At some point, you can't lift this boulder with just your own strength. And if you find that you need to move bigger and bigger boulders up hills, you will need more and more help.
Vinton CerfI can imagine people actually working in virtual environments where productive, cooperative work is undertaken, and I think we will find people helping others to take advantage of masses of information that are inaccessible or too vast to process in real time today.
Vinton CerfThe purpose behind terrorism is to instill fear in people - the fear that electrical power, for instance, will be taken away or the transportation system will be taken down.
Vinton CerfEngineers are really good at labeling and branding things. If we had named Kentucky Fried Chicken, it would have been Hot Dead Birds.
Vinton CerfIt is just a thing. Whether it is good or bad depends what you do with it. If you don't like what you are doing with it then it is simply a reflection of what you are as an individual, an organisation or a society and that is what you have to fix.
Vinton CerfGoogle’s objective is to organize the world’s information and to make it accessible. Unicode plays a central role in this effort because it is the principal means by which content in every language can be represented in a form that can be processed by software. As Unicode extends its coverage of the world’s languages, it helps Google accomplish its mission.
Vinton CerfOn email and the first instance of spam: This is not for advertising! This is for serious work!
Vinton CerfWritten communication is a tremendous help for me, and so when electronic mail was invented in '71, I got very excited about it, thinking well, gee, the deaf community could really use this, or the hard of hearing community as well.
Vinton CerfI've been hearing-impaired, not quite since birth, but I've been wearing hearing aids since I was 13, so I'm very conscious of the difficulty of voice communication.
Vinton CerfI expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices.
Vinton CerfI no longer give Power Point presentations, because I've come to believe that power corrupts, and Power Point corrupts absolutely.
Vinton CerfThe remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services.
Vinton CerfThere is an underlying, fundamental reliance on the Internet, which continues to grow in the number of users, country penetration and both fixed and wireless broadband access.
Vinton CerfFirst of all, in terms of investment in Internet-related developments, venture capitalists - once burned - are now very cautious and are investing in areas that actually make business sense.
Vinton CerfThere has been a substitution of ideology for fact and scientific and engineering data in this administration.
Vinton CerfInformation flow is what the Internet is about. Information sharing is power. If you don't share your ideas, smart people can't do anything about them, and you'll remain anonymous and powerless.
Vinton CerfAlthough I've had several major career changes, I was extremely hesitant about making some of them.
Vinton CerfMy reaction to a lot of the current situation that we're in is based in part on a serious concern that the present administration's course ignores reality.
Vinton CerfWe will have more Internet, larger numbers of users, more mobile access, more speed, more things online and more appliances we can control over the Internet.
Vinton CerfNow, more than ever, the Internet must be wielded along with other media to cast bright lights on all who would destroy freedom in the world.
Vinton CerfIf we do not like what we see in that mirror the problem is not to fix the mirror, we have to fix society.
Vinton CerfSo, for me, working with larger companies has often been very satisfying, precisely because of the ability of bringing critical mass to bear on a given effort.
Vinton CerfMy belief is that there will be very large numbers of Internet-enabled devices on the Net - home appliances, office equipment, things in the car and maybe things that you carry around. And since they're all on the Internet and Internet-enabled, they'll be manageable through the network, and so we'll see people using the Net and applications on the Net to manage their entertainment systems, manage their, you know, office activities and maybe even much of their social lives using systems on the Net that are helping them perform that function.
Vinton CerfTheir Internet usage is growing very rapidly, and even they can do the math: If everyone in China needed an IPv4 address - just one - this country would use up one third of the entire public IP address space.
Vinton CerfWhat is special about VOIP is that it's just another thing you can do on the Internet, whereas it is the only thing - or nearly the only thing with the exception of the dial-up modem and fax - that you can do on the public switched telephone network.
Vinton CerfI was very nervous about going up to teach at Stanford and very nervous even about going to ARPA.
Vinton CerfBy placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation.
Vinton CerfMovie distribution may very well have migrated fully to digital form by then, making a huge dent in the need to print film and physically distribute content.
Vinton CerfIn a small company, you often see a lot more of what goes on in a broader range of things. And that's good.
Vinton CerfI believe that the problem of global climate change will ultimately spur our global society to respond and while the condition does not appear to be reversible, we will find ways to adapt to it.
Vinton CerfI'd like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old.
Vinton Cerf