“But Richard had already gone the cop route and found it not nearly as productive as driving around with a sledgehammer and retaining the services of men with oxyacetylene torches.”

— Neal Stephenson , book Reamde

Day 6
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

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Neal Stephenson 167

American science fiction writer 1959

Tom Peters (1942) American writer on business management practices

15 January 2018
Tom Peters Daily, Weekly Quote

“Getting to near zero marginal cost and nearly free goods and services is a function of advances in productivity. Productivity is “a measure of productive efficiency calculated as the ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce it.” If the cost of producing an additional good or service is nearly zero, that would be the optimum level of productivity.”

Jeremy Rifkin (1945) American economist

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (2014)

“The final result will be that the American people will ultimately prefer communities. They will cop out or opt out of the system. Today everything is a bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed people who are not personalities are trained to fit into this bureaucratic structure and say it is a great life--although I would assume that many on their death beds must feel otherwise. The process of copping out will take a long time, but notice: we are already copping out of military service on a wholesale basis; we are already copping out of voting on a large scale basis. …People are also copping out by refusing to pay any attention to newspapers or to what’s going on in the world, and by increasing emphasis on the growth of localism, what is happening in their own neighborhoods.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

John Gilmore (1955) Internet activist, software programmer and contributor to the GNU project

As quoted in TIME magazine (6 December 1993) http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/outerspace/internet-article.html
Unsourced variant:
The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it.

“Product and service quality can be defined as the total composite product and service characteristics of marketing, engineering, manufacturing, and maintenance through which the product and service in use will meet the expectations of the customer.”

Armand V. Feigenbaum (1922–2014) American businessman

Variant: Product quality can then be defined as: The composite product characteristics of engineering and manufacturing that determine the degree to which the product, in use, will meet the expectations of the customer.
Source: Total Quality Control, 1983, p. 7