You don't want your readers seeing easy connections; it becomes a distraction.

Having a persistent nature is part of being human. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to speak of knowing another person, or loving them, or being their friend or enemy or rival.

Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be — or to be indistinguishable from — self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.

And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.

Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. Microsoft is the very embodiment of modern high-tech prosperity - it is, in a word, bourgeois - and so it attracts all of the same gripes.

I just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption.