Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

When I so pressingly urge a strict observance of all the laws, let me not be understood as saying there are no bad laws, or that grievances may not arise for the redress of which no legal provisions have been made. I mean to say no such thing. But I do mean to say that although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still, while they continue in force, for the sake of example they should be religiously observed. So also in unprovided cases. If such arise, let proper legal provisions be made for them with the least possible delay, but till then let them, if not too intolerable, be borne with.

A century ago populist leaders like William Jennings Bryan denounced the hard-money advocates of the era as wanting to “crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” But modern-day populists are largely out to lunch, downplaying the importance of monetary policy in economic health. Krugman, normally the least polite man in punditry, confessed to going soft on Bernanke because he knows him personally from the Princeton economics department. Payne briefly raised my hopes by reading aloud the phone number of the Federal Reserve’s public affairs department in Washington, urging the audience to call in. What she wanted people to complain about, however, wasn’t mass unemployment: It was the fact that Dimon is on the New York Fed board.

What is the name of the Jewish boy with the Facebook? Zuckerberger? I met him. A very nice boy. Also the Jewish boy from Google, a nice boy.

(via felixsalmon)

We told HP we needed better displays [for the Pre 3]. They’d come back and say, ‘Apple bought them all. Our suppliers tell us we need to build them a factory if we want the displays’ and they weren’t willing to put the billion dollars upfront to do that,” one source said. “The same thing happened with cameras. We’d pick a part, turns out Apple picked the same part. We were screwed left and right.

God damn it,” Murray snarls, “the movie better be the greatest movie ever made. If it’s not, I’m gonna kill Anderson. He’s a dead man. If it’s not the greatest movie ever made, or in the top ten, he may as well just move to China and change his name to Chin, and he better get himself a small room in a small town—and even then, I’ll hunt him down.

This is, as the vulgar Marxists used to say, no accident. And, as Bob Fitch liked to say, vulgar Marxism explains 90% of what goes on in the world.

WHITE

I’m not familiar with books on style. My role in the revival of Strunk’s book was a fluke—just something I took on because I was not doing anything else at the time. It cost me a year out of my life, so little did I know about grammar.

It’s the same with the Dangling String, which is a device that hangs in your peripheral vision, a piece of string hanging from the ceiling, and it jiggles about the more network traffic there is on your local network. It’s a terrific example of what Mark Weiser, the father of ubiquitous computing, calls “calm technology”. In fact, I think this kind of calm technology is the future of public computing in general. But let’s say it’s jiggling really badly one day and you want to see what’s going on — so you look really close, but what do you see? Just more string!

From Floridi’s environmental cyberethics, wiki gardening and free software are the cyberspace equivalents of respecting rainforests and biodiversity.