| This is the zeroth saying. It is for comments, and should not be returned | by any software unless we're in debug mode. The sayings must be separated | by two null lines. Lines that start with '|' are returned as paragraphs in | HTML; others are returned as preformatted "as-is" lines. | ... with liberty and justice for all who can afford it. -- Crowden Satz (chuckleaduck.com) | Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers | by deterministic means is, of course, living in | a state of sin. -- John von Neumann | But it is vital to remember that information - in the | sense of raw data - is not knowledge; that knowledge | is not wisdom; and that wisdom is not foresight. -- Arthur C. Clarke 1. Make a list of the top 10 ways to amuse a geek. 10. Use binary. -- Brandon Holtsclaw | 'Legacy code' often differs from its suggested alternative | by actually working and scaling. -- Bjarne Stroustrup Conservatism: (n.) the old evils should be preserved. Liberalism: (n.) allow everyone their own choice of evils. Progressivism: (n.) the new evils are better than the old ones. | Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. | Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones. | Objects in calendar are closer than they appear. | Many projects in the past have suffered from excessive micro-management | by people not actively involved in doing the actual work, and that is | probably a situation that is best avoided in the interest of everyone | concerned. -- Anselm Lingnau, anselm@strathspey.org 2013-9-29 | A committee is a life form with six or more legs and no brain. -- Robert A. Heinlein | For a successful technology, reality must take precedence | over public relations, for Nature can not be fooled. -- Richard P. Feynman | Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. -- George Bernard Shaw | Get the facts first. You can distort them later. -- Mark Twain | Do not insult a mother alligator until you have crossed the river. | "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." -- Victor Stenger | The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. -- Albert Einstein | You don't manage people; you manage things. You lead people. -- Admiral Grace Hopper, USN | Scriptures: The sacred books of our holy religion, as | distinguished from the false and profane writings on | which all other faiths are based. -- Ambrose Bierce | I find that when someone's taking time to do something right in the | present, they're a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, | whereas when someone took time to do something right in the past, | they're a master artisan of great foresight. -- Randall Munroe, xkcd | The fewer jobs a tool is designed to do, the better it does each of them. | The voters are like cattle in a pasture. Every four years, someone | brings a bull around and lets it loose in the field. It doesn't matter | which bull they send in because the same thing happens to the cows. | What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. -- Christopher Hitchins | The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be | preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it. -- Terry Pratchett Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual. --Terry Pratchett | Life is just the dead on vacation. -- Tom Waits | Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things. -- Robert A. Heinlein Q: How do we know that confirmation bias is a real phenomenon? A: I seek out facts that support it, and ignore facts that disprove it. | Scientific literacy has other advantages than just taking down con artists. | The truth has a great advantage over lies: the truth works. -- Michael Busch | You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, | because the two are mutually exclusive. -- Buckminster Fuller | Enjoy Life - It Has An Expiration Date | Ichtheology: The belief that you'll go to heaven if your car has Jesus fish on it. | Going into combat without the French is like going hunting without an accordion. -- General Patton | Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass; | it's about learning to dance in the rain. | As you know, the best way to create standards is to mash | together a bunch of mutually exclusive preferences. -- Dogbert (in Scott Adams' cartoon, Dilbert) | Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: | If you're alive, it isn't. | Lady Justice is blind -- but she has very sophisticated listening devices. | A man is known by the company he organizes. -- Ambrose Bierce | I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. -- Hunter S. Thompson | Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not | care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues | you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want | to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have | lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. -- attributed to Marcus Aurelius; probably a paraphrase, not a translation | Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day. | Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime. | The Internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. | An apostrophe is used to alert the reader that an "S" is coming up at the end of the word. -- Dave Barry | Citing the Bible to prove the existence of Jesus Christ is like | citing "Looney Tunes" to prove the existence of Bugs Bunny. -- Perry B. Friedman | Save the earth. It's the only planet with chocolate. | "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our point of view. -- Obi-Wan Kenobi (Return of the Jedi) | If I have seen further than others, it is because I stole the IP of giants. | The Second Law of Thermodynamics: If you think things are in a mess now, just wait! -- Jim Warner | For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism. -- Harrison's Postulate | The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober. -- William Butler Yeats | I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed | corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a | trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. -- Thomas Jefferson | Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason. -- Jerry Seinfeld | When elephants fight it is the grass under their feet that suffers the most. -- African saying | [T]echnology that existed when we were born seems normal, anything | that is developed before we turn 35 is exciting, and whatever comes | after that is treated with suspicion. -- Douglas Adams (1952-2001) | You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right. -- Randall Munroe (author of XKCD comic) | The danger today is not so much that machines will learn | to think and feel but that men will cease to do so. -- William Ferry | You can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them. -- Condoleezza Rice | Beware of taking advice from the very successful | because, as a rule, they don't want company. -- Dogbert [Dilbert, i.e., Scott Adams] Suffering and goodwill Aren't diminished when they're spread -- Which one do you bring? -- zathras_ix in a Tales of Mu discussion, 2009-12-25 | Darwin started as an undergraduate here. (Hated it -- said his geology | lectures were deeply boring. Whenever I go off to teach a class here, I | keep that in mind. Don't be boring. You don't know who's out there among | the undergraduates.) -- Geoffrey K. Pullum teaches at the University of Edinburgh | When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. -- Mark Twain | I just feel fortunate to live in a world with | so much disinformation at my fingertips. -- P.C. Vey, New Yorker cartoon | You should sit down (someplace comfy), and ask yourself if you even care. | You shouldn't. It's not your fault, you've been trying as hard as you can, | so you shouldn't care. Not if they're going to act like that. -- MsSam | I had this dream that my whole family was just cartoon | characters, and that our success had led to some crazy | propaganda network called "Fox News". -- Bart Simpson | The act of bellringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. | It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people. -- Ezra Pound | First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn | numbers into letters with ASCII -- and we thought it was a typewriter. Then | we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World | Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure. -- Douglas Adams (1952-2001) | A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely | foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. -- Douglas Adams | What a natural history of religion would show is that the human | experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and | fungi. (Karl Marx may have gotten it backward when he called | religion the opiate of the people.) -- Michael Pollan, "The Botany of Desire" | The length of one's days matters less than the love of one's family and friends. -- Gerald Ford, U.S. President 1973-1974 Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside. -- Alexander Pope | We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. -- Anais Nin | You know you've got a problem when you can't tell a hostile | attack by another nation from bored kids with an axe to grind. -- Bruce Schneier, on the Estonian "cyber-war" | Tristo e' quel discepolo che non avanza il suo Maestro. | (It's a sad student who doesn't advance past his Master.) -- Leonardo da Vinci | It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand | that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand. -- Mark Twain Gifts are like insults In that they must be accepted To do any harm -- Zathras IX (more.talesofmu.com/01/69/ 2008-12-11) | We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. -- Jonathan Swift | A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. -- John Gall | Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate | evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. -- Richard Dawkins | We did a risk management review. We concluded that there was no risk of any management. -- Dilbert CALVINIST ARGUMENT, a.k.a. TERTULLIAN'S ARGUMENT: (1) If God exists, then He will let me watch you be tortured forever. (2) I rather like that idea. (3) Therefore, God exists. | The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mothers this Sunday. | They need to calibrate their system. -- Radio announcement for Mothers' Day, 2006, via "Schneier on Security" | To brand a book as unsuitable is an important step toward making it required reading. -- Marvin Kay | It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not. -- Bill Gates, in a 2007 Fortune interview | Those who fail to understand communication protocols | are doomed to reimplement them over port 80. | A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -- Edward Abbey | Hardware systems eventually fail. | Software systems eventually work. | Birthdays are good for you. Studies show that | the people who have the most live the longest. | A house without a cat, and a well-fed, well-petted, and properly revered | cat, may be a perfect house, perhaps, but how can it prove its title? -- Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson | Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, | abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact. -- George Eliot | There are two kinds of fool. One says "This is old therefore | good". The other says "This is new therefore better". -- Dean Ing(e) -- John Brunner Q: How many Microsoft phone support people does it take to change a Microsoft Lightbulb for Windows(tm)? A: Why, what's wrong with your lightbulb? I have the exact same copy of your lightbulb right here, and it works fine. | It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) | Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through. -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) | Belief in God is odd, a blessing and a curse. | It makes a good man better; it makes a bad man worse. | Evidence disproving evolution means evolution is wrong. | Evidence disproving the Bible means the evidence is wrong. | The trouble with the world is that the stupid are | cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. -- Bertrand Russell | What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the | will to find out, which is the exact opposite. -- Bertrand Russell Last night while sitting in my chair I pinged a host that wasn't there It wasn't there again today The host resolved to NSA. | When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something | is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that | something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- [Arthur C] Clarke's First Law | The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is | to venture a little way past them into the impossible. -- [Arthur C] Clarke's Second Law | Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- [Arthur C] Clarke's Third Law | For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. -- [Arthur C] Clarke's Fourth Law | If you enter debug mode and enable logging to handwriting, you can watch | the distributed computation for The Great Question in near-realtime. -- Dan Ritter discuss:blu.org 2008-1-27 | The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at | the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. -- Albert Einstein Q: If I write the code int i, j; can I assume that (&i + 1) == &j? A: Only sometimes. It's not portable, because in EBCDIC, i and j are not adjacent. -- Infrequently Asked Questions in comp.lang.c | If you have an apple, and I have an apple, and we exchange | apples, you and I will still only have one apple. But if you | have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, then | each of us will have two ideas. -- George Bernard Shaw | Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like | having a peeing section in a public swimming pool. | wikipedesis: n.,the act of moving randomly through connected | wikipedia pages [from wikipedia + pedesis (Brownian movement)]. -- Westringia F. in XKCD forum 2007-12-26 | I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: | One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no | deficiencies, and the other way is make it so complicated that there | are no obvious deficiencies. -- C.A.R. Hoare, The Emperor's Old Clothes, Turing Award lecture (1980) | You cannot teach beginners top-down programming, | because they don't know which end is up. -- C.A.R. Hoare | All is chaos under the heavens, and the situation is excellent. -- Mao Zedong | If it was meant to be easy to understand, we wouldn't have called it "code". | Religion is regarded by the common people as true, | by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful. -- Seneca the Younger | Didn't I say no killing? Don't make me come down there! -- God | Every time you give up a right, the terrorists win. When you want a computer system that works, just choose Linux. When you want a computer system that works, just, choose Microsoft. | With object-oriented development, you have a paradigm shift. | You don't make money; you tell the money to make itself. | Garlic is to Food as Insanity is to Art. | I never meant to say that Conservatives are generally stupid. | I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. -- John Stuart Mill | There is no idea so bad that it cannot be made to look | brilliant with the proper application of fonts and color. -- Scott Adams, Dilbert's Guide to the Rest of your Life | You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in | humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward | the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored | races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has | been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches | of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as | organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of | moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell, Why I am Not a Christian, 1927 | Usenet Rule #547: When people know they're wrong they resort to ad hominems. -- Arne Adolfsen | I will tend to go with the [scientific papers] I have reasonably easy | access to, and those are the ones notching up another citation, while | those behind heavy paywalls and that forbid the authors to put them | online will not. -- JanneM (Slashdot user 7445) 2007-06-21 | To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we | are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic | and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. -- Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US President | The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry | is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering | gains made by the computer hardware industry ... -- Henry Petroski | Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to | learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for | their apparent disinclination to do so. -- Doug Adams | Every time you talk to a neighbor over the fence, | you're depriving your phone company of revenue. | The Linux philosophy is "Laugh in the face of danger". | Oops. Wrong One. "Do it yourself". Yes, that's it. -- Linus | In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -- Oscar Wilde | Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor | do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is | no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a | daring adventure or nothing. -- Helen Keller | No technology exists until Microsoft invents it. -- Nicholas Petreley's First Law of Computer Trade Journalism | Because here in the U.S., we hate the idea of government-owned business, | but we love the idea of business-owned government. -- Chris Burke (slashdot user 6130) | "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it | means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." | | "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many | different things." | | "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's | all." -- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass | We're not out to destroy Microsoft, that's just a nice side-effect. -- Linus Torvalds | The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of | the people who are evil, but because of the people who | don't do anything about it. -- Albert Einstein | If I'd asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said "A faster horse." -- Henry Ford | When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl. | When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had | happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall | be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It | is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it. -- Mark Twain | She was not quite what you would call refined; she was | not quite what you would call unrefined; she was the kind | of person that keeps a parrot. -- Mark Twain | If you can't learn to do something well, | learn to enjoy doing it poorly. | In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime | is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin | is stupidity. -- Hunter S Thompson | As Americans we must always remember that we all have a | common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and | relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government. -- Dave Barry | Man is not nourished by what he swallows, but by what he digests and uses. -- Hippocrates | If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried. | Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7th of your life. | Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings, | they did it by killing all those who opposed them. | Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity. | Isn't it enough to see that the garden is beautiful, | without believing in fairies at the bottom of it too? -- Douglas Adams "Am I under arrest?" "Do you have a warrant?" "I do not consent to a search." "I want a lawyer." "Am I free to go?" -- checklist for when you're facing the police. > It reverses the logical flow of conversation. >> Why is top posting annoying? >>> Top-posting! >>>> What's the most annoying email practice? | It is difficult to get a man to understand something | when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair | LET US BE HONEST about the intellectual culture of America in general: | It has become almost impossible to have an intelligent discussion | about anything. Everything is a war now. This is the age of lethal | verbal combat, where even scientific issues involving measurements and | molecules are somehow supernaturally polarizing. The controversy about | global warming resides all too perfectly at the collision point of | environmentalism and free market capitalism. It's bound to be not only | politicized but twisted, mangled and beaten senseless in the process. -- Joel Achenbach, "The Tempest", Washington Post Magazine, 28 May 2006 | When God hates all the same people you do, its | a sure sign you've created Him in your own image. | argumentum ad ignorantiam: The fallacy of taking a statement | not provably false and implying that it is therefore true. Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911) | Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, | and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong. -- Richard P. Feynman A further disadvantage of the top-down method is that, if an understanding of a fault is obtained, a simple fix, such as a new shape for the turbine housing, may be impossible to implement without a redesign of the entire engine. -- Richard Feynman, in his report on the Challenger disaster Q: How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A: None, obviously market forces will take care of it. Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape. | In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak | up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and | I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the | trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade | unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up | because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that | time no one was left to speak up. -- Martin Niemoeller | A smart man learns from his mistakes. | A wise man learns from others' mistakes. | Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. -- Michael Crichton | The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. -- William Gibson | The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. | Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as | distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others. -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911) | What's the best thing you could be doing right now? Why aren't you? | The power of accurate observation is called cynicism by those who have not got it. --George Bernard Shaw | If I can't do computers for money anymore, I'll probably | have to go back to being a starving artist. At least that | way you're not surprised when you don't have any money. -- Bob Bruhin | Far from being the raison d'etre of the universe, we appeared | through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way. | This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, | seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel. -- John Horgan, in "Why I Can't Embrace Buddhism" They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction. -- Janet Reno | Under communism, the government owns all of the businesses. | Under capitalism, it is the other way around. | Great minds think alike; hurried developers make similar mistakes. | Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government. | People who like sausages or laws should never watch them being made. -- German proverb | The less a man knows about how sausages and laws are made, | the easier it is to steal his vote and give him botulism. | Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, | but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. | As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. | They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how | to collect sometime in the next decade. -- Bill Gates (in 1998 CNET interview) | The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], | ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to | be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only | with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It | comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with | that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to | oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both | deceived and oppressed it. -- Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations | Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web | page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you | had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, | another word processor, or another network. -- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996 | You know you've been on the 'net too long when you look | at your digital watch at 4:04 PM and immediately think, | "Whaddaya *mean*, time not found?" | The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always | so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. -- Bertrand Russell | It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. -- Voltaire | A witty saying proves nothing. -- Voltaire | Gaffe: n. What happens when a politician speaks the truth. | Always hope for the best and prepare for the worst, | You may not get what you pay for, | But you'll surely pay for what you get. -- Maya Angelou | Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired | signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and | are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower, "The Chance for Peace" (1953) | Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. -- Oscar Wilde How many Vietnam veterans does it take to screw in a light bulb? You don't know, man. You don't KNOW. Cause you weren't THERE. Windows is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). Unix is YAFIYGI (You Asked For It, You Got It). | When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that | something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he | states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- Arthur C. Clarke | We'll know that rock and roll is dead when you have to get a degree to play in a band. | It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you look playing the game. | Imagine that Cray computer decided to make a personal computer. It | has 8 1500-MHz processors, 20 gigabytes of RAM, 1500 gigabytes of | disk storage, a screen resolution of 8192x4096 pixels, relies | entirely on voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket | and costs $300. What's the first question that the computer user | community asks? | | "Does it run Windows?" Sometimes seventeen syllables aren't enough to express a complete I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory. | I'm the anti-visionary. I distrust people with visions. | You don't see what's right in front of your face and you | don't see the technical issues that face everyday users. -- Linus Torvalds (Feb 2005) | The problem with defending the purity of the English | language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse | whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English | has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them | unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. -- James D. Nicoll, in rec.arts.sf-lovers, 15 May 1990 | In a time of drastic change it is the learners who | inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves | equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. -- Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right. Q: Why should I start my reply below the quoted text? | »Necessity is the mother of invention« is a silly proverb. | »Necessity is the mother of futile dodges« is much nearer the truth. -- Alfred North Whitehead | If you're not part of the solution, there's good | money to be made in prolonging the problem. | The purpose of the office of the president is not | to wield power, but to draw attention away from it. -- Douglas Adams | Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die. -- Salvador Dali | People generally seem to want software to be free as in speech and/or free | as in beer. Unfortunately rather too much of it is free as in jazz. | To be a leader find where someone is going and walk in front of them. -- Bishop of Norwich (which one?) | In the beginning, God made idiots. This was for practice. | Then He made school boards. -- Mark Twain | The secret to success is - find out where the people are going and get there first. -- Mark Twain "Interactive" is a synonym for "manual". | Only puny secrets need protection. Big | discoveries are protected by public incredulity. -- Marshall McLuhan | When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. | When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent. When | they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun. Now | they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet. -- Lyle Myhr The lesser of two evils is still evil. | Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. -- Bernard Berenson | Brian Kernighan has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most | automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the | numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the | driver makes any mistake, a giant "?" lights up in the center of the | dashboard. "The experienced driver", he says, "will usually know | what's wrong." -- the unix "fortune" command Like the winter snow Melting in the Spring time rain; Your Haiku lacks form. | A ship in the harbor is safe. But that's not what ships are built for. -- Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper | Schneier's Law: "Anyone can invent a security system so clever that they | can't think of how to break it." This means that the only experimental | methodology for discovering if you've made mistakes in your cipher is to | tell all the smart people you can about it and ask them to think of ways | to break it. Without this critical step, you'll eventually end up living | in a fool's paradise, where your attackers have broken your cipher ages | ago and are quietly decrypting all their intercepts of your messages, | snickering at you. -- Cory Doctorow | There are two kinds of people in this world: those | who divide people into two kinds, and those who don't. | There are three kinds of people in this world: | those count, and those who don't. | There are 10 kinds of people in this world: | those who understand binary, and those who don't. | Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. -- H. L. Mencken | The project was finally outsourced to India, where more | time can be wasted for less money. This will ultimately | be good for the economy as a whole. -- Slashdot user tds67 (670584) | If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" -- Albert Einstein | We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. -- F.W.Nietzsche | It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. | By definition, there are already enough people to do that. -- G.H.Hardy It's never too late to have a happy childhood. Growing older is mandatory. Growing up is optional. Q. Is that legal? A. It is if you have nuclear weapons. -- Dave Barry | Men do not quit playing because they grow old; | they grow old because they quit playing. -- Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes | The vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. | And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice. -- George W. Bush (Washington DC, Oct 27 2003) | If you ever find yourself on the side of the majority, | it is time to pause, and reflect. -- Mark Twain | Due to circumstances beyond your control, you are | master of your fate and captain of your soul. I'm programming Perl My program is just one line Took five years to write I wrote an A.I. Only used two lines of Perl Output is cryptic | Take away the right to say "fuck" and you take away the | right to say "fuck the government." -- Lenny Bruce | DISCLAIMER: The information and opinions expressed on this site are not | necessarilly the opinions of the author and may be denied or disregarded at | a later date. Reading of this paragraph constitutes as agreement on part of | reader not to hold author responsible for any damaging effects resulting | from reading and agreeing with anything printed on this site; furthermore | reader waives all future claims resulting from changes in law which may | render this disclaimer null and void. This disclaimer is valid in all | states with the exception of those states which have laws forbidding the | existence of this disclaimer, and in states where such laws exist the | reader agrees to read this disclaimer in a state where this disclaimer is | binding. -- http://www.ubersoft.net/ | It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. -- Alfred Adler | People understand instinctively that the best way for computer | programs to communicate with each other is for each of them to be | strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd | thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how | they speak and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would | also be obvious. -- Larry Wall | Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel | ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in | the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink | this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be | shattered. Then I say to myself, "It is better that I drink this | beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about | my liver." -- Jack Handy There once was a young man named Rex, With diminutive organ of sex. When charged with exposure He replied with composure, "De minimis non curat lex." Whenever a fellow called Rex Flashed his very small organ of sex, He always got off, For the judges would scoff, "De minimis non curat lex." | If Darl McBride [CEO of SCO] was in charge, he'd probably | make marriage unconstitutional too, since clearly it | de-emphasizes the commercial nature of normal human | interaction, and probably is a major impediment to the | commercial growth of prostitution. -- Linus Torvalds | The ultimate goal of science is to unify all forces of nature | to a single law that can be silk-screened onto a T-shirt. Beware chmod +rw and umask 111, the permissions of the beast! | Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, | misdiagnosing it, and misapplying the wrong remedies. -- Groucho Marx | I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year. -- Walden O'Dell, president of Diebold (manufacturer of electronic voting equipment) and major contributor to the Republican Party, in an Aug 14 2003 fund-raising letter to Ohio Republicans. | What women and psychologists call "dropping your armor", | we call "baring your neck". | The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that | it has been accomplished. -- George Bernard Shaw | I have always wished for a computer that would be as easy | to use as my telephone. My wish came true. I no longer | know how to use my telephone. -- Bjarne Stronstrup | When aiming for the common denominator, be | prepared for the occasional division by zero. | We like to praise birds for flying. But how much of it is | actually flying, and how much of it is just sort of | coasting from the previous flap? -- Jack Handey | People think it would be fun to be a bird because you | could fly. But they forget the negative side, which is | the preening. -- Jack Handey | When you go for a job interview, I think a good thing to | ask is if they ever press charges. -- Jack Handey | Many people never stop to realize that a tree is a living | thing, not that different from a tall, leafy dog that has | roots and is very quiet. -- Jack Handey | If you go through a lot of hammers each month, I don't | think it necessarily means you're a hard worker. It may | just mean that you have a lot to learn about proper | hammer maintenance. -- Jack Handey | A lot of times when you first start out on a project you | think, This is never going to be finished. But then it | is, and you think, Wow, it wasn't even worth it. -- Jack Handey | People need to realize that every time they talk about | how "fragile" our planet is, it's just like asking | outer-space aliens to come invade us. -- Jack Handey | I think the mistake a lot of us make is thinking the state | appointed psychiatrist is our 'friend'. -- Jack Handey | I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world | without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, | because they'd never expect it. -- Jack Handey | Instead of trying to build newer and bigger weapons of | destruction, we should be thinking about getting more use | out of the ones we already have. -- Jack Handey | We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we | can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this | is what annoys me. -- Jack Handey | Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which | I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis. -- Jack Handey | No matter how good the idea, there is always an advocate | extreme enough to deter people. -- Steve Aylett | Throughout the 20th century, small groups of men seized control of | great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate | the weak and intimidate the world. -- George W Bush, State of the Union speech, 28 Jan 2003 | It has been discovered that C++ provides a remarkable | facility for concealing the trival details of a program - | such as where its bugs are. -- David Keppel | If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, | it is not rightly owned if it is not shared. -- St. Augustine | When I am working on a problem I never think about | beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But | when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I | know it is wrong. -- R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) | The RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of | America. It is not the Recording Industry and Artists | Association of America. It says its concern is artists. | That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is | concerned about its cattle. -- Laurence Lessig | An optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. | A pessimist fears we live in the best of all possible worlds. | He who receives an idea from me, receives instructions | himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his | taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. -- Thomas Jefferson on Copyright | There ain't no rules around here. We're trying to accomplish something. -- Thomas Edison | [I]n Perl culture, almost nothing is prohibited. My feeling | is that the rest of the world already has plenty of | perfectly good prohibitions, so why invent more?" -- Larry Wall | It is practically impossible to teach good programming concepts | to students who have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential | programmers they are mutilated beyond hope of redemption. -- Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, RIP 1930-2002 | The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting | than the question of whether a submarine can swim. -- Edsger W Dijkstra | For a list of the ways which technology has failed | to improve our quality of life, press 3. | When you say "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people just stare | at you blankly and say "Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*". -- Linus Torvalds | The more you know, the more jokes you get. -- Tim Bray | War is God's way of teaching Americans about geography. -- Ambrose Bierce | I've figgured out: If you've had enough to drink, you | really *can* play anything. Anyone who feels otherwise | obviously hasn't had enough. -- Bob Rogers (on scots-l) | Emacs: It's a nice OS, but to compete with Linux | or Windows it needs a better text editor. -- Alexander Duscheleit There once was a lady from Niger Who smiled as she rode on a Tiger They returned from the ride With the lady inside And the smile on the face of the Tiger. | Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make | violent revolution inevitable. -- John F. Kennedy | Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since | it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Benito Mussolini | Give a man a fish, he owes you one fish. | Teach a man to fish, you give up your monopoly on fisheries. | Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted. -- Groucho Marx Tell a man there are a million billion stars, and he will believe you. Tell a man that a bench has wet paint, and he just HAS to touch it. | Innovation is a wildflower. You cannot choose where it | will blossom, you can only choose where it will not. | If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. -- Louis D. Brandeis, US Supreme Court Justice | Naturally the common people don't want war. But after all, it is the | leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple | matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a | fascist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being | attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and | exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country. -- Hermann Göring (1893-1946) | Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. -- Hector Berlioz | If you need or want stability, don't upgrade to new releases | until someone else has had time to find all the bugs for you. -- Unknown HP rep | Only a fool expects rational behavior from his fellow humans. | Why do you expect it from a machine that humans have constructed? -- The Tao of Programming | It is an unfortunate fact that, human nature being what it is, an | ounce of cheerleading often beats a pound of rational discussion. -- Larry Wall | Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow. | Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris | from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? -- Diane Ackerman | It's easy to fall into the habit of choosing rigor over | vigor. ... We already have lots of computer languages | with rigor, but not so many with vigor. -- Larry Wall | Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right. :-) -- Larry Wall | Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall | If you don't know what your program is supposed to do, you'd better not start writing it. -- E.W.Dijkstra | 300,000 kps. It's not just a good idea; it's the law. | If you're not part of the solution, | you're part of the precipitate. | Feathers are light. | The sun gives off light. | Therefore, the sun gives off feathers. | Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it. | For myself, I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat | terrified at the results of this evening's experiments. | Astonished at the wonderful power you have developed, and | terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music | may be put on record forever. -- Sir Arthur Sullivan, message to Thomas Edison, 1888 "I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma." -- The Great Oz | "If I asked you where we were," said Arthur weakly, "would I regret | it?" Ford stood up. "We're safe," he said. "We are in a small galley | cabin," said Ford, "in one of those of the Vogon Construction | Fleet." "Ah." said Arthur, "this is obviously some strange usage of | the word `safe' that I wasn't previously aware of." -- Douglas Adams, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". | The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front | for the urge to rule. -- H.L.Mencken | If C gives you enough rope to hang yourself, then C++ | gives you enough rope to bind and gag your neighborhood, | rig the sails on a small ship, and still have enough rope | to hang yourself from the yardarm. -- from the Unix Hater's Handbook | Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me. -- Linus Torvalds | Working with UNIX is like wrestling a worthy opponent. | Working with Windows is like attacking a small whining | child who is carrying a loaded .38 -- Nancy L. Button | Why use one word when two polysyllabic agglomerates will do? | Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. -- Samuel Johnson | With all respect to Mr. Johnson, I submit that it is the first. -- Ambrose Bierce | Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their | important stuff, and let the rest of the world mirror it. -- Linus Torvalds | Information may want to be free, but fiber wants to be a million dollars a mile. | Somewhere in downtown WASHINGTON, DC, a formerly hard-drinking | UNDERACHIEVER who says "new-kew-ler" is running the COUNTRY! -- Zippy | Recently I saw "The Count of Monte Cristo". I heartily recommend | this movie to anyone who has spent time in a cubicle. You'll | relate to being stabbed by co-workers, trapped in a tiny prison | cell with no way out, tortured once a year during your annual | review, and dreaming of revenge. -- Scott Adams | The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and | corruption abound. Children no longer mind their parents, | every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that | the end of the world is fast approaching. -- from an Assyrian stone tablet, c. 2800 B.C. | A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices | it without any hope of fame or money, but even practices it | without any hope of doing it well. -- G.K.Chesterton | It's noble to be good. It's nobler to teach others to be good, and less trouble. -- Mark Twain | It may be that your sole purpose in life is | simply to serve as a warning to others. | You're much more likely to be knocked down by a snowball | than by an equivalent number of snowflakes. -- Larry Wall | Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. | Free men pull in all kinds of directions. -- Terry Pratchett, "The Truth" | Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music. | Your compiler will be classified as a "protection | circumvention device". You *will* have to license it. | Sesame Street was brought to you today by the letters M, | I and T and the number 2.71828182845904523536028747135... | They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at Newton. | Of course, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- Carl Sagan | It's lonely at the bottom too, just more crowded. | If you're not paranoid, you just haven't been paying attention. Age is a very high price to pay for maturity. "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft ad "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein FÜhrer" - Adolf Hitler Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Those who study history are doomed to know it's repeating. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Those who know history are doomed to make the opposite mistake. | To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, | my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists -- for they erode | our national unity and diminish our resolve. -- John Ashcroft (US Attorney General) 7 Dec 2001 | In a time of drastic change it is the learners who | inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves | equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. -- Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) | Perhaps those of us who care about quality programs have | not spoken up often enough--`for bad programs to triumph | requires only that good programmers remain silent.' I | call this passivity the `Silence of the Lambdas.' -- Henry Baker Sarcasm beats logic but not wit. Logic beats wit but not sarcasm. Wit beats sarcasm but not logic. (Equivalent to the paper/rock/scissors game) | We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance! -- Japanese proverb | If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. -- Japanese proverb | No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. | He won it by making other bastards die for their country. -- General George Smith Patton (WWII) | Free as in speech, free as in beer, or free as in disk space? | I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos. -- Albert Einstein | God not only plays dice; He sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen. -- Stephen Hawking | It is much easier to apologize than to ask permission. -- Grace Murray Hopper, Admiral, U.S. Navy | The fantastic advances in the field of communication | constitute a grave danger to the privacy of the individual. -- Earl Warren (US Supreme Court justice) | The 'Net interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it . -- John Gilmor | This sentence is neither true nor self-referential. | Wow, I'm being shot at from both sides. That means I *must* be right. :-) -- Larry Wall | Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with the software. | If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life. -- Brooke Shields | The POP3 server service depends on the SMTP server | service, which failed to start because of the following | error: 'The operation completed successfully.' -- Windows NT Server v3.51 A host is a host from coast to coast, But no one will talk to a host that's close, Unless of course the host that's close Is busy, hung, or dead. | The world is full of people who have never, since | childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind. -- E.B. White | Give a man a match, and you keep him warm for an evening. | Light him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. | A drama critic is a person who surprises a playwright by | informing him what he meant. -- Wilson Mizner | The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor | for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital | truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. -- Paul Valéry, 1895 | Do not mistake the pointing finger for the moon. -- Zen saying. | Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin | They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little | temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin | "Hardly Does Anything!" would be an excellent product slogan, if you ask me. -- Dave Barry | Where are we going and why are we in this handbasket? | It's our nature to be adversarial and free. | Our evolution didn't hinge on passivity. | It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in. | Conscience: the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking. -- H. L. Mencken | It is better to debate a question without settling it | than to settle a question without debating it. Conservative: a liberal who has just been mugged. Liberal: a conservative who has just been arrested. | Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of | the time he will pick himself up and continue on. -- Winston Churchill | The Americans will always do the right thing -- | after they've exhausted all the alternatives. -- Sir Winston Churchill | I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing. -- Oscar Wilde | An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow | oneself to be devoured. -- Konrad Adenauer | When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; | when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. -- George Bernard Shaw | There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. | By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us | in touch with the ignorance of the community. -- Oscar Wilde | My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in | a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth there's | hardly any difference. -- Harry Truman | You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. | This is living!" "I gotta be me!" "Ain't we got fun!" It's all | there in the Declaration of Independence. We are the only | nation in the world based on happiness. Search as you will the | Magna Carta, the Communist Manifesto, the Ten Commandments, | the Analects of Confucius, Plato's Republic, the New Testament | or the UN Charter, and find me any happiness at all. -- P.J.O'Rourke | We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in | the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory | that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. -- H. L. Mencken | When words are not better than silence, remain silent. -- Kung Fu | Football is not a contact sport; it is a collision sport. | Dancing is a contact sport. -- Vince Lombardi | All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. | Now I see that I should have been more specific. -- Lily Tomlin | Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The | relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the | working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by | a higher intelligence than ours. -- President Grover Cleveland, 1905 | We rule by love and not by the bayonet. -- Dr. Joseph Paul Göbbels, 1936 (Minister of Enlightenment for the German National Socialist Party.) | The thought of being President frightens me. | I do not think I want the job. -- Ronald Reagan, 1973 | The cinema is little more than a fad. It's canned drama. | What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on | the stage. -- Charlie Chaplin, c.1916 | Negro equality, Fudge!! How long in the Government of a God great | enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue to | be knaves to vend and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagoguism | as this? -- Abraham Lincoln, 1859 [Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol III, pp 399, Basler, ed.] | I think [a black person] could scarcely be found capable of | tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and | that in imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous. -- Thomas Jefferson, "Notes on Virginia", 1787 | One half of the children born die before their eighth year. | This is nature's law; why try to contradict it? -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762 | When a woman becomes a scholar, there is usually something wrong | with her sexual organs. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1888 | When the president does it, that means it is not illegal. -- Richard Nixon, May 1977 | The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most | experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; | we're computer professionals. We cause accidents. -- Nathaniel Borenstein | He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue. -- Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella | Carter squeezed the accordion. There was the long-drawn-out chord that | by law must precede all folk music to give bystanders time to get away. -- Terry Pratchett | I don't make jokes in base 13. Anyone who does should get help. -- Douglas Adams | Procrastinators always have the benefit of working with the latest data. | The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. | And God said 'Let there be Satan, so people don't blame everything on me. | And let there be lawyers, so people don't blame everything on Satan. -- George Burns | The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a | metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of | capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. -- Paul Valéry, 1895 | I think we all agree, the past is over. -- George W. Bush | I can't understand why people are frightened | by new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones. -- John Cage | A long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy. -- Charles Manson | Never attribute to malice, that which may be explained by stupidity. | | Never attribute to stupidity, that which may be explained by ignorance. | | Never attribute to ignorance, that which may be explained by deliberate misinformation. | Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send. -- Jon Postel | Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two. | No matter what the priority, you can't increase the speed of light. | No matter how hard you try, you can't make a baby in much less than 9 | months. Trying to speed this up *might* make it happen later, but you | won't make it happen any sooner. | I am a jelly doughnut. (Ich bin ein Berliner.) -- John F. Kennedy | Did you ever notice that everyone in favour | of birth control has already been born? -- Benny Hill | Kill -9 first; ask questions later. | The thought of suicide has carried me through many a night. -- Sylvia Plath | Write a wise saying and your name will live forever. -- Unknown | Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules: | The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the | time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent. Ninety-Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules: | The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the | time, the next nine percent takes another ninety percent. and the | last one percent takes the remaining ninety percent. | The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a | humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy | because it is an exalted activity will have neither good | plumbing nor good philosophy ... neither its pipes nor | its theories will hold water. | I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us | with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -- Galileo Galilei | The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. -- Albert Einstein | Real Programmers don't play tennis, or any other sport that requires | you to change clothes. Mountain climbing is OK, and real programmers | wear their climbing boots to work in case a mountain should suddenly | spring up in the middle of the machine room. I ate your Web page. Forgive me. It was juicy And tart on my tongue. Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur. Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound. Those who cast ballots decide nothing. Those who count ballots decide everything. -- Josef Stalin | It's not who votes that count; it's who counts the votes. -- Josef Stalin | Where do you want to go today? It doesn't matter. | You'll go where we bloody well tell you to go. | In free software, the fact that something is possible doesn't | guarantee that it will happen; it's the fact that it's possible | and a lot of the people who could do it want it. -- Laura Conrad | Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it. | It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard | a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young. -- Konrad Lorenz | Tradition: (a) The collective wisdom, preferences and taste | of a community regarding their own creations and such of | other people's creations as they wish to assimilate. (b) A | chimera thoughtfully provided by past generations for us, | their posterity, to argue about, thus saving us the trouble | of creating our own. -- (from The Divil's Wordbook, by Ambrosia Beerswiller.) | If they don't want us to drink and drive, why do | you have to have a driver's license to buy beer? | If liberty means anything at all, it means the right | to tell people what they do not want to hear. -- George Orwell | There's no sense in being precise when you | don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann | Support bacteria! They're the only culture some people have. | Some so-called open minds should be closed for repairs. | Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it may be necessary from | time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye. -- Miss Piggy | A paranoid is someone in full possession of the facts. -- Iain Sinclair If there's a way to do it wrong, someone will. | Original form of Murphy's law If anything can go wrong, it will. | Common rephrasing of Murphy's law, changed so as to avoid | blaming the person who does it wrong, thus demonstrating | Murphy's Law applied to itself. | The love of music does not require perfection, but rather | waits to be surprised by it every once in a while. | It never occurs to a boy that he will some day be as dumb as his father. -- Dr. Laurence J. Peter | Vampireware: n, a project capable of sucking the lifeblood out of | anyone unfortunate enough to be assigned to it which never actually | sees the light of day, but nonetheless refuses to die. | If you import antimatter into the United States, | does the Customs Service pay you? -- Jordin Kare | Attention Spam: The time it takes to determine | that a piece of email is not worth reading. | A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and | to turn around three times before lying down. -- Robert Benchley | Money will buy you a pretty good dog, but it won't buy the wag of his tail. | The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist. | Someday, we'll look back on all this, laugh nervously and change the subject. | Your mouse has moved. Windows must be restarted for | the change to take effect. Reboot now? [ OK ] If you can talk, you can sing; If you can walk, you can dance. -- African proverb | Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. -- Henry Spencer | It seems to be an immutable Law of the Universe that any message | concerning an error in spelling or grammar will itself contain an | error in spelling or grammar. -- often called Muphry's Law | Vs lbh pna ernq guvf, lbh unir n oevtug shgher va Pnrfne'f yrtvbaf. -- Tim McDaniel | You wear an EVENING gown to go to a NIGHTclub ... shouldn't it be a NIGHTgown? -- George Carlin | I stand by all the misstatements that I've made. -- J. Danforth Quayle | Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem. -- William of Ockham (1285-1347/49) | The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to | hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, | and still retain the ability to function. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald | War doesn't determine who is right; only who is left. | ... while Purgatory may be less unpleasant than | Hell, it's still not a nice place for a holiday. -- Tom Christiansen on Java vs C++ | Unix IS user friendly. It's just selective about who its friends are. | Despite the Cost of Living, have you noticed how it remains so popular? | Common sense is that set of prejudices we attain by the age of eighteen. | The sticker on the side of the box said "Supported | Platforms: Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, or better", so | clearly Linux was a supported platform. | If an undetectable error occurs, the processor | continues as if no error had occurred. -- IBM System/360 Principles of Operation | If you are going to become a writer, the last thing you want is | a computer because you won't become a writer, you will become a | nerd or a nervous wreck. -- Mike Royko | If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure. -- Dan Quayle | If it ain't worth doing, it ain't worth doing well. | How can something called "UNIX(TM)" be called "open"? "Don't include .signature twice" -- "Don't include .signature twice" | If the designers of X-windows built cars, there would be no | fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none | of which followed the same principles - but you'd be able to | shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that. | How can something that is almost 2 Megabytes in size be called | a "kernel"? The truth in advertising laws should apply to | software. Let's call it a "gourd" or perhaps a "watermelon". | Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. -- Albert Einstein | For every problem there is a simple, elegant solution - that is wrong. | then: | For every problem there is a simple, elegant solution | that is wrong. | | now: | For every problem there is a complex, knotted, huge, | bloated solution that doesn't work, dumps core, or | doesn't address the users' needs. | Anyone who looks at all the copyrights in a typical UNIX | license will notice that almost every major vendor is | represented. Each has their own slightly different UNIX, | while owning part of everyone else's. | We used to have slow iron and fast code, now we have fast iron and slow code. | UNIX is very very slowly re-inventing VM/CMS. | Under POSIX, all operating systems will masquerade as UNIX. | This is not unlike designing add-ons to the Ferrari | Testarossa in order that it will be interchangable with a | Greyhound Bus. | To err is human; to really mess things up requires a computer. | To err is human; to err by an order of magnitude is marketing. | MIPS don't count if your program has dumped core. | First, Get It Right. Then optimize. | Zippy-Says: If you can't say something nice, say something surrealistic. | If you are uncomfortable with solitude, consider | that others may find you boring as well. -- Mark Twain To someone who feels, life is a tragedy. To someone who thinks, life is a comedy. | Sometimes you have to look reality straight in the eye, and deny it. -- G. Keillor | One way of writing a book by a committee is to restrict its | contents to the intersection of the various opinions; it is | a technique that tends to lead to short texts of high | quality, and has the advantage that in the case of a | sufficiently diverse committee, it leads to no text at all. -- E. W. Dijkstra | Mr. Bell, after careful consideration of your invention, | while it is a very interesting novelty, we have come to the | conclusion that it has no commercial possibilities. -- J. P. Morgan, to Alexander Graham Bell | Pensu tutmonde; agu loke. | It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement | that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their | children, practice witch-craft, destroy capitalism and | become lesbians. -- Pat Robertson, on the Equal Rights Ammendment | That is a fine analogy. Its only fault is its unintelligibility. -- Lance Taylor | As far as I know, my computer has never had an undetected error. | Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. | The major difference between a thing that might go wrong | and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a | thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually | turns out to be impossible to get at or repair. -- Douglas Adams [in "Mostly Harmless"] | To err is human; to blame it on a computer is even more so. | If the automobile industry had developed like the computer | industry over the past 30 years, a Rolls-Royce would now | cost $5.00, would get 3000 miles to the gallon, and at | random times would explode, killing all its passengers. | I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather - | not screaming in terror like his passengers. | If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you. | The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. -- William Shakespeare, As You Like It | That we but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, | return to plague the inventor... -- Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, Scene vii | Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his | hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -- H.L.Mencken | The strongest evidence that there is intelligent life out | there is the fact that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes | "I quite agree with you," said the Dutchess; "and the moral | of that is `Be what you would seem to to be' - or if you'd | like to put it more simply - `Never imagine yourself not to | be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what | you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you | had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'" -- The Dutchess `Alice in wonderland' | Is this just a clockwork of fabulous design, or does it actually tell time? -- Virgil Thompson | If a "religion" is defined to be a system of ideas that contains | unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only | a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one. -- John Barrow | Experience is a hard teacher. She gives the test first and the lessons afterwards. | A pessimist says the glass is half empty. | An optimist says the glass is half full. | An engineer says the glass is twice as large as is needed. | You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was. -- Irish Proverb | Old age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill. -- Gertrude Stein | Two men are standing on the street in Ballyshannon arguing. | One says: "Ah, sure, it is the bright sun that's blinding | me now." The other argues: "Not at all, that's the bright | moon you see there." So they try to find someone to help | settle the dispute, and they grab this little man who's | walking down the street. So your man says to him: "My | friend here and I are having an argument. I say it's the | bright sun I see up in the sky there, but my friend insists | it's the moon. What do you think?" The little man looks up | and says: "I'm sorry, lads, I'm not from Ballyshannon..." -- Brendan Begley who said he got it from Joe Burke | Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead | of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either. | JUST LEAVE ME ALONE. | The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan | belt and a leaky tire. | It's always darkest just before dawn. So if you're going to | steal your neighbor's newspaper, that's the time to do it. | Sex is like air. It's not important unless you aren't getting any. | Don't be irreplaceable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. | No one is listening until you fart. | Always remember you're unique. Just like everyone else. | Never test the depth of the water with both feet. | It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve | as a warning to others. | It is far more impressive when others discover your good | qualities without your help. | If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a | couple of car payments. | Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in | their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a | mile away and they're barefoot. | If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you. | Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how | to fish, and he will sit in a boat & drink beer all day. | Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how | to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach 100 men to | fish, and they will empty the lake of fish. | Give a man a fish, and he not only eats for a day, he also owes you | a fish. Teach him to fish, and you lose your fishing monopoly. | If you lend someone $20, and never see that person again, | it was probably worth it. | Don't squat with your spurs on. | If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. | If you drink, don't park; accidents cause people. | Some days you are the bug, some days you are the windshield. | Don't worry, it only seems kinky the first time. | Good judgment comes from bad experience, and a lot of that | comes of bad judgment. | The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half | and put it back in your pocket. | Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance. | A closed mouth gathers no foot. | Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side and a dark | side, and it holds the universe together. | There are two theories to arguing with women. Neither one works. | Generally speaking, you aren't learning much when your mouth is moving. | Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it. | Never miss a good chance to shut up. | We are born naked, wet, and hungry. Then things get worse. | Who am I? What am I doing here? -- Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale