Poverty is when people lack the means to appear in public without shame

-- Amrtya Sen, paraphrased by William Greider in The Soul of Capitalism (2003) p.9

One paradox of the information age is that, while we are able to find out instantly so many more things than the ancestors could ever know, the anchor of self-knowledge -- who we are and where we fit in, what we count for in this new scheme -- seems to be weaker.

-- William Greider, The Soul of Capitalism (2003), p. 8

We originally came to India for the [low] cost. We stayed because of the quality, and now we're investing because of the innovation

-- Dan Scheinman, Sr. VP of Corporate Development, Cisco; quoted in Cisco Seeks Talent Abroad, Lisa DiCarlo, Forbes, 21 Oct 2005

From the story:

Cisco (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ) has invested in and had operations in India for several years but is stepping up its investement partly because it can't ignore India's brainpower and partly because of market reforms that favor business and foreign investment.

"We originally came to India for the [low] cost. We stayed because of the quality, and now we're investing because of the innovation," says Dan Scheinman, senior vice president of corporate development. He notes that India's universities are churning out tens of thousands of engineers, many of whom used to come to the U.S. after graduating, but who are now choosing to stay at home.

Cisco, which has less than 5% of its global workforce in India, didn't want to miss out. Scheinman says the country is producing an "incredible number of engineers who are building some of the world's most advanced networks and applications," led by broadband and mobile applications. That throws a harsh light on the dwindling number of young Americans going into the sciences and helps explain why U.S. companies are looking elsewhere to stay competitive.

Software as process crystallized in programs and workflow, and interpreted by hardware, is bureaucracy

-- George Spix, email, 18 October 2005

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway.

-- Esther Dyson, panel discussion in Time Magazine, 16 Oct 2005

Quote in context:

SO IS THE INTERNET TRULY CREATING CONNECTIONS AMONG PEOPLE? OR DIVIDING US AS WE HIDE INSIDE OUR PRIVATE SHELLS?

...

ESTHER DYSON, editor of technology newsletter Release 1.0 for CNET Networks: The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect. In my own experience, it has drawn my family closer, as we post pictures on Flickr. It has done more than tap into something latent; it has actually created something that wasn't there with the younger family members. We couldn't do that before because we were all geographically separated.

DRM will be like the Prohibition

-- Jon Pincus, in coversation, 6 October 2005

"The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil"

-- Sheikh Zaki Yamani, a Saudi Arabian who served as his country's oil minister three decades ago

Quoted by the Economist, The End of the Oil Age, 23 Oct 2003