Clifford Stoll Quotes

#1. The Internet is a telephone system that's gotten uppity.

Clifford Stoll

#2. Here are my strong reservations about the wave of computer networks. They isolate us from one another and cheapen the meaning of actual experience. They work against literacy and creativity. They undercut our schools and libraries.

Clifford Stoll

#3. It's a great medium for trivia and hobbies, but not the place for reasoned, reflective judgment. Suprisingly often, discussions degenerate into acrimony, insults and flames.

Clifford Stoll

#4. Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.

Clifford Stoll

#5. Data isn't information, any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.

Clifford Stoll

#6. The information highway is being sold to us as delivering information, but what it's really delivering is data ... Unlike data, information has utility, timeliness, accuracy, a pedigree ... Editors serve as barometers of quality, and most of an editor's time is spent saying no.

Clifford Stoll

#7. Electronic communication is an instantaneous and illusory contact that creates a sense of intimacy without the emotional investment that leads to close friendships.

Clifford Stoll

#8. The Internet has no such organization - files are made available at random locations. To search through this chaos, we need smart tools, programs that find resources for us.

Clifford Stoll

#9. If you don't have an E-mail address, you're in the Netherworld. If you don't have your own World Wide Web page, you're a nobody.

Clifford Stoll

#10. Why is it drug addicts and computer aficionados are both called users?

Clifford Stoll

#11. We'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.

Clifford Stoll

#12. The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Clifford Stoll

#13. The astronomer's rule of thumb:
if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen

Clifford Stoll

#14. Cliff, I'd like to take over, but our charter prevents it. NSA can't engage in domestic monitoring, even if we're asked. That's prison term stuff.

Clifford Stoll

#15. So what? Somebody's always had control over information, and others have always tried to steal it. Read Machiavelli. As technology changes, sneakiness finds new expressions." Martha

Clifford Stoll

#16. Computers in classrooms are the filmstrips of the 1990s.

Clifford Stoll

#17. If we built houses the way we build software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

Clifford Stoll

#18. I spend almost as much time figuring out what's wrong with my computer as I do actually using it.

Clifford Stoll

#19. Minds think with ideas, not information No amount of data, bandwidth, or processing power can substitute for inspired thought.

Clifford Stoll

#20. It's easier to apologize afterwards than getting something allowed in the first place.

Clifford Stoll

#21. The Internet is a perfect diversion from learning ... it opens many doors that lead to empty rooms.

Clifford Stoll

#22. Call me a troglodyte; I'd rather peruse those photos alongside my sweetheart, catch the newspaper on the way to work, and page thorough a real book.

Clifford Stoll

#23. Im a scientist, once I do something, I want to do something else.

Clifford Stoll

#24. I sense an insatiable demand for connectivity. Maybe all these people have discovered important uses for the Internet. Perhaps some of them feel hungry for a community that our real neighborhoods don't deliver. At least a few must wonder what the big deal is.

Clifford Stoll

#25. Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.

Clifford Stoll

#26. While I admire the insights of many of the people in the world of computing, I get this cold feeling that I speak a different language.

Clifford Stoll

#27. If you really want to know about the future, don't ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No! Don't ask somebody who's writing code. No, if you want to know what society's going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher.

Clifford Stoll

#28. What's society going to be like when the kids today are phenomenally good at text messaging and spend a huge amount of on-screen time, but have never gone bowling together?

Clifford Stoll

#29. Of course. NSA is rumored to tape record every transatlantic telephone conversation. Maybe they'd recorded this session.

Clifford Stoll

#30. VI was predecessor to hundreds of word processing systems. By now, Unix folks see it as a bit stodgy - it hasn't the versatility of Gnu-Emacs, nor the friendliness of more modern editors. Despite that, VI shows up on every Unix system.

Clifford Stoll

#31. Merely that I have a World Wide Web page does not give me any power, any abilities, nor any status in the real world.

Clifford Stoll

#32. Rather than bringing me closer to others, the time that I spend online isolates me from the most important people in my life, my family, my friends, my neighbourhood, my community.

Clifford Stoll

#33. No computer network with pretty graphics can ever replace the salespeople that make our society work.

Clifford Stoll

#34. When I'm online, I'm alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard, staring at a cathode-ray tube.

Clifford Stoll