Sublime

rôle décisif au cours de la seconde guerre mondiale dans le décryptage des codes d’Enigma, la machine à écrire sophistiquée qui servait aux Nazis pour encoder et déchiffrer les commandements militaires et autres messages

Firth had just begun to study programming, but the error was “just obvious” to him. Remembering this incident years later, Firth said that the engineer had probably been “programming by rote. He wanted to make his program look like programs he’d seen before, and that clearly wasn’t gonna work.” Firth always tried to avoid such an approach. “I like

When technological conditions raised the returns to violence, they doomed societies that were not organized to channel large resources into making war.

GIVEN THE GREAT diversity

much better bug-munchers

In the high-stakes competition between weapons and counterweapons, the weak link was not the supply of new ideas. It was the transfer of those ideas to the field.

the formula number for the resulting version of the formula is none other than . . .

Unsurprisingly, the Human Genome Project also exhibited a bubble dynamic, driven as it was by an ambitious vision and characterized by excessive government overinvestment.

The megapolitical logic of cyberspace suggests that central command-and-control systems that currently dominate the world’s large-scale infrastructure will have to be replaced by multicentric models of security with distributed capabilities so they cannot be easily captured or blocked by a computer virus.