People are very ready to criticize other people's accents. There's no correlation between accents and intelligence or accents and criminality, but people do make judgments.

There's nothing unusual about a single language dying. But what's going on today is extraordinary when we compare the situation to what has happened in the past. We're seeing languages dying out on a massive scale.

Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.

Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.

The entire Internet, as well as the types of devices represented by the desktop computer, the laptop computer, the iPhone, the iPod, and the iPad, are a continuing inescapable embarrassment to science fiction, and an object lesson in the fallibility of genre writers and their vaunted predictive abilities.

I don't care how sacred is freedom, but I think the time has come for governments, at least the Malaysian government, to censor the Internet.

In our quest to define and describe the world, we have crisscrossed the oceans and continents, compiling exhaustive knowledge about its life forms and features, and extended our physical reach through technology, which provides us instantaneous and pervasive access to information about seemingly everything.

You really need to have a lot of empathy for the work you're doing and the people who you're ultimately trying to help, whether that's a business colleague, a boss, or, ultimately, the user of the software you're building.