Rather than forcing local factories to clean up after themselves, Changzhou decided to outsource the job of managing its water supply to a French company named Veolia - one of a handful of corporate giants now scrambling to take over city water systems around the planet, especially in the often polluted and water-short developing world.
You look at any industry - you're not innovating unless people are questioning it. If you're innovating, you're doing something nobody's done before, which means you're re-writing rules, resetting boundaries, re-creating systems. And that means the traditional industry is going to question it.
Computer systems could not work without standards - an agreement among programs and systems about how they will exchange information.
The most important thing for people to know about the governance of the Arctic is that we have a chance now to act to maintain the integrity of the system or to lose it. To lose it means that we will dismember the vital systems that make the Arctic work. It's not just a cost to the people who live there. It's a cost to all people everywhere.
Governments allocate enormous resources for social programs. And it is true that for many years we have had one of the best social service systems in the world. Yet we are still incapable of meeting the needs of tens of thousands of Canadian families.
20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems.
I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology.
From search and books to online TV and operating systems, antitrust affects our daily digital lives in more ways than we think.
In cyberspace, weapons systems get created in 24-hour cycles. You have no earthly idea whether or not you have a defensive capability against them.
My family and I took visits to each and every school and listened to each coaching staff. I felt the most comfortable with and really excited about playing at SC. Being close to home in one of the best offensive systems is paying off now as I'm making the jump to the pros.
Sometime in the future, science will be able to create realities that we can't even begin to imagine. As we evolve, we'll be able to construct other information systems that correspond to other realities, universes based on logic completely different from ours and not based on space and time.
Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.
The thing that's good about music-making software like the DAW-kinda systems is that they're all generally the same; the kind of interface is normally laid out in a similar way. Depending on the program, the sounds might be quite different, but they tend to all have a drum machine or synthesizer or a sampler.
I didn't dream that I would become the CEO of the company when I joined as a systems marketing engineer back in 1995. Sometimes, I don't really reconcile to it; it's a bit of an odd sensation which is under the surface.
I remember endless Apple v. Windows debates in the early '90s when I was in college. Macs were better machines, everyone said; the whole Office thing was a huge pain. It was difficult to transfer files between operating systems, and generally speaking, if you wanted to do Office stuff, you needed a Windows machine.
All countries have poor people. Yet it's a very rare country which understands the indignities of poverty, while education systems maintain the status quo. The children of the elite go to the best schools and get the best jobs, not because they are the best. We're not taking advantage of the intellectual power on this planet.
Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don't draft people; it's not jury duty.
In setting goals and executing a strategy, Wanda is sophisticated. We have good systems and departments. If targets are not reached, a yellow light goes off.
I love Winston Churchill. I love the wisdom he had, the sagacity. I like people who are independent-minded. People who aren't part of clans or systems, who are talented and free, and able to do things without being corrupted by the system.
When I was 8 or 9, I started using bulletin board systems, which was the precursor to the Internet, where you'd dial into... a shared system and shared computers. I've had an email address since the late '80s, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then I got on the Internet in '93 when it was first starting out.
The eventual goal is to marry all of my work together to make a high-speed, high-resolution, low-impact tool that can look deep inside biological systems.
The future consists of cross specialisation; that is how university systems abroad have evolved.
Client companies and advertising agencies are old-world-order places. The systems and processes and structures come from a time when you shot the TV commercial, then you did the print ads, then you did everything else - including the website. Everything has changed, but the systems haven't.
Though pundits and politicians, weary of the story, are happy to omit facts about voting systems and their private contractors running our public elections, such omissions impair voters and democracy itself.
I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.
In my brief sojourn in college, my favorite classes were political science because I loved the idea of systems we can set up that benefit society - rules we can put in place that sometimes you run against, sometimes they're painful, but ultimately they benefit the world.
Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.
Various religious systems have been given to humanity at different times, each suited to meet the spiritual needs of the people among whom it was promulgated, and, coming from the same divine source: - God, all religions exhibit similar fundamentals or first principles.
Fancy GPS systems and space-age tractors are what most excite the farmers I know and astound their city friends.
The world today is so full of violence, obscenity, war, the failure of political systems. I try to make movies that make people a bit more confident. But that doesn't mean being sugary.
I want to work with the Philippine people and make life better there; there are systems I can work with.
I never claimed to be a computer engineer, but I did train as an industrial designer, and I am a consumer marketer, and I am very comfortable dealing with complex businesses and complexity in general and simplifying it - basically a systems designer.
When I was an adolescent in England, at school we had to read 'Death of a Salesman.' I remember feeling incredibly moved by the portrayal of these people and the idea with which Miller broached the whole subject of failure or failed systems, or the way that people are crushed by a system in which they find themselves.
When computer systems cause errors, you can end up with The Dreaded NIGO - the 'not in good order' transaction.
Well, the responsibility for maintaining a reliable transmission grid is one that's shared by an awful lot of players who have a role in the grid: Companies that either generate and transmit energy or just play the role of being the transmission systems or monitoring them.
With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, design, and our lifestyles.