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"Downloadable goods illustrate how modern tax systems have become increasingly ill equipped for an economy dominated by electronic commerce. Apple, say former executives, has been particularly talented at identifying legal tax loopholes and hiring accountants who, as much as iPhone designers, are known for their innovation. In the 1980s, for instance, Apple was among the first major corporations to designate overseas distributors as “commissionaires,” rather than retailers, said Michael Rashkin, Apple’s first director of tax policy, who helped set up the system before leaving in 1999."

＼(〇O〇)／
（ﾉ´д｀）(。ヘ°)

Antigoogle search.

"To better explain for the uninitiated, Ruby on Rails is not a language, or a version of Ruby. It uses Ruby code to make building a website much faster and easier. Let’s say that you wanted to make a complicated Web-based product, such as an online invitation service. You could do all the programming yourself. But Ruby on Rails is a framework that includes a lot of the basic, necessary functions for you.

"In his writings, he evinced a longing for artistic purity coming from obscurity. “People cling to ideas, because they're supposed to be vouchers for a million dollars. no, write an obscure book. build something outside all that pressure. i guess treehouses for kids qualify,” he wrote in 2004."

"Very few people are looking at this digital universe in an objective way. Danny Hillis is one of the few people who is. His comment, made exactly 30 years ago in 1982, was that "memory locations are just wires turned sideways in time". That's just so profound. That should be engraved on the wall. Because we don't realize that there is this very different universe that does not have the same physics as our universe.

"The reason we're here today (surrounded by this expanding digital universe) is because in 1936, or 1935, this oddball 23-year-old undergraduate student, Alan Turing, developed this theoretical framework to understand a problem in mathematical logic, and the way he solved that problem turned out to establish the model for all this computation. And I believe we wold have arrived here, sooner or later, without Alan Turing or John von Neumann, but it was Turing who developed the one-dimensional model, and von Neumann who developed the two-dimensional implementation, for this increasingly three-dimensional digital universe in which everything we do is immersed. And so, the next breakthrough in understanding will also I think come from some oddball. It won't be one of our great, known scientists. It'll be some 22-year-old kid somewhere who makes more sense of this."

"Some will tell you that an organization is the people who make it up, but that's not the case at all. The whole is larger and completely different from the sum of its parts. The system that we as a society have invented to run our world is a simple one. It's a game with a small number of rules. You put the pieces on the board, wind it up, and let it go. The thing is, the rules involved are all about money. The underlying theory is that you motivate people to provide value to society by making it be in their best interest to do so. But that's the intent; the mechanism is much less vague. The mechanism is money."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strategy-aims-at-low-tax-states-and-nations.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&hp&pagewanted=all

"Ironically, the ingenious network that you see with Mosaic has been around for several years. It is called the World Wide Web, and it was developed by a group of programmers at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (more commonly known by its old French acronym, CERN, for Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire) led by Oxford graduate Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee and his colleagues faced the problem of creating a unified hypertext network for high-energy physicists working in a diverse international environment. They came up with a stunning solution. Rather than attempt to impose standards on the hardware or software, they defined standards for the data. They also created a universal addressing system. Using a relatively simple set of commands, World Wide Web users can turn their documents into hypertext: insert the proper bit of code, and a word becomes a link; insert a different bit of code, and a sentence becomes a headline or begins a new paragraph. With the new addressing system, nearly any Net document - text, picture, sound, or video - can be retrieved and viewed on the World Wide Web.
The beauty of this approach is that it allows maximum openness and flexibility. All World Wide Web documents are similar, but every World Wide Web reader, or browser, can be different. From the smallest laptop to the most outrageous supercomputer, nearly every machine can hook into the Web. The Web, despite its sophisticated hypertext capabilities, is as catholic as the Net itself. All you need for exploring is a browser."

"One day I was walking down one of those busy roads covered with car dealerships (this was shortly after my wedding was called off) and I found an orphaned dog on the road."

@ http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/book/chapter-3.html
Method...

SK recommended

FN 3: "While in 2008 Zuckerberg avowed that privacy is "the vector around which Facebook operates," he now views Facebook's treatment of personal information in less reverent terms: "We decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it." Nevertheless, contradictorily, he maintains that Facebook is merely "updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are."

"In June of last year, NATO published a report entitled “Information and Information Security,” which called for Anonymous to be infiltrated and dismantled. “Observers note that Anonymous is becoming more and more sophisticated and could potentially hack into sensitive government, military, and corporate files,” the report reads. “Today, the ad hoc international group of hackers and activists is said to have thousands of operatives and has no set rules or membership.” In July, Anonymous hackers infiltrated NATO, just days after sixteen alleged Anons were arrested in the US, fourteen of them in connection with Operation Payback. (Scores of alleged Anons had previously been arrested in the UK, Spain, and Turkey.)"

“I provide ways to control what is publicly visible or hidden, and my users figure out how to integrate that into their actual lives as human beings,” says Maciej Ceglowski, an oil painter and writer who created Pinboard while deep in debt living in northeastern Romania. Ceglowski also runs Pinboard on his own.

“There’s going to be a more natural way to share things with one another than having thirty ‘like’ and ‘+1′ buttons next to everything we see. The wonderful thing is that this will arise organically, as we gain experience with life online, and not be invented by any one company,” says Ceglowski.

"Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it.

I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating."

Bartleby: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11231/pg11231.html
Waste Land: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext98/wslnd11.txt

"The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts--the only medium--that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media.

"The spectre of a polity controlled by the fads and whims of voters who actually believe that there are significant differences between Bud Lite and Miller Lite, and who think that professional wrestling is for real, is naturally alarming to people who don't. But then countries controlled via the command-line interface, as it were, by double-domed intellectuals, be they religious or secular, are generally miserable places to live."

http://www.debian.org/intro/about

“The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

"According to the report, staring blankly at luminescent rectangles is an increasingly central part of modern life. At work, special information rectangles help men and women silently complete any number of business-related tasks, while entertainment rectangles—larger and louder and often placed inside the home—allow Americans to enter a relaxing trance-like state after a long day of rectangle-gazing."
http://idalehtonen.com/best.html

Save Pages to Read Later. Eliminate cluttering of bookmarks with sites that are merely of a one-time interest.

When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn't just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning. Personal Web pages do that, as do journals and books. Even Britannica has an editorial voice, which some people have criticized as being vaguely too "Dead White Men."

"In fact, all the pleasures that capitalism depends upon, the pleasures elaborated in the daydreams Campbell regards as integral, are exemplified by pornography: the collecting mania, the pseudo-work of categorizing one's possessions, the excitement of ownership for its own sake, the opportunity to making shopping choices. Whether they are meticulously collecting issues of Playboy or filing their favorite JPEGs into a detailed folder hierarchy on their laptop, men amass pornography because it promises the same sort of mastery over women that commodities promise over emotions."

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2010/7/9hague.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puu3IvKnSb