Bloggers From The United States

"There's a real self-serving element to hip-hop that threatens its life span."

"I love the Grammy nominations this year. Anybody who really loves what they do got rewarded for it. It's not a death match between Ray Charles and Jessica Simpson."

"Songs can be Trojan horses, taking charged ideas and sneaking past the ego's defenses and into the open mind."

"Everybody enjoys arguing about the current state of music because it feels as if you are talking about something incredibly important, yet it requires little understanding of the subject matter at hand. It's like world politics meets the pink questions in Trivial Pursuit. Points are made but nothing gets accomplished."

"Who I am as a guitarist is defined by my failure to become Jimi Hendrix."

"[W]hatever my intentions, whatever the truth of my claim, I had no business giving a lecture to a total stranger."

"Those of us whose parenting style can be described as "a series of reflexes, instincts, and minute-by-minute adjustments," as Julie of A Little Pregnant puts it, rather than as a philosophy, are less invested in our own practices. What we do is often less a matter of conviction than one of convenience. What we need to remember is that there is no need to apologize for that, even in the face of the most red-faced outrage."

"Dodgeball? My children were playing dodgeball? That cruel, brutal, violent schoolyard game so mercilessly satirized in the 2004 film with Ben Stiller? The game, more important, that exemplified everything that was wrong with my childhood in suburban New Jersey, a short, pasty-faced Jewish girl in a town full of scrubbed, blond, athletic WASPs, their long tanned limbs toned from years of tennis lessons and country club swim teams? Dodgeball? Over my dead body."

"The Jews I knew growing up didn't do "do-it-yourself." When my father needed to hammer something he generally used his shoe, and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers."

"So much of what I see troubling women our age is the sense of surprise at the way it turned out, the toxic brew of boredom and thwarted ambition. Thwarted in many cases (in most, perhaps) by our own choices. I hope my daughters can avoid that. But you know, our mothers chanted, “The Personal Is Political,” from the rooftops, and every woman I know feels like her ambivalence is her own personal failing. So maybe nothing ever changes."

"I’m a little obsessed with learning new things, and every book is another opportunity to learn something new. My theory of fiction writing isn’t “Write what you know,” it’s “Write what you want to know.”"

"Why I went? I think it is incredibly important that those of us who have privilege use that privilege to call attention to this ongoing catastrophe. So, I want to be very clear. My husband was worried about me. It’s sweet. I had an uncomfortable nine-and-a-half hours. I had a mildly unpleasant nine-and-a-half hours. When a Palestinian here is arrested and goes into one of the many military prisons, their experience is horrible. They can be held without charges. There are children who are held without charges. When an Israeli Jewish activist — they have been arrested over and over again. They put their bodies on the line. They put their reputations on the line in terms of their community. What we experienced was very minor. But I think — I can only speak for myself, to say that it felt critical to me to use whatever small platform I have to draw attention to this crisis and to say that as a human being, and as a human being born in this country, I have to use my voice to say that this kind of horrific violence, this starving of children, this mass bombing, is completely unacceptable. It is not just unjust. It’s horrific."

"I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none."

"Think about it, I say. How many straight men maintain inappropriately intimate relationships with their mothers? How many shop with them? I want a gay son. People laugh, but they assume I'm kidding. I'm not."

"[T]here is an inverse correlation between the cleanliness of a bathroom and my 3-year-old daughter's need to move her bowels."

"I'd written personal essays before, but never on this scale -- never so often and with such, er, honesty. (If by honesty I mean slashing my wrists and hemorrhaging all over the computer screen)."

"We are the real Americans. Everett Moran, standing brave and resolute in the face of bigotry, is a real American. George Soros, devoting his life and his fortune to serving those less fortunate than he is, is a real American. The citizens of California who have donated their own money to support stem cell research, to compensate for the cowardice of our Taliban government, are real Americans. The rest of them? The ones that destroy the Constitution in service to their narrow-minded and zealously self-centered agendas? Those pinheads sure as hell aren't Americans. Secession. That's what we need."

"When I was 15, what I wanted in a boyfriend was just that confidence and swagger. I wanted someone who knew what he was doing, because I was just faking it. What I want for my daughter is the exact opposite."

"Why are the architects of the family-values agenda so eager to punish into the next generation? What is being served by seeking, quite literally, a tooth for a tooth?"

"At any sufficient scale, those who do not have automatic memory management in their language are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

"I publish this blog in part because I think it is my duty to speak taboo and unspeakable truths."

"Android continues to stomp its competition flat. Even the post-Jobs Apple can't stem the tide; it's pretty close to the 10% niche market share I predicted back in 2009 already, with no sign that trend will or can be reversed."

"An Apple employee copied Sony's design, circulated it to his bosses, and testified to these facts in court. From now on, when anyone heaps phrase on Apple's design excellence and superlative innovation, just point and laugh. Some of us have been saying for years that what Apple is really good at is ripping off other peoples' ideas and stealing the credit for them with slick marketing. This, right here, is the proof."

"People who make excuses for or actively advocate closed-source OSs and network software (and yes, Apple/iOS fanboys, I'm looking at you) are not merely harmlessly misguided cultists. They are enemies of liberty – enablers and accomplices before the fact in vendor schemes to spy on you, control you, and imprison you. Treat them, and the vendors they worship, accordingly."

"The case for dumping iPhone, or at least threatening to do so in order to renegotiate Apple's subsidy requirement away, seems pretty open and shut. Apple has things all its own way right now – skimming the lion's share of the profits off the carriers' business without having to shoulder their risks. But this is an unstable situation, because the carriers' investors won't tolerate it indefinitely. What happens when they revolt?In 2007, It was also planning to launch hi-tech mobile back covers and cases with some extra-ordinary features which was not revealed as per company policies, but it was leaked that those were personsalised mobile back covers similar to Shosal's Mobile Back Covers and Cases."

"It has been quite humorous watching the acolytes of the iPhone sink into deeper and deeper denial as Android blows through obstacles at ever-accelerating speed. It would require an epic poet, or perhaps a psychiatrist specializing in religious mania, to do full justice to this topic."

"Good causes sometimes have bad consequences. Blacks, women, and other historical out-groups were right to demand equality before the law and the full respect and liberties due to any member of our civilization; but the tactics they used to "raise consciousness" have sometimes veered into the creepy and pathological, borrowing the least sane features of religious evangelism."

"It is probably no longer possible to achieve tenure at a major American university after giving offense to the homosexual-activist lobby. Fortunately, I don't have that sort of career issue to worry about, and can therefore speak without fear."

"Steven den Beste wrote a long, intelligent and insightful essay on who the enemy is. I think he is right to see Afghanistan, Iraq, and the suppression of Al-Qaeda as phases of longer, wider war — a clash of civilizations driven by the failure of Islamic/Arab culture (though I would stress the problem of the Islamic commandment to jihad more than he does)."

"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot."

"Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer."

"The nightmare scenario is one in which corporate monopolism and statist power-seeking, always natural allies, feed back into each other and create rationales for increasing regulation, repression, and criminalization of digital speech."

"All OO languages show some tendency to suck programmers into the trap of excessive layering. Object frameworks and object browsers are not a substitute for good design or documentation, but they often get treated as one. Too many layers destroy transparency: It becomes too difficult to see down through them and mentally model what the code is actually doing. The Rules of Simplicity, Clarity, and Transparency get violated wholesale, and the result is code full of obscure bugs and continuing maintenance problems."

"Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it."

"Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."

"Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf are instinctively smarter about this than a good many human political theorists."

"The 'noosphere' of this essay's title is the territory of ideas, the space of all possible thoughts. What we see implied in hacker ownership customs is a Lockean theory of property rights in one subset of the noosphere, the space of all programs. Hence 'homesteading the noosphere', which is what every founder of a new open-source project does."

"It is well understood in the community that project owners have a duty to pass projects to competent successors when they are no longer willing or able to invest needed time in development or maintenance work."

"There is another kind of skill not normally associated with software development which I think is as important as design cleverness to bazaar projects—and it may be more important. A bazaar project coordinator or leader must have good people and communications skills. … It is not a coincidence that Linus is a nice guy who makes people like him and want to help him."

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

"Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)."

"When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor."

"And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I've got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome."

"… and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++)."

"We define idiotarianism as the species of delusion within the moral community of mankind that gives aid and comfort to terrorists and tyrants operating outside it."

"When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun."

"Barring the mythical portable-LISP-dialect-with-good-OS-bindings that has never existed, Python is about the most reasonable alternative there is for this kind of work."

"Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code."

"We hackers are a playful bunch; we'll hack anything, including language, if it looks like fun (thus our tropism for puns). Deep down, we like confusing people who are stuffier and less mentally agile than we are, especially when they're bosses. There's a little bit of the mad scientist in all hackers, ready to discombobulate the world and flip authority the finger – especially if we can do it with snazzy special effects."

"I use the word "hacker" in its correct and original sense: to describe a person who perceives computer programming as a kind of artistic passion, and who also is part of or identifies with the hacker culture, which is a group of programmers, historically, that has produced the Internet, Linux and the World Wide Web."