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Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism.

Nicholas Negroponte

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Nicholas Negroponte
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: December 1
Architect
Author
Computer Scientist
Investor
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Order
Assumption
Nature
Systems
Come
Draw
Self
Basic
Good
Draws
Hierarchical
Organization
Organizing
Pretty
Networks
Social
Contrast

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There is a belief that children drop out of school because they're needed by their families to work, or the little girls are needed to take care of younger siblings. It turns out that's not really true.
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In the world of computers and just devices in general, the lifespan, or the shelf life, is relatively short just because technology moves so fast and the costs drop so quickly and the power, whether it's computing power or memory rises very, very quickly.
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Very often kids don't ask questions in class because they don't want to be seen asking a question.
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Companies cannot really see beyond their current customer base. They explicitly or implicitly do things to protect their current customers. And the last person to want real change is your customer. This is why most new ideas come from small companies that have nothing to lose.
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Access by kids to the Internet should be like kids breathing clean air.
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Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living. Whatever big problem you can imagine, from world peace to the environment to hunger to poverty, the solution always includes education, ... We need to depend more on peer-to-peer and self-driven learning. The laptop is one important means of doing that.
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Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible.
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While a significant part of learning certain comes from teaching - but good teaching and by good teachers - a major measure comes from exploration, from reinventing the wheel and finding out for oneself.
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By the year 2000, most Americans will be online one way or another.
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The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable. Why now? Because the change is also exponential - small differences of yesterday can have suddenly shocking consequences tomorrow.
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If you take any world problem, any issue on the planet, the solution to that problem certainly includes education. In education, the roadblock is the laptop.
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Remember that the military used wind-up radios for years.
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Linux is its own worst enemy: it's splintered, it has different distributions, it's too complex to run for most people.
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Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.
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Big companies are looking closer term, and even the most technological companies spend less than 1% of sales on research. Startups have suffered the burst bubble.
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To compare books to computers, I mean, computers are the way to get books. That is the medium for distributing text because it doesn't require paper.
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The cost of electronics in a modern car now exceeds the cost of its stall.
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Machines need to talk easily to one another in order to better serve people.
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Juan Enriquez will change your view of change itself.
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Computer science departments have always considered 'user interface' research to be sissy work.
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