Pastoral Resources

In 1966 I became president of the British Computer Society.

And so every one of us in the FBI, I don't care if it's a file clerk someplace or an agent there or a computer specialist, understands that our main mission is to protect the public from another September 11, another terrorist attack.

And then you start getting into the technical side of it and the aesthetic side and with those areas you can come up with new ways to visualise things, new ways to render and use the computer to make things look different and new and stuff like that.

While the recent addition of the National Guard providing a support role manning computers and cameras has allowed more Border Patrol agents to work the field, more agents are still needed.

Guess what - I am one of the ONLY senators in the whole United States Senate that is computer literate!

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time.

Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.

Even in the developing parts of the world, kids take to computers like fish to water.

Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.

But it seemed to me that as soon as you have computer storage you could put every point you wanted in - make the ones that are less relevant to your central topic, further away or allow the central topic to move as the reader proceeded.

In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.

The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do.

So, the point was to be able to have a medium that would record all the connections and all the structures and all the thoughts that paper could not. Since the computer could hold any structure in any form, this was the way to go.

Computers are hierarchical. We have a desktop and hierarchical files which have to mean everything.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

The point is that these decisions they've made are partly for your convenience and partly for theirs and partly out of stereotypes that they carry with them from the conventions of the computer field.

It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that's impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants.

At this present time, matter is still the best way to think of architecture, but I'm not so sure for very long. The computer is radicalizing the way we think about our world.