"Pumping aid money into poor countries is less effective than encouraging economic growth through commerce, 'inclusive capitalism.' A cellphone in the hands of a fisherman using it to grow his business is a textbook case of bottom-up economic development"

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Peter Thiel on liberty and scientific progress.

"WSLEs [Weakly State-Like Entities] are parastate entities [...] small, fast, live in holes, do not attempt combat with big dogs, and run from hole to hole in the event of trouble. They do not die with their boots on."

"The decline of civilization will run many of its historical processes in reverse, and the map will open up again, just as it once closed, and in the empty gaps, the romantic example of the pirate will no doubt inspire many."

"Hakim Bey’s essay moves on to describe how we can create a space for freedom, a temporary autonomous zone, defined not only in time, but in space, to create a pocket beyond the controls of the state."

"When the Nazis stormed the apartment in Vienna, he was gone. The man they were looking for was Ludwig von Mises, an economist whose writings enraged them."

"UTF-8 is one of the smartest things I've seen. It is a byte stream encoding for simple values (like Unicode characters) that can be bigger than bytes. UTF-8 has some wonderful properties: [...]"

"Let me get this straight: the company will side with petulant, unreasonable, angry, demanding customers instead of with me, its loyal employee? And this is meant to lead to better customer service?"

"The way memristors handle current and voltage is startlingly similar to the way synapses between brain cells do, says Chua. Both build up voltage to a threshold before firing and letting a current pass."

"Researchers believe the discovery will pave the way for instant-on PCs, more energy-efficient computers, and new analog computers that can process and associate information in a manner similar to that of the human brain."

"Fluid intelligence was previously thought to be genetically hard-wired, but the finding suggests that with about 25 minutes of rigorous mental training a day, healthy adults could improve their mental capacities."

"The researchers found that the IQ of trained individuals increased significantly more than controls - and that the more training people got, the higher the score."

"If the basic tenets of free-market 'capitalism' include the full recognition of property rights, the sanctity of voluntary contract, [etc...] it can hardly be argued that we have ever actually lived under such a regime."

"Two years ago, Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney said, 'We understand now that piracy is a business model. Pirates compete the same way we do - through quality, price, and availability.'"

"The idea is to get out into international waters and set up a floating outpost from which people can come and go, experimenting with different types of legal, social, and contractual arrangements."

"Colombian cartels have spent billions of dollars to build one of the world's most sophisticated IT infrastructures. It's helping them smuggle more dope than ever before."

"So would it be wrong to uplift animals and make them happy slaves? One could imagine uplifted animals designed to receive an addictive jolt of pleasure inducing dopamine every time they successfully carry out a human command."

"Almost exactly a hundred years ago -- 1907, to be exact -- the original J.P. Morgan arranged a bailout of a troubled financial institution for the same purpose of preventing a panic that could end up with the whole economy declining."

Capitalism should not be condemned, writes Ron Paul, since we haven't had capitalism. A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank and incomprehensible regulations gone wild.

"The case against capitalism is indefensible. It is smoke and mirrors. It is rooted in envy and malice. It is fueled by a stunning ignorance of sound economics, which is part and parcel of a broader rejection of reason itself."