evidence that can be gleaned from Scytl. That's S-C-Y-T-L. That's a company headquartered in Barcelona Spain that was responsible for aggregating all of our, all the information from all the machines and whatnot. Uh, but now the main headquarters had moved to Frankfurt. You know Frankfurt: where Merkl, uh, in Germany, had said the day after the election that Trump needed to go ahead and concede. Well, uh, they're going through bankruptcy, but they, that information as to how many votes were switched from Republican to Democrat, would've been easily established by the information that Scytl gathered. And y'know how, what were the votes going in, and which ones were changed going out. And he said "can you send me exactly the information we need to gather?" and so I got that information and sent it the wee hours of Monday morning and before he would've had a chance to, uh, make a request to get any of that information, uh, it turns out... I don't know the truth... I know that there was a German tweet in German saying that on Monday, uh, U.S. army forces went into Scytl and grabbed their server. There's some that believe this is the US intelligent that manipulated all this in order to cover their own rear ends but it's a little disturbing to just contemplate just how corrupt the government has gotten with the whole Russia hoax, the framing of Mike Flynn, and so many others: Carter Page, Papadapalous. So this is a desperate time for our country"

"Servers in Frankfurt were used for a specific project for the European Parliament in 2019. These back-up servers were closed in September 2019."

"The servers at Scytl in Germany were confiscated the other day. I’m hearing it was our forces that got those servers, so I think the government is now working on an investigation of what really happened."

"The Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany successfully used online voting for the first time during their recent internal consultation related to the government’s new coalition. From February 20 to March 3, the SPD allowed its party members living abroad to vote online with Scytl’s online voting system."

"The effect of this is there is no longer a free and open social media company or site for any American to get on any longer. Because these big companies—Apple, Amazon, Google—they have just destroyed what was likely a billion dollar company, and, poof, it's gone...But it's more than the just the financial aspect of that. Republicans have no way to communicate. It doesn't even matter if you're Republican or conservative, if you don't want to be regulated by left-wingers that are at Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, where you get shadow-banned and nobody gets to see you and they get to decide what's violent or not violent, it's preposterous."

"The big tech companies understood that the government had not only damaged American principles, it had hurt their businesses."

"Big Tech — like other large US companies — benefited from corporate tax cuts implemented under President Donald Trump. In many cases, the smaller tax payments helped boost their profits. However, not all of Trump's policies and actions during his first term have played well with Big Tech."

"Elon’s appointment to the board was to become officially effective on 4/9, but Elon shared that same morning that he would not be joining the board. I believe this is for the best."

"Specific threats of violence or wishing for serious physical harm, death, or disease to an individual or group of people is in violation of our policies. Our new changes include more types of related content including: Accounts that affiliate with organizations that use or promote violence against civilians to further their causes. Groups included in this policy will be those that identify as such or engage in activity — both on and off the platform — that promotes violence. This policy does not apply to military or government entities and we will consider exceptions for groups that are currently engaging in (or have engaged in) peaceful resolution."

"HB20 would compel platforms to disseminate all sorts of objectionable viewpoints, such as Russia’s propaganda claiming that its invasion of Ukraine is justified, ISIS propaganda claiming that extremism is warranted, neo-Nazi or KKK screeds denying or supporting the Holocaust, and encouraging children to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior like eating disorders."

"Twitter is the people’s tool, the tool of the ordinary people, people who have no other resources."

"People are always criticizing Twitter. "Twitter is crazy!" they say. I think that's misguided. Twitter is simply an avenue -- there are many -- by which people reveal who they are."

"If you’ve ever been to the monkey house in one of those awful downscale zoos, you know what monkeys — these particular monkeys — are like: They jerk off and fling poo all day, generally using the same hand for both, and they don’t do a hell of a lot else, unless there’s McDonald’s. All day: jerk off, fling poo, jerk off, fling poo, jerk, fling, jerk, fling. Twitter, basically."

"I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump"

"! This claim about election fraud is disputed"

"No official directive at all, and I don’t think I’ve ever tweeted anything that bad. But it’s nine years of stuff written largely off the cuff as ephemera, if trolls scrutinizing it for ammunition is the new normal, this seems like a “why not?” move."

"Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn. We need roughly half of our revenue to be subscription."

"Regardless, this new research shows that Wikipedia editors of different opinions have strived for consensus over time. That's opposed to Facebook or Twitter, where people are siloed into their own self-reinforcing echo chambers. ... Consider this a version of the “miracle of aggregation” – that large groups of people are able to act rationally and solve problems despite having vastly different interests."

"They [Twitter] are not principled in this. They have so much garbage and filth on that platform all the time. They did not censor people when they are using those platforms or the rioting that occurred over the summer."

"Twitter is actively preparing to support the transition of w:White House institutional Twitter accounts on January 20th, 2021. As we did for the presidential transition in 2017, this process is being done in close consultation with the w:National Archives and Records Administration."

"A million fucking message boards, email, Twitter, any number of free tools, being limited only by time and your imagination? If I’d had the internet in 1988 I WOULD OWN AN ENTIRE COUNTRY BY NOW AND WOULD PUT HUNDREDS OF YOU TO DEATH EACH DAY JUST FOR FUN AND IT WOULD BE THE LAW."

"That is the central tenet of twenty- first-century Western philosophy: ‘I tweet, therefore I am.’"

"Running an ad-free website where millions of people gather every day to discuss facts and update scores of pages is a monumental task. It’s incredible that Wikipedia doesn’t often go down and has few technical problems. Most of the time, Wikipedia works without issue. The same is not true for X (formerly known as Twitter)."

"That you cannot argue with 30 million people on Twitter I will grant you, which is why nobody is asking anybody to do that. But do you know what you can do with 30 million people on Twitter? You can wait one afternoon. People can be ruthless on social media, but they also have the long-term memory of goldfish. The whole cycle—the controversy, the apology, the rash of takes about the apology, the rash of takes about the takes about the apology, and the redemption—lives its lifespan so quickly you could miss one completely if you flew from New York to LA and didn’t spring for the Gogo in-flight WiFi. If you make a piece of art, and Twitter registers its displeasure with it, you can either stomp your feet and quit the game forever, or—I promise you this is true—go to the gym for a couple hours."

"This means that the account of @realDonaldTrump will be locked for 12 hours following the removal of these Tweets. If the Tweets are not removed, the account will remain locked."

"I think there are times that the other side does it to get you caught."

"There’s no way that this is just happening randomly."

"As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, D.C., we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy"

"Much of the stuff on Twitter or in op-ed pieces is all the more embarrassing for having been written from a presumed position of great intellectual superiority..."

"I complained to Twitter about the man who, pretending to be me, commended the Charleston racist murderer. Twitter responded: “We have determined that it’s not in violation of Twitter’s impersonation policy.” I felt a flash of rage. Every time an online shaming occurred Twitter and Google made money. Whereas those of us doing the actual shaming? We got nothing. Twitter suddenly felt uncaring, intimidating, even dangerous. We were unpaid shaming interns for a company that didn’t care about us. I quit Twitter. The world outside Twitter was great. I read books. I reconnected with people I knew from real life and met them for drinks in person. Then I drifted back on to Twitter."

"If Shakespeare were alive today, he might be writing on Twitter."

"Too many twits make a twat."

"I don’t have confidence in management."

"I Don't Look at Twitter Because It Doesn't Tell Me Anything."

"Voter fraud of any kind is exceedingly rare in the US, election experts confirm"