A Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith
The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the U.S. is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems.
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I feel bad that I'm the one always blamed for the failure of the space business - even though there are problems with government policy toward the space business.
To know whether photography is or is not an art matters little. What is important is to distinguish between good and bad photography. By good is meant that photography which accepts all the limitations inherent in photographic technique and takes advantage of the possibilities and characteristics the medium offers. By bad photography is mean that which is done, one may say, with a kind of inferiority complex, with no appreciation of what photography itself offers: but on the contrary, recurring to all sorts of imitations.
And an apprenticeship to whatever gadgetry is useful in a technical world
It is foolish to claim, as some do, that emigration into space offers a long-term escape from Earth's problems. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest.
I believe that life offers you packages. It doesn't offer you good and bad, otherwise you will choose the good and you will leave the bad. It offers you packages and every package has some good and some bad.
Human problems are complex. If something isn't complex it doesn't qualify as problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about.
I understand Windows as well as most technical-support personnel. I can edit a config.sys file and delete bad lines in an autoexec.bat with the best of them. I can partition a hard drive in FAT32
But why would I want to?
I was inspired by the Hole in the Wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum. When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had learned how to use the worldwide web.
Beware of people preaching simple solutions to complex problems. If the answer was easy someone more intelligent would have thought of it a long time ago - complex problems invariably require complex and difficult solutions.
A good teacher offers practice, a bad one offers theories.
Every bad feeling is potential energy toward a more right way of being if you give it space to move toward its rightness
The language is the hardest thing. My technical Russian is much better than my conversational Russian, and it has to be good enough to explain problems to them in their technical control center.
In parallel with the development of my interests in technical gadgetry I began to acquire a profound love of and respect for the natural world which motivates my scientific thinking to this day.
Y2K is showing everyone what technical people have been dealing with for years: the complex, muddled, bug-bitten systems we all depend on, and their nasty tendency toward the occasional disaster.
Honest error in the face of complex and possibly intractable problems is a far more important source of bad results than are bad motives.
Cloud computing offers individuals access to data and applications from nearly any point of access to the Internet, offers businesses a whole new way to cut costs for technical infrastructure, and offers big computer companies a potentially giant market for hardware and services.
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