Patent battles have become a strong catalyst for mergers, reducing competition in various domains. The largest corporations, with gigantic patent portfolios, routinely enter into cross-licensing agreements with their largest competitors.

Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.

In cyberspace, the Wikipedians never stop gathering: It's a continuous round-the-clock rolling workfest.

Granted, I'm more interested in technology than most people, and less interested in politics than most. But I don't like to think about categories. I really see myself as a general non-fiction writer.

I really don't think of myself as a science writer.

A good part of 'The Information' is about the transition from an oral to a literary culture. Books effected such a great transformation in the way we think about the world, our history, our logic, mathematics, you name it. I think we would be greatly diminished as a people and as a culture if the book became obsolete.

The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.

A book is not necessarily made of paper. A book is not necessarily made to be read on a Kindle. A book is a collection of text, organized in one of a variety of ways. You could say that words printed on paper and bound between cloth covers will someday be obsolete. But if and when that day comes, there will still be a thing called books.

It's important with any new technology to try to pay conscious attention to what the drawbacks might be. We choose to multitask. Sometimes our choices aren't the wisest of choices, and we regret them, but they are our choices. I think it'd be wrong to think that they're automatically bad.

I'll cheerfully confess to spending a lot of time playing completely disgusting computer games that have no redeeming social value.

As the Earth continues to slow, leap seconds will grow more common. Eventually we will need one every year, and then even more. Scientists could have avoided these awkward skips by choosing instead to adjust the duration of the second itself. Who would notice? That is what they did, in fact, until 1955.

If we want to live freely and privately in the interconnected world of the twenty-first century - and surely we do - perhaps above all we need a revival of the small-town civility of the nineteenth century. Manners, not devices: sometimes it's just better not to ask, and better not to look.

Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.

Strangely enough, the linking of computers has taken place democratically, even anarchically. Its rules and habits are emerging in the open light, rather shall behind the closed doors of security agencies or corporate operations centers.

The Fifties and Sixties were years of unreal optimism about weather forecasting. Newspapers and magazines were filled with hope for weather science, not just for prediction but for modification and control. Two technologies were maturing together: the digital computer and the space satellite.

Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the 'Oxford English Dictionary,' has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.

The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.

Humorists are using Twitter to tell jokes in an interesting way. It doesn't have to be profound, and it doesn't have to be earth-shaking, but it is transformative.

People worry about Twitter. Twitter is banal. It's 140-character messages. By definition, you can hardly say anything profound. On the other hand, we communicate. And, sometimes, we communicate about things that are important.

We have a habit of turning to scientists when we want factual answers and artists when we want entertainment, but where are the facts about the nature of the self? Neurologists peering at PET scans and fMRIs know they aren't seeing the soul in there.

It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.

In spacetime, all events are baked together: a four-dimensional continuum. Past and future are no more privileged than left and right or up and down.

As for memes, the word 'meme' is a cliche, which is to say it's already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene.

A bit, the smallest unit of information, the fundamental particle of information theory, is a choice, yes or no, on or off. It's a choice that you can embody in electrical circuits, and it is thanks to that that we have all this ubiquitous computing.