Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer. - Eric S. Raymond

The nightmare scenario is one in which corporate monopolism and statist power-seeking, always natural allies, feed back into each other and create rationales for increasing regulation, repression, and criminalization of digital speech.

Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.

It has been quite humorous watching the acolytes of the iPhone sink into deeper and deeper denial as Android blows through obstacles at ever-accelerating speed. It would require an epic poet, or perhaps a psychiatrist specializing in religious mania, to do full justice to this topic.