Quotes About Computers

We couldn't build quantum computers unless the universe were quantum and computing. We can build such machines because the universe is storing and processing information in the quantum realm. When we build quantum computers, we're hijacking that underlying computation in order to make it do things we want: little and/or/not calculations. We're hacking into the universe.

I was working in computers when this stranger approached me out of the blue, saying I should become an actor. I took it as a gift from God, because I had been praying for clarity about what He wanted me to do, since I wasn't happy in computers.

I started getting into Internet technologies and computers. I wasn't especially interested in being a musician, but I wound up finding my way back to being interested in music through computers.

The idea that so many kids eat rubbish and sit on computers all day long appals me and getting them into sport is a major way of getting them off computers and leading healthier lives.

It doesn't matter how many televisions and computers and pieces of stereo equipment the Chinese send to us, even if they're sending them to us only in return for some funny, little, green pieces of paper. That is a balanced trade. They got what they wanted: the green pieces of paper. We got what we wanted: the plush toys, the computers, the stereo components.

One of the big challenges I've thought about in making record is that the role of computers has become so inescapable and computers offer so many possibilities for creativity, but they also make you lazy.

The guy who knows about computers is the last person you want to have creating documentation for people who don't understand computers.

While we bemoan the decline of literacy, computers discount words in favor of pictures and pictures in favor of video. While we fret about the decreasing cogency of public debate, computers dismiss linear argument and promote fast, shallow romps across the information landscape. While we worry about basic skills, we allow into the classroom software that will do a student's arithmetic or correct his spelling.

People are craving this great progress in electronics, going after computers, the Internet, etc. It's a giant progress technologically. But they must have a balance of soul, a balance for human beauty. That means art has an important role.

I've never been that technologically savvy, my friends are actually amused by how infrequently I use computers.

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

I'm not really gadget oriented. I'm not into technology or computers. I'm not good at interfacing with that sort of gear.

Every ISP is being attacked, maliciously both from in the United States and outside of the United States, by those who want to invade people's privacy. But more importantly they want to take control of computers, they want to hack them, they want to steal information.

Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he's a human calculator. He says it's a skill he learned as a kid. Now he's a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice.

About three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

If security were all that mattered, computers would never be turned on, let alone hooked into a network with literally millions of potential intruders.

I'm projecting somewhere between 100 million and 200 million computers on the Net by the end of December 2000, and about 300 million users by that same time.

Only if the computers really love each other.

Computers are very powerful tools, but in the simulated world of the computer, everything has to be calculated.

Along with filters on computers and a lock on affections, remember that the only real control in life is self-control.

The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt.

Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.

The security of computers and the Internet is a horrible and dangerous mess. Every week we hear about breaches of databases of Social Security numbers and financial information and health records, and about critical infrastructure being insecure.

It's not computer literacy that we should be working on, but sort of human-literacy. Computers have to become human-literate.

Society needs people who...know how to be compassionate and honest...Societ y needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're emotional, they're affectional. You can't run the society on data and computers alone.

A typical wine writer was once described as someone with a typewriter who was looking for his name in print, a free lunch, and a way to write off his wine cellar. It's a dated view. Wine writers now use computers.

Nowadays, all students have access to and indeed most own computers and are comfortable with the software used to compose music. There are probably too many musical options for them now and the trick is to limit the number of musical ideas so as to develop structure and continuity in their work.

We'll be able to have very intelligent, little robots with computers going inside our bloodstream, keeping us healthy from inside, destroying cancer at the level of one cell.

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly.

[With quantum computers] you can calculate how many bits are in the universe, how much energy it takes to flip them, how much energy exists, and use that to rule out lots of things about the universe's history. Anything that takes more bit flips couldn't have happened.

There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think.

Be afraid of the Chinese. I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space; they hack into Google's computers; the Osama bin Laden people can't make their underwear blow up.

Computers are like horses; they can sense fear and will act based on that.

I'm not very technically minded. I mean, I don't know how to do e-mail on computers.

Learning how to code and program computers when I was a kid was one of the best choices I made growing up. By writing code, I learned how to bring my dreams to life, how to budget, and how to build stuff. Whatever path you choose in life - being an artist, an engineer, a lawyer, a teacher, or even a politician, you will give yourself a huge leg up if you learn how to code.

Regardless of how it's done, transaction costs will continue to plummet as computers get more powerful. Low transaction costs are a wonderful thing if you're in the transaction business. They're wonderful for consumers too, making it cheaper and easier to buy things and creating new things to buy.

I'm very interested in the way the Internet has changed teenage life. Obviously it's very different from when I grew up, when there weren't even answering machines, much less computers. I was telling my children this the other day, and the little one said, "Did you have electricity, Mom?" and I was like okay, enough, kid.

It was very challenging in terms of making sure that everyone is distinct. Also, we wanted to have some Asian influences as well, so that it really is a mashup. We want evidence of our presence in this world, so you'll see there's an interest in technology, that there are not complex electronics. There's electricity in this world, but computers, circuits don't work.

So when you do board, the first class people, they're sitting there. A lot of them are working as your boarding. They have computers out and calculators. They're looking up at you like, Hey, we're making money right now!

I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.

The computers are not replacing mathematicians; they are breeding them.

I've come to a view that humans will continue to do what we do well, and that computers will continue to do what they do very well, and the two will coexist, but in different spaces.

There's all these ways to instantly communicate - cars, computers, telephone and transportation - and even with all that, it's so hard to find people and have an honest communication with them.

We have an epidemic of sexual predators following our children, whether it be on the computers, whether it be in our public parks, whether it be in the workplace, or even our schools.

In the summer of 1988, I received an interesting call from Bill Gates at Microsoft. He asked whether I'd like to come over and talk about building a new operating system at Microsoft for personal computers. What Bill had to offer was the opportunity to build another operating system, one that was portable.

I was a musician who began playing with computers, to see if they could make some tasks simpler. I developed some "tricks" or strategies for working with audio files, and then discovered that the same tricks could be applied to video files, or really, any type of data. Previously I made many different kinds of music. I did some work as a composer of film scores. In that role, my task was to create audio to match and deepen the visual. In my work now, the role is often reversed: I have to create images to match and deepen the audio.

I tell adults about the experiences of more than a hundred teachers I've interviewed. They tell me that allowing the child to help them learn helped them become better teachers. That's because they no longer had to pretend they were the experts - not only about computers but about other things.

My big dream back then was to buy an IBM Selectric. I still have that dream. I really ought to buy a word-processor. Half the cabbies at Rocky own computers. They tell me they can write failed novels ten times faster on a PC.