Micropayments are great if you use them for a product or service with certain properties. It must be one where you can get away with usage-based pricing, and where there is a strong rationale for making it cheap, yet not free.

New online formats gutted the newspaper-ad business. Why pore over tiny print looking for a job in the want ads when you can tap a few keywords into monster.com, then click through and apply? Why pay a steep per-character rate for a classified when you can hawk a whole garage full of used stuff on EBay or Craigslist for free?

Software is a gas ! It expands to fit the container it is in !

Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here.

Don't let the secret recipe die with the inventor.

Words can hurt you. In the larger world, it frames how people think about you, and it can hurt you in lots of little, subtle ways.

One of the ugly secrets of the renewable-energy industry is that its products make no economic sense unless they are highly subsidized.