Gary Varga > Gary's Quotes

“After several decades of empirical study, Jaques concluded that just as humans differ in intelligence, we differ in our ability to handle time-dependent complexity. We all have a natural time horizon we are comfortable with: what Jaques called “time span of discretion,” or the length of the longest task an individual can successfully undertake.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Consider the world we could live in if all of our local and global leaders, if all of our personal and professional friends and foes, recognized the defeasibility of their beliefs and acted accordingly. That sure sounds like progress to me. But of course I could be wrong.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Defeasible beliefs provide the provisional certainty necessary to navigate an uncertain world.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“When someone takes your car, they have the car and you do not. When, because of some new technology, someone is able to get access to the MP3 file of your new song, they have the file and so do you. You did not lose the song. What you may have lost is the opportunity to sell the song to that person or to the people with whom they “share” the file.”
― Anonymous

“In certain situations, though, competition will not work: if the dinosaurs are a cartel strong enough to squelch competition; if they have enlisted the state to make the threatening technology illegal, describing it as a predatory encroachment on the “rights” of the old guard rather than aggressive competition; if ingrained prejudices are simply so strong that the potential business benefits take years to become apparent; or if the market has “locked in” on a dominant standard—a technology or an operating system, say—to which new market entrants do not have legal access. In those situations, markets cannot be counted on to self-correct. Unfortunately, and this is a key point, intellectual property policy frequently deals with controversies in which all of these conditions hold true. Let me repeat this point, because it is one of the most important ones in this book. To a political scientist or market analyst, the conditions I have just described sound like a rarely seen perfect storm of legislative and market dysfunction. To an intellectual property scholar, they sound like business as usual.”
― Anonymous

“The content industries like to portray fair use as a narrow and grudging defense against an otherwise valid case for copyright infringement—as if the claim were, “Yes, I trespassed on your land, which was wrong, I admit. But I was starving and looking for food. Please give me a break.” This is simply inaccurate. True, fair use is asserted as “an affirmative defense”; that is the way it is brought up in a copyright case. But in U.S. law, fair uses are stated quite clearly to be limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright holder—uses that were never within the copyright holder’s power to prohibit. The defense is not “I trespassed on your land, but I was starving.” It is “I did not trespass on your land. I walked on the public road that runs through it, a road you never owned in the first place.”
― Anonymous

“I want to convince you that intellectual property is important, that it is something that any informed citizen needs to know a little about, in the same way that any informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment, or civil rights, or the way the economy works. I will try my best to be fair, to explain the issues and give both sides of the argument. Still, you should know that this is more than mere description. In the pages that follow, I try to show that current intellectual property policy is overwhelmingly and tragically bad in ways that everyone, and not just lawyers or economists, should care about. We are making bad decisions that will have a negative effect on our culture, our kids’ schools, and our communications networks; on free speech, medicine, and scientific research. We are wasting some of the promise of the Internet, running the risk of ruining an amazing system of scientific innovation, carving out an intellectual property exemption to the First Amendment. I do not write this as an enemy of intellectual property, a dot-communist ready to end all property rights; in fact, I am a fan. It is precisely because I am a fan that I am so alarmed about the direction we are taking.”
― Anonymous

“When one is busy and absorbed in one's work, the very absorption affords great delight; but when one has withdrawn one's hand from the completed masterpiece, the pleasure is not so keen.”
― Seneca, Letters From A Stoic: Epistulae Morales AD Lucilium (Illustrated. Newly revised text. Includes Image Gallery + Audio): All Three Volumes

“It is wrong to live under constraint; but no man is constrained to live under constraint.”
― Seneca, Letters From A Stoic: Epistulae Morales AD Lucilium (Illustrated. Newly revised text. Includes Image Gallery + Audio): All Three Volumes