karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) (03/21/90)
Again, more cookies. Second of the new series. Tenth or so overall.
Enjoy.
------------------------ cut here ------------------------
"Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment
by the corrupt few."
-- George Bernard Shaw
%%
"To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously
quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror,
a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for
middle-class respectability."
-- Oscar Wilde
%%
"In addition I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success
because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its
efforts. Namely, the physical universe."
-- Ken Jenkins
%%
"The right to search for the truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal
any part of what one has recognized to be the truth."
-- Albert Einstein
%%
"He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the
accomplice of liars and forgers."
-- French philosopher Charles Peguy
%%
"We hold that each man is the best judge of his own interest."
-- John Adams
%%
"Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron
may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the
actual completion. An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be
progressing nicely. But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer
has two choices -- wait or eat it raw. Software customers have had the
same choices."
-- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr, _The Mythical Man-Month_
%%
This cowboy looked at me and said
With a sort of a smile,
"A sorry hand is in the way all the time,
A good one just once in awhile."
-- Cowgirl poet Georgie Sicking
%%
"Keeping proprietary and confidential information secret is the key to moving
the computer industry into the 21st century."
-- Letter from Apple Computer and Rasterops to the Macintosh user community
%%
"If the conjecture `You would rather I had not disturbed you by sending you
this.' is correct, you may add it to the list of uncomfortable truths."
-- Edsgar Dijkstra
%%
"We wish to incorporate into the machine -- in the form of circuits --
only such logical concepts as are either necessary to have a complete
system or highly convenient because of the frequency with which they
occur and the influence they exert in the relevant mathematical
situations."
-- Burks, Goldstine, and von Neumann (1946)
(from _Computer Stuctures: Readings and Examples_, C. Gordon Bell (ed)
McGraw-Hill Book Company, (c) 1971, page 97)
%%
"Once a ruler becomes religious, it [becomes] impossible for you to debate with
him. Once someone rules in the name of religion, your lives become hell."
-- Colonel Moammar Qaddafi, at the General People's Congress in Tripoli
in October, 1989
%%
"It's OK to do the right thing... as long as you don't get caught."
-- The Lone Contractor
%%
"Even if you start your laundry before 8 AM on Saturday, you will not finish
folding it until after midnight on Sunday."
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%%
Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colors from our sight
Red is gray, and yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is a quantization error.
-- Jef Poskanzer, from the doc to his oh-so-cool program that converts color
bitmaps to greyscale ones.
%%
progasm: the feeling you get when your code works the first time
%%
"A box of punchcards could theoretically store 240,000 bytes of information,
and usually stored less than 80,000. Think about it."
-- Karlie-q
%%
"God is more interested in your future and your relationships than you are."
-- Billy Graham
%%
"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."
-- Mark Twain
%%
"When helping with this problem, please flame me good so that others will learn
from my brazen irresponsibility."
-- Russell Earnest (re4@prism.gatech.edu)
%%
"[On Mars] there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, there
is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."
-- Dan Quayle, VP of the United States
%%
"If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, riddle them with bullets."
-- David Bedno (davidbe@sco.COM)
%%
"Organized Religion is like Organized Crime; it preys on peoples' weakness,
generates huge profits for its operators, and is almost impossible
to eradicate."
-- Mike Hermann (hermann@cs.ubc.ca)
%%
"The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed
entirely of lost airline luggage."
-- Mark Russell
%%
"Meet me in the bedroom in five minutes... and bring a cattle prod!"
-- Woody Allen's "What's Up Tiger Lily"
%%
"You can hardly do anything that won't seem stupid later."
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%%
"Ignorance simplifies ANY problem."
-- R. Lucke
%%
"Hello... IRON CURTAIN? Send over a SAUSAGE PIZZA!
World War III? No thanks!"
-- Zippy the pinhead
%%
"I have short-term memory loss, though I like to think of it as Presidential
eligibility."
-- Paula Poundstone
%%
"A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular."
-- Adlai Stevenson
%%
"That is not the Usenet tradition, but it's a solidly-entrenched
delusion now."
-- Brian Kantor (brian@ucsd.Edu)
%%
"Our Constitution ... gives to bigotry no sanction."
-- George Washington
%%
"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! It is a dangerous
servant and a terrible master."
-- George Washington
%%
No good deed goes unpunished.
%%
"We've got everyone convinced except the people who have to make the decision."
-- name witheld by request
%%
"I smell a rat."
-- Patrick Henry, upon hearing about the Constitutional
Convention, which eventually overthrew the first
Federal Government of the United States
%%
"I can give you a sentence with the word horticulture. You
can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."
-- Dorothy Parker
%%
"I can give you a sentence with the word punctilious. There's
a farmer with two daughters, Lizzie and Tillie. Lizzie is
all right, but you have no idea how punctilious."
-- Another member of the Algonquin Round Table
%%
"I shall fold my tens and silently slip away."
-- An Algonquinite with a losing card hand
%%
"I've been trey-dueced."
-- An Algonquinite with a hand of threes and twos
%%
"One man's Mede is another man's Persian."
-- A member of the Algonquin Round Table
%%
"Insanity is the exception in individuals. In groups, parties, people,
and times, it is the rule."
-- Nietzche
%%
Jesus saves. Moses invests.
%%
"The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom...for we never know what is
enough until we know what is more than enough."
-- William Blake
%%
"One man's mate is another man's passion."
-- Jeff Daiell's description of adultery
%%
After winning the decathlon, Jim Thorpe was told by the King of Sweden, "You
are the world's greatest athlete."
Thorpe replied, "Thanks, King."
%%
The President of these overly-united States was shaking
hands with the NY Yankees one day -- apparently during
summer. When he got to Babe Ruth, the Bambino opened
with, "Hot as Hell, ain't it, Prez?"
%%
When told he was making more per year than the President,
Babe Ruth replied, "Well, I had a better year than he did."
%%
Two men once wrote to Mark Twain. Not having his
address, they marked the envelope,
Mark Twain
God knows where
They received a response from him: "He did."
%%
My other computer is also a Unix system.
%%
"I'm against any law that I wouldn't break if I could get away with it."
-- A. Whitney Brown, SNL
%%
"I think; therefore, I can't be a Socialist."
-- Thomas Landsberger
%%
"I was charged on minestrone, and invincible."
-- Vicki Brown, about AI programming.
%%
"Bill Gates says no matter how much more power we can supply, he'll develop
some really exciting software that will bring the machine to its knees."
-- Intel VP David House, In _EE_Times_, 16 October 1989
%%
"Why do men go to war? Because women are watching."
-- T. S. Eliot
%%
One of your cookies is the Pledge of Allegiance by that
Socialist scamp, Francis Bellamy.
It should read, for those wishing to recite it:
I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America
and to The Union for which it stands,
with liberty
and justice for all.
-- Jeff Daiell
%%
"Americans like to talk about (or be told about) Democracy but, when put to
the test, usually find it to be an 'inconvenience.' We have opted instead
for an authoritarian system *disguised* as a Democracy. We pay through
the nose for an enormous joke-of-a-government, let it push us around, and
then wonder how all those assholes got in there."
-- Frank Zappa
%%
In every language, the first word after "Mama!" that every kid learns to say
is "Mine!" A system that doesn't allow ownership, that doesn't allow you to
say "Mine!" when you grow up, has -- to put it mildly -- a fatal design flaw.
>From the time Mr. Developing Nation was forced to read _The Little Red Book_
in exchange for a blob of rice, till the time he figured out that waiting in
line for a loaf of pumpernickel was boring as fuck, took about three
generations. ...
Decades of indoctrination, manipulation, censorship and KGB excursions haven't
altered ths fact: People want a piece of their own little Something-or-Other,
and, if they don't get it, have a tendency to initiate counterrevolution.
-- Frank Zappa, _The Real Frank Zappa Book_
%%
"The Lisa had problems, but it was a terrific piece of engineering that still
puts the Macintosh to shame."
-- Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld
%%
"I feared that the committee would decide to go with their previous decision
unless I credibly pulled a full tantrum."
-- dmr@alice.UUCP
%%
"You must either master politics or be mastered by those that do."
-- Anonymous
%%
"I am interested in politics so that someday I will not
have to be interested in politics."
-- Ayn Rand
%%
"If it sounds GOOD to YOU, it's bitchen; and if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's
shitty."
-- Frank Zappa
%%
"The real test of an artist, of course, is not whether you can see each blade
of grass, but whether the eyes follow you across the room."
-- Stewart Evans
%%
Look at it this way: MSDOS is an overgrown program loader; the MacOS
is an overgrown user interface. Neither is an operating system, but
the second is better for running applications.
-- Paul Placeway
%%
"Hello?... What?... Yes, Jeff... Flame them."
-- phone conversation overheard in Peter da Silva's office
%%
Make money, not war.
-- slogan popular in libertarian circles in the early 70s
%%
"The most important question in the study of government is 'how
can we prevent government from going beserk and killing off
half the population?'"
-- John Kormylo
%%
"...the value of the constitution depends on the good will
of government itself. If the Supreme Court rules that the
Bill of Rights should not interfere with the important
business of government (which they have done on at least
two occasions), then the constitution is meaningless."
-- John Kormylo
%%
"The greater the hold of government upon the life of
the individual citizen, the greater the risk of war."
-- John Hospers
%%
"Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a
locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a
single bound.
"'Look! Up in the sky!'
"'It's a bird!'
"'It's a plane!'
"'No, it's Superman!'
"Yes, it's Superman, strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth
with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.
Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers; bend steel in his bare
hands; and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great
metropolitan newspaper, fights a never ending battle for Truth, Justice, and
The American Way!"
%%
"A system of economy is good when ... the farmer, the manufacturer, and the
trader enjoy the full liberty of their property, their production, and their
industry."
-- Eschasseriaux
%%
"When the government attempts to regulate everything, all is lost."
-- Thibaudeau
%%
"The time for action is past! Now is the time for senseless bickering!"
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
%%
"*Real* wizards don't whine about how they paid their dues."
-- Quentin Johnson (quent@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu)
%%
"Question Authority and the Authorities will question You."
-- Danny Low (dlow%hpspcoi@hplabs.hp.com)
%%
"Today there may be more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than in Eastern
Europe."
-- George Will
%%
"The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism."
-- George Will
%%
"Never give a statist an even break. The State has never given us one."
-- Andre Marrou
%%
"I went to a job interview the other day, the guy asked if I had any questions.
I said yes, just one, if you're in a car traveling at the speed of light and
you turn your headlights on, does anything happen? He said he couldn't
answer that. I told him sorry, but I couldn't work for him then."
-- Steven Wright
%%
"Taxes? We don't need no stinking taxes."
-- Jeff Daiell
%%
"A mighty work deserves a mighty theme."
-- Herman Melville
%%
"The federal procurement system is like a software system with bugs.
Every time it's broken down, somebody has patched it. But keeping
it together is getting harder and harder and costing more money.
And at that point, an experienced software engineer would throw up
his hands and say, 'Hey! Let's toss this out and start over.'"
-- James Paul,
House Science, Space, and Technology Committee's Subcommittee
on Investigations and Oversight.
%%
"I have two very rare photographs: one is a picture of Houdini locking
his keys in his car; the other is a rare photograph of Norman Rockwell
beating up a child."
-- Steven Wright
%%
If we cannot learn from our mistakes, we just rename them; "Success".
-- Jon Loux
%%
"Reliable software must kill people reliably."
-- Andy Mickel
%%
"Fuckin' A! Purple Haze!!!"
-- Louie Gonzalez, Geometry class, 1973
%%
>From a long view of the history of mankind -- seen from, say, ten thousand
years from now -- there can be little doubt that the most significant event
of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of
electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial
insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the
same decade.
-- Richard P. Feynman
%%
>You may redistribute this article only to those who may freely do likewise.
>Chip Salzenberg at A T Engineering; <chip@ateng.com> or <uunet!ateng!chip>
Thanks. I think I'll just flush it.
-- Dale C. Cook, cook@pinocchio.Encore.COM
%%
"[advise] the ruler to govern the state as one cooks a small fish -- that is,
don't turn it so often in the pan that it disintegrates."
-- Lao-tzu
%%
``Once again, we see that interesting correlation between saying "Blessed Be!"
and being an idiot.''
-- Gene W. Smith, gsmith@garnet.berkeley.edu
%%
"If you juggle with knives, you're likely to get cut."
-- Kieran Donegal
%%
By the time of the Great Renaming, net.suicide, along with net.rumors,
was mainly populated by refugees from net.bizarre, which was the first
popular group ever dropped by the backbone. This group of people acted
like a roving gang. "Ah, here's a NEW almost-empty group to post
train schedules and core dumps in!" Imagine their squeals of joy when
they discovered that posting to net.test got them mail from all over
the net.
-- Joe Buck, jbuck@janus.berkeley.edu, gives us some Usenet history
%%
Australia, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and
commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate
dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.
-- Ambrose Bierce, _The Devil's Dictionary_
%%
"The Diabolonian position is new to the London playgoer of today, but not to
lovers of serious literature. From Prometheus to the Wagnerian Siegfried,
some enemy of the gods, unterrified champion of those oppressed by them, has
always towered among the heroes of the loftiest poetry."
-- Shaw, "On Diabolonian Ethics"
%%
THE THREE LAWS OF ROBOTICS
1 - A robot may not injure a human being, or,
through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2 - A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings
except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3 - A robot must protect its own existence as long as
such protection does not conflict with the First or
Second Law.
-- Isaac Asimov
%%
Like almost all old [more than 70 years], large [more than 10,000 people]
institutions, the government did not get to be as successful as it is by acting
the way it does now.
-- Paraphrased by estell%fidler.decnet@nwc.navy.mil from the original
statement by Robert Townsend, in _Up the Organization._
%%
"The weed of crime bears bitter fruit."
-- The Shadow
%%
"Software is the heart and soul of a computer company."
-- DEC President Ken Olsen
%%
>I would like to see a dictionary of Usenet slang written and added to the
>n.a.newusers postings.
-- Boyd Nation (boyd@ingr.com)
IMHO, if some newby wants a n.a.n newsfroup dictionary of net.slang put in
the crontab of a net.god's backbone site, the silly JEDR should email
him instead of posting the start of a flamefest I have to put in my kill
file or unsubscribe to. BTW, that posting was a megabyte gilly. What
a maroney! Almost half a waldron of pompousity. Imminent death of the
net predicted. Perhaps he should ask his SO or MOTOS what net.slang
means. Of if his MOTAS is a MOTSS, he should ask him? Or just post his
question to /dev/null.
BTW, IMHO if you understood this whole posting, you've been on the
net far too long. BCNU :-) TTFN.
-- Brad Templeton (brad@looking.on.ca)
%%
"It was just dumb luck that Unix managed to break through the Stupidity Barrier
and become popular in spite of its inherent elegance."
-- gavin@krypton.sgi.com
%%
"A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought."
-- Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy L. Sayers, "Gaudy Night")
%%
Xerox Innovates
Apple Litigates
(Now Xerox Litigates, too -- sigh)
%%
I'm going to EUROPE this summer--but when I
GET BACK, I'll have TRAINING waiting for me
as a COMBAT ENGINEER !!!
Sound familiar? Be all you can BE!
"Ya sluzhat v'Army!"
--Russian for "I'm in the Army!" (I serve in the Army)
-- Brad Morrison
%%
"Let us go forth not as defenders of the status quo,
but as crusaders with a revolution idea - that
government should be the servant and not the master
of the people; that its purpose is to protect, not
deny, each man's freedom; that the purpose of a free
press is to liberate, not enslave the human spirit."
-- From the speech made by A. S. Hills upon taking office as President of the
Inter-American Press Association
%%
"There is no law that vulgarity and literary excellence cannot coexist."
-- A. Trevor Hodge
%%
"Happiness is Planet Earth in your rear-view mirror."
-- Sam Hurt
%%
"Science is about skepticism."
-- Eugene Miya
%%
"It wasn't lies. It was just bullshit, that's all."
-- Elwood Blues
%%
"He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one
verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there
is a certain pleasure in contemplating the wailing and gnashing of
teeth, or else it would not occur so often."
-- Bertrand Russell, "Why I Am Not a Christian"
%%
"If you don't read news.groups, the net appears to be a rather tranquil place."
-- Karl Lehenbauer, about Usenet
%%
"Justice has nothing to do with what goes on in a courtroom, Justice is what
comes out of a courtroom."
-- Clarence Darrow
%%
And it does matter. An honest man or woman is an honest man or woman more
because he or she is honest in the small, everyday things that "don't matter"
individually, but which make up a well-lived life, than because of some single
great temptation that was passed. A person who is concerned about individual
rights or about individual dignity makes his or her difference not because of
any sweeping great statement or action, but because of the accretion of small,
individually seemingly insignificant acts that spread that dignity and confirm
those rights through every action they take. It matters because every action
you take, and every action I take is an expression of the human spirit.
-- William Oliver (oliver@uncmed.med.unc.edu)
%%
"In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere."
-- Maxim Gorkey
%%
"The *evident* character of this defective cognition of which mathematics
is proud, and on which it plumes itself before philosophy, rests solely on
the poverty of its purpose and the defectiveness of its stuff, and is therefore
of a kind that philosophy must spurn."
-- G. W. F. Hegel
%%
"There is no doubt I should be tarred and feathered."
-- Richard Sexton
%%
"You pathetic jugglers never lowered yourselves to developing the software.
You should have paid a little more attention to R & D."
-- Cyberpunk comics
%%
"I've been called an evil genius by cities of assholes... but I know who
these people are! And they're on my list!"
-- Robert Crumb
%%
>>> >This is revisionist history.
>>> This is crap.
>>This is a lie.
>This is boring.
This is USENET...
-- Hank Bovis (hb@Virginia.EDU),
other attributions removed to protect the guilty
%%
"Your posting is just the kind of BS that leads me to believe that
moderation is necessary. As it happens, you are simply wrong. On
all counts."
-- Bill Wells (bill@twwells.com)
"Funny, this is just the kind of quasi-religious didacticism that
leads me to believe that objectivism is not philosophy and that
it's basically a Rand fan club."
-- Tim Maroney (tim@hoptoad.UUCP)
"I've added to my understanding that you refer to calling a
bullshitter a bullshitter as ``quasi-religious didacticism''."
-- Bill Wells (bill@twwells.com)
%%
"The most important question when any new computer architecture is
introduced is `So what?'"
- someone in comp.arch
%%
"...poetry, like chastity, can be carried too far."
-- Mark Twain
%%
"Let the evil minds of the world beware! Ever and always shall
the Avengers prevail!"
-- Thor
%%
Miniscribe's troubles are daunting. The company has floundered in its attempt
to settle 13 shareholder lawsuits, filed after a panel found that previous
managers circumvented financial controls and resorted to shipping bricks and
unfinished drives to shore up sagging revenue figures.
-- "Miniscribe Prognosis Is Hopeful," E. E. Times, Jan 15, 1990, pg 67
%%
"If all philosophers were required to present their ideas in novels,
to dramatize the exact meaning and consequences of their philosophies
in human life, there would be far fewer philosophers -- and far better
ones."
-- Ayn Rand
"...and a lot more really bad novels!"
-- Jeremy York, jeremy@milton.acs.washington.edu
%%
"In space, no one can hear you flame."
-- Tim P Scott, scott@spectra.com
%%
"You know, I've never acidentally drilled a hole in myself while programming."
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%%
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the
inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
-- Winston Churchill, churchill@hmv.uk.gov
%%
"Pseudo-Judeo-Christian horror was no match for genuinely
hypoglycemic hunger."
-- Peni R. Griffin, "The Goat Man" (IASFM, 5/89)
%%
"...what's the point of ... new technology if you can't find some way to
pervert it?"
-- G. A. Effinger, "Marid Changes His Mind", IASFM, 1/90
%%
"The difference between fantasy
and science fiction
is that one hast
honest politicians
scrupulous lawyers,
and altruistic doctors,
while the other
only has beings from outer space."
-- William John Watkins
%%
In modern Europe, as in ancient Greece, it would seem that even inanimate
objects have sometimes been punished for their misdeeds. After the revocation
of the edict of Nantes, in 1685, the Protestant chapel at La Rochelle was
condemned to be demolished, but the bell, perhaps out of regard for its value,
was spared. However, to expiate the crime of having rung heretics to prayers,
it was sentenced to be first whipped, and then buried and disinterred, by way
of symbolizing its new birth at passing into Catholic hands. Thereafter it
was catechized, and obliged to recant and promise that it would never again
relapse into sin. Having made this ample and honourable amends, the bell was
reconciled, baptized, and given, or rather sold, to the parish of St.
Bartholomew. But when the governer sent in the bill for the bell to the
parish authorities, they declined to settle it, alleging that the bell, as
a recent convert to Catholicism, desired to take advantage of the law lately
passed by the king, which allowed all new converts a delay of three years in
paying their debts.
-- Sir James G. Frazer, _Folklore In The Old Testament_
%%
"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they
be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
-- George Bush in Free Inquiry magazine, Fall 1988
%%
"Well," said Programmer, "the customary procedure in such cases is as follows."
"What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?" said End-user. "For I am an End-user
of Very Little Brain, and long words bother me."
"It means the Thing to Do."
"As long as it means that, I don't mind," said End-user humbly.
-- Chris Mathes, uunet!metter!chris, with apologies to C. Robin And W. T. Pooh
%%
"While today's digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear
that the human retina's real time performance goes unchallenged.
Actually to simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of
even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution
of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times
and would take at least several minutes of time on a Cray supercomputer.
Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting
with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of
Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times each
second."
-- John K. Stevens, "Reverse Engineering the Brain"
Byte magazine, Page 287, April 1985,
%%
"Another way to look at this is: if your computer is not capable of
saturating *your* I/O bandwidth, you may be pissing away *your*
wetware power. And last I checked, mine isn't increasing exponentially..."
-- Dan Mocsny (dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu)
%%
"We can no more blame our loss of freedom on congressmen than we can
prostitution on pimps. Both simply provide broker services for their
customers."
-- Dr. W Williams
%%
"If your computer doesn't multitask, it ain't shit."
-- Cal Keegan
%%
"...public television is one of the most extravagant, over-capitalized
institutions in our society .. a huge national conglomerate ...l almost
every one of the major local stations in public television has
an elaborate, state-of-the-art, and very expensive production
facility. Most ... are scarcely used ... but there they are: costing
money and gathering dust."
-- C. M. Lichenstein, former Sr. VP, PBS
%%
"If at all possible, you should avoid being a young person or a wheat
farmer when the president starts feeling international tension."
-- Dave Barry
%%
"Don't take life too serious. It ain't no ways permanent."
-- Pogo, by Walt Kelly
%%
"For I lean on no dead kin, my name in mine for fame or scorn
And the world began when I was born and the world is mine to win."
-- Badger Clark
%%
"I hate to agree with Tim Maroney on anything, but I guess this latest is
an example of the fact that even a stopped clock is right twice a day."
-- Lee Lady, lady@uhccux.UUCP
%%
In article <9001312222.AA20446@apee.ogi.edu>, mehuld@APEE.OGI.EDU (Mehul Dave)
writes:
> I apologize for misposting this article to a wrong newsgroup. It was
> intended for sci.philosophy.tech. Sorry for the oversight.
Come, come; you needn't apologize. News.groups is the very bastion
of synthetic a priori judgments, so why not attack the Kantian beast
in its lair?
-- Mike Siemon, mls@cbnewsm.ATT.COM
%%
"Sometimes you have to be a harsh cookie editor."
-- Karl
%%
Software Engineering: How to program if you cannot.
-- Dijkstra
%%
"Posting to alt.flame has nothing to do with writing flames."
-- Patricia O Tuama (rissa@attctc.Dallas.TX.US)
%%
"Could you both just send hate mail a few times a day and post the synopsis
in the year 2000?"
-- Wm E Davidsen Jr, davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM, to a couple guys in news.groups
%%
In accepting an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame a few
years ago, General David Sarnoff [head of RCA] made this statement: "We are
too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of
those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves
good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." That
is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say, "Apple pie
is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines
its value." ... There is nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear
scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in
the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of
his own being in a new technical form. ... It has never occurred to General
Sarnoff that any technology could do anything but _add_ itself on to what we
already are.
-- Marshall McLuhan, _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_ (1964)
%%
... The subtlety of these methods implies an important source of
unreliability; unreliable error recovery. Thus it is important that
system testing pay meticulous attention to fault simulation to
uncover weaknesses in the recovery. Data taken on electronic
switching systems show that failure to recover from simplex faults
is usually a significant source of total outage time....
-- Edwin A. Irland, "Assuring Quality and Reliability of Complex Electronic
Systems: Hardware and Software," Proceedings of the IEEE, January 1988
%%
"To block hats, that is everything."
-- character in a Woody Allen short story
%%
"Spending four or five hours a day tracing through CONSIO with an
assembly-level debugger will take the spring out of anybody's step."
-- The Lone Contractor
%%
"Do not be deceived. Revolutions do not run backwards."
-- A. Lincoln, railsplitter, lawyer, imperialist
%%
In article <1133@gort.cs.utexas.edu> Jason bitches about IBM screwing all
of the people who were dumb enough to buy RTs, then...
-- Rad Morrison
%%
"Toroidal carbohydrate modules? Make mine glazed!"
-- Zippy
%%
"Why was the Ferranti flag taken down? Jim Adamoli says that it was
drooping too much. A new flag is being made out of silk so that it
will better catch the wind."
-- bulletin to employees
"Oh, yeah, the irony was too f*cking much!!! It was made of broader,
``better-quality'' cloth, but it wouldn't fly. Remind you of anything?"
-- Name Witheld For Obvious Reasons
%%
In article ... jmi@devsim.mdcbbs.com (JM Ivler - Douglas Aircraft) writes:
>Mass junk mail. If all of us who use this
>group for what it was designed for start to mass mail the below message to the
>offenders, maybe they will have enough sense to go somewhere else. My bloody
>kill file is getting too damn big!
Mass junk mail?
Just say 'forward to jmi@devsim.mdcbbs.com'.
-- Jay Maynard, jay@splut.conmicro.com
%%
"The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with
judiciously placed print statements."
-- Brian Kernighan [1978]
%%
"Oh God ... I'm *shot* ... Hey ... *wait* a second ... I'm
*okay* ... Wow! This is *cool! Bullets don't hurt me!"
-- Superboy, #2 of SUPERBOY THE COMIC BOOK (based on the TV series)
%%
"Somebody said to me, `But the Beatles were antimaterialistic.' That's a huge
myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say `Now, let's write a
swimming pool'."
-- Paul McCartney
%%
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, a big TV with a hi-fi VCR and a nice stereo, a
full fridge, a microwave, a UNIX system, two phone lines, a high speed modem,
and thou.
--
%%
"Don't you know there ain't no devil, it's just god when he's drunk."
-- Tom Waits
%%
"...and it's finished! It only has to be written."
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%%
"Kitten: small homicidal muffin on legs; affects human sensibilities to
the point of endowing the most wanton and ruthless acts of destruction with
near-mythical overtones of cuteness. Not recommended for beginners. Get
at least two."
-- strata@psyche.mit.edu
%%
"Draft politicians, not human beings."
-- antidraft slogan coined by Jeff Daiell, 1979
%%
"Lenin probably wouldn't understand. But then, no one around he seems to care
what he would think."
-- Lynn Ashby's report on Romania
%%
"This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He forgot to eat.
Sometimes he'd resent having to leave the deck to use the toilet..."
-- William Gibson, _Neuromancer_
%%
"Captain Picquard trusts his bartender's instincts and saves the Federation."
-- Karl's synopsis of a recent Star Trek episode
%%
"The more you have, the more you have that needs fixing."
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%%
"If you demand money from someone in exchange for your silence, it's called
``blackmail.'' If your lawyer demands money from someone in exchange for
your silence, it's called ``a settlement.''
-- Karl
%%
"Remember, IBM has always prided itself on its marketing prowess, and market
segmentation was an essential part of that. The last thing IBM wanted to
do was compete with itself. But it looks like that kind of thinking isn't
going to work anymore."
-- An unnamed IBM official, InfoWorld, February 26, 1990, page 1, about
the unhappiness of the AS/400 group that the System/6000 had an agressive
price/performance ratio, and a larger number
%%
"If a machine can be made so that an idiot can use it,
then only an idiot will use it."
-- Tadao Ichikawa
%%
"The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its
own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it
is merely a process, not an art."
-- Alfred Stieglitz, circa 1895, about the Romantic-Impressionist school
of photography
%%
"Well, you know, it sounds like they've got their own nuts on an anvil and
they're hammering away at them."
-- Dave Crocker
%%
"If you don't make money off of it, it had better be either a religious
experience or a hobby."
-- Lance Cooper
%%
"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the
part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of."
-- They Might Be Giants
%%
"There is no law that vulgarity and literary excellence cannot coexist."
-- A. Trevor Hodge
%%
"We're going to do it the way we always have -- the super-dumbass way...
It's what we know."
-- The Lone Contractor
%%
"When Barbary Pirates demand a fee for allowing you to do business, it's
called 'tribute money'. When the Mafia demands a fee for allowing you to do
business, it's called 'the protection racket'. When the State demands a fee
for allowing you to do business, it's called 'sales tax'."
-- Jeff Daiell
%%
"Real education must be limited to men who *insist* on knowing. The rest
is mere sheep-herding."
-- Ezra Pound
%%
"... you're my best friend. I don't have to be nice to you.
Besides, everybody knows I'm a jerk."
-- Wally West (the new Flash)
%%
"I'm a lover, not a hacker."
-- Jeff Daiell
%%
"There's one constant in buying a suit: It should fit."
-- The Houston Chronicle, 3/15/90
%%
Surely every human being ought to attain to the dignity of the unit. Surely
it is worth while to be one, and to feel that the census of the universe
would be incomplete without counting you. Surely there is grandeur in knowing
that in the realm of thought you are without a chain; that you have the right
to explore all heights and all depths; that there are no walls or fences, or
prohibited places, or sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought; that
your intellect owes no allegiance to any being, human or divine; that you
hold all in fee, and upon no condition, and by no tenure, whatsoever; that
in the world of mind you are relieved from all personal dictation, and from
the ignorant tyranny of majorities. Surely it is worth something to feel that
there are no priests, no popes, no parties, no governments, no kings, no gods,
to whom your intellect can be compelled to pay a reluctant homage. Surely it
is a joy to know that all the cruel ingenuity of bigorty can devise no prison,
no dungeon, no cell in which for one instant to confine a thought; that ideas
cannot be dislocated by racks, nor crushed in iron boots, nor burned with
fire. Surely it is sublime to think that the brain is a castle, and that
within its curious bastions and winding halls the soul, in spite of all worlds
and all beings, is the supreme sovereign of itself.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll, "The Free Soul"
%%
"I think they will be very effective in keeping Catholic legislators away
from the Communion rail."
-- Idaho Senator Mike Blackbird, about ecclesiastical sanctions against
politicians
%%
Kill files are an expression of resentment by the unmemorable or
untalented against the memorable and talented. Your appearance in kill
files merely marks the fact that you have more than once tried to make
people think, when they really would rather not. It is an honor.
-- Tim Maroney, who is in at least a few...
%%
"Will your long-winded speeches never end? What ails you that you keep on
arguing?"
-- Job 16:3
%%
"Dammit, we're all going to die, let's die doing something *useful*!"
-- Hal Clement, on comments that space exploration is dangerous
%%
--
-- uunet!sugar!karl "As long as there is a legion of superheros, all else
-- can surely be made right." -- Sensor Girl
-- Usenet access: (713) 438-5018