Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.
Nicholas NegroponteLinux is its own worst enemy: it's splintered, it has different distributions, it's too complex to run for most people.
Nicholas NegroponteThis is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries.
Nicholas NegroponteProgramming allows you to think about thinking, and while debugging you learn learning.
Nicholas NegroponteA Wired reader told me once, Get a life, which I read from the back of a yacht in the Aegean, while eating fresh sea urchins and drinking terrific Montrachet.
Nicholas NegroponteTaxes will eventually become a voluntary process, with the possible exception of real estate - the one physical thing that does not move easily and has computable value. The US has a jump-start on the practice, in that 65 percent of local school funds come from real estate taxes - a practice Europeans consider odd and ill advised. But wait until that's all there is left to tax, when the rest of the things we buy and sell come from everywhere, anywhere, and nowhere.
Nicholas Negroponte