He was a good winner; poor losers often are.

Clark couldn’t stop using technology to change the world, and so he needed an excuse not to stop. The reasons he couldn’t stop were ultimately unknowable; but I assumed that the best and most lasting motive for wanting to change the way things are is to be unhappy with the way things are. People who are unhappy with the way things are tend to

Why do people perpetually create for themselves the condition for their own dissatisfaction? Listening to Clark talk about how much money he needed to make was like watching the racing dog who had the wit to grab hold of the remote device that controls the mechanical rabbit. Rather than slow it down, however, he speeds it up. Clark played these

“Once we admit that there is room for newness—that there are vastly more conceivable possibilities than realized outcomes—we must confront the fact that there is no special logic behind the world we inhabit, no particular justification for why things are the way they are. Any number of arbitrarily small perturbations along the way could have made

That was the burden of the technical man. He knew the many ways technology could fail. And he realized that he alone was responsible for its success.

The computer engineer has a postmodern flavor to him—which is perhaps why it is so difficult for him to explain even to other computer engineers what he does for a living. The honest answer is that he gazes into a screen and thinks. He is a creator of concepts.

“If you want to be a good engineer you have to be willing to be replaceable.

When the crew begins to hide the situation from the passengers, the passengers should begin to worry.

The DOJ introduced endless e-mails and memos showing how Microsoft bribed and blackmailed companies into harming Netscape. (“How much do we have to pay you to screw Netscape?” Gates asked executives of America Online in early 1996.)