``The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it's better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech.'' -- Paul Graham %% ``Cadillac stopped being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970.'' -- Paul Graham %% ``Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard!'' -- ZapTheMutant %% ``The purpose of scientific research is to gain understanding, an obligation no person can delegate without giving up.'' -- E. W. Dijkstra %% ``A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.'' -- Leopold Stokowski %% ``If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.'' -- Francis Bacon %% ``People have this obsession. They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise their youth goes with you. It's very selfish, but it's understandable.'' -- Mick Jagger %% ``I gotta cut down on my (ab)use of parentheses.'' -- Unknown %% ``Read banned books. Watched questionable movies. Wear a silly hat on your head and pretend to be a pirate. Stay beautiful.'' -- Megan Stevens %% ``It isn't martyrdom if the beliefs you're dying for aren't your own.'' -- Megan Stevens %% ``We do but teach bloody instructions Which, being taught, return to plague th' inventor'' -- Shakespeare, "Macbeth" %% ``In the case of the sewing machines, as in so many similar technological transformations of the last sixty years or so, the replacement of one technology by another furthered a single process -- the replacement of human skill by mechanical complexity.'' -- John Michael Greer %% Broken pencils are pointless. %% I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me. %% A dyslexic man walks into a bra. %% I stayed up all night to see where the sun went. Then it dawned on me. %% ``Software engineers only have two problems: Concurrency, cache coherency, and off-by-one errors.'' -- Unknown %% ``Unix is very simple. It just needs a genius to understand its simplicity.'' -- Dennis Ritchie %% ``The 15 minutes between when you discover an unknown device with an Atmel SBC HTTP server on your network, and when you remember...'' -- Dan Lyke %% ``To be successful, a piece has to reinforce the myths of the culture.'' -- Dan Lyke %% ``Taking what you consider to be the straight path often requires twisting and turning in the real world. Taking the straight-and-narrow path in the real world often means putting your mind through intellectual contortions to rationalize things with respect to your own beliefs.'' -- Venkatesh Rao %% ``The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.'' -- Charles de Gaulle %% ``Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'.'' -- Betteridge's Law of Headlines %% ``One of the things that gelled as I stepped through the call stack and hierarchy is that there's a particular style of OO programming that leads to needing a debugger to figure stuff out.'' -- Dan Lyke %% ``I believe in blowing up in as dramatic and obvious a way as possible, as soon as possible, and doing absolutely nothing to attempt to recover. This is annoying, and that's exactly what you want: you want the end user to be annoyed, so they will complain, so you'll actually hear about it, and have a chance to fix it. Otherwise you end up with users who struggle along for years, cursing you every day as they repeat bizarre voodoo dance workarounds for bugs that you could fix in five minutes if you even had a clue they existed.'' -- Mars Saxman %% ``They say chicken soup feeds the soul, but they don't say what it feeds the soul to. Lovecraft was an optimist.'' -- Dan Lyke %% ``The contemporary way is to have fun with stuff you can't understand.'' -- Goto 80 %% ``Although I can not lay an egg, I am a very good judge of omelets.'' -- George Bernard Shaw %% ``Observation: Systems which break regularly are more resilient than systems which run flawlessly for long periods.'' -- Dan Lyke %% This e-mail is encrypted with 2ROT-13. %% ``Ubiquity is just a technocratic term for mass organisation.'' -- Christo %% ``Varje gång vi inte vågar säga att kejsaren är naken rullar vi ut den röda mattan för en framtida diktatur ännu en meter.'' -- Anna Troberg %% ``I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself by now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.'' -- Sir Isaac Newton %% ``In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice.'' -- Elf Sternberg %% An organization is less than the sum of its parts. %% ``Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.'' -- Unknown %% ``This is not only what's wrong with the way we structure education generally, where we're teaching "the one true way" and assuming that the teachers have the best answers, this is especially what's wrong with the gamification of everything: This notion that there will always be incremental steps which are within reach, that the really hard problems will have a blinking red target area that will be open for some small period and the way to beat it is to dodge the missiles until that moment when you can fire precisely and defeat the boss.'' -- Dan Lyke %% ``There's no 'I' in 'team', but there's more than one 'u' in 'fuck-up'.'' -- Unknown %% ``The ideal situation occurs when the things that we regard as beautiful are also regarded by other people as useful.'' -- Donald Knuth %% ``The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. Were just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people -- as remarkable as the telephone.'' -- Steve Jobs, Playboy, Feb 1, 1985 %% ``Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.'' -- Oscar Wilde %% ``Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.'' -- Benjamin Disraeli, 1870 %% ``First off, in the view you are now seeing, go near the bottom and uncheck the following items if they are checked: “Check spelling as you type,” “Use contextual spelling,” “Mark grammar errors as you type,” “Check grammar with spelling.” Now, these are not the most important of the options we will be unchecking, and if you really feel insecure, you can leave them on. All they’ll really do is underline words with wiggly lines if Outlook thinks they’re a mistake, so they’re fairly harmless. However, unchecking them will stiffen your spine and encourage you to take responsibility for correcting your own damned spelling or grammar, not to mention learning how to spell or form sentences properly in the first place. Spelling and grammar hints like this are for wimps who can’t be bothered to take their own destiny into their hands or learn spelling and grammar well enough to be reasonably sure of themselves.'' -- Violet Impudence %% ``Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.'' -- Sayre's law %% ``Somewhere, there are two kids in a garage building a company whose motto will be "Don't be Google".'' -- Digwuren the Gray %% ``While I think grace and gratitude are both wonderful things, I also think they are attitudes best preceded by bitterness, rage and self-pity.'' -- Sarah Miller %% ``At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you.'' -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe %% ``You drink every thing you want and you like but nothing is above the beauty, the pureness and the simplicity of water. Glass music is that water.'' -- brunozaid on Philip Glass %% ``I am not young enough to know everything.'' -- Oscar Wilde %% ``Scars are like tattoos with better stories.'' -- meuon %% ``There is no sacredness in the virgin. There is only the fear, were she to be educated and empowered and really let loose, of what she could become.'' -- Mark Morford %% ``Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.'' -- Robert Heinlein %% ``Enverbification of nouns is OK, but to dismantle an adjective and verbify with its remains is completely purplehatbands.'' -- MarillionFan %% ``Every time you *like* something on Facebook, an advertiser gets its horns.'' -- DJsolarlab %% ``The thing that I've realized about modern journalism is that controversy generates readership. [...] Which means that your average newspaper article is what we online discussion old-timers would refer to as trolling, and that explains the quality of the comments to such articles.'' -- Dan Lyke %% Fear brought us fire. %% ``The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.'' -- Guy de Maupassant %% ``I did not go to his funeral, but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it.'' -- majinbuu %% ``See the happy moron, He doesn't give a damn. I wish I were a moron, My God! Perhaps I am!'' -- Dorothy Parker %% ``Atoms also want to be free -- they're just not as pushy about it.'' -- Chris Anderson %% ``She looks as though she's been poured into her clothes, and forgot to say "when".'' -- P. G. Wodehouse %% ``Man ska inte prata med fula människor, de kan få för sig att det är ok att se ut så.'' -- Xider %% ``It would fill the world with innumerable immoralities and give such occasion for intrigues as people can not meet with. You would have a couple of lovers make a midnight assignation upon the top of the monument and see the cupola of St. Paul's covered with both sexes like the outside of a pigeon house. Nothing would be more frequent than to see a beau flying in at a garret window or a gallant giving chase to his mistress like a hawk after a lark.'' -- Joseph Addison, concerns about where manned flight might lead, 1713 %% ``It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.'' -- Robert Goddard (1882-1945) %% ``If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.'' -- Peter Ustinov %% Seven days without a pun makes one weak. %% ``A cipher is a device for converting a plaintext distribution problem into a key distribution problem.'' -- Marsh Ray %% ``The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.'' -- Richard Feynman, "Cargo Cult Science" %% ``Western music is fast because it's not in tune.'' -- Terry Riley %% IMPORTANT: This email is intended for the use of the individual addressee(s) named above and may contain information that is confidential, privileged or unsuitable for overly sensitive persons with low self-esteem, no sense of humour or irrational religious beliefs. If you are not the intended recipient, any dissemination, distribution or copying of this email is not authorised (either explicitly or implicitly) and constitutes an irritating social faux pas. Unless the word absquatulation has been used in its correct context somewhere other than in this warning, it does not have any legal or grammatical use and may be ignored. No animals were harmed in the transmission of this email, although the yorkshire terrier next door is living on borrowed time, let me tell you. Those of you with an overwhelming fear of the unknown will be gratified to learn that there is no hidden message revealed by reading this warning backwards, so just ignore that Alert Notice from Microsoft: However, by pouring a complete circle of salt around yourself and your computer you can ensure that no harm befalls you and your pets. If you have received this email in error, please add some nutmeg and egg whites and place it in a warm oven for 40 minutes. Whisk briefly and let it stand for 2 hours before icing. -- Koen van der Pasch %% ``I just replaced my Iphone screen with a mirror. Now, instead of checking Facebook, I just look and go, "Yeah, I'm fine." The mirror screen also works for GPS. Instead of Google Maps, I just look at my phone and I'm all, "There I am, at the center of the universe."'' -- Christopher Moore %% ``What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.'' -- Lev Tolstoj %% ``To err is human; to purr feline.'' -- Robert Byrne %% ``A statue is a pigeon's best friend.'' -- Lenin %% Benchmarks don't lie, but liars do benchmarks. %% ``During your travels, you will one day meet a tradesman more apt for your trade than yourself. When this happens, you have a choice: become the best at something else, or forever languish in knowing you're second-rate jack of all trades.'' -- Oscar Wilde %% ``If you want a track team to win the high jump, you find one person who can jump seven feet, not seven people who can jump one foot.'' -- Terman's Law of Innovation %% ``This laxe pithe or marrow in man's head shows no more capacity for thought than a Cake of Sewet or a Bowl of Curds.'' -- Henry More, 1652 %% ``I have nothing but confidence in you. And very little of that.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``If we have to act like we have rules, because of your behavior... we kick you out'' -- meuon %% "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Andy Warhol "As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country. This is the Long Tail." Chris Anderson "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes and then internet famous to 15 people forever. This is the Long Fail." ND¢ %% ``An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way while an American thinks a hundred years is a long time.'' -- Unknown %% ``It is a fundamental mistake to believe that a leading edge idea requires a leading edge technology.'' -- Norman White %% ``Any sufficiently advanced riddle is indistinguishable from gibberish.'' -- Erfworld %% ``Two kinds of businesses call their customers "users" - drug pushers and sysadmins'' -- Unknown %% When rights are illegal, only outlaws will have rights. %% Don't follow advice you get from fortune cookies. %% Playing Solitaire is its own punishment. %% ``The relation between a Calvin Klein ad and a hard-core adult film is essentially the same as the relation between a funny joke and an explanation of what's funny about that joke.'' -- David Foster Wallace (paraphrasing some guy or other), "Big Red Son" %% ``Reality is a quality that things possess in the same way they possess, say, weight. Some people are more real than others, for example. It has been estimated that there are only 500 *real* people on any given planet, which is why they keep unexpectedly running into one another all the time.'' -- Terry Pratchett, "Moving Pictures" %% ``Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.'' -- Mark Twain %% Save energy. Use a small font. %% ``One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotings.'' -- Diogenes %% ``Wanting connections, we found connections -- always, everywhere, and between everything. The world exploded in a whirling network of kinships, where everything pointed to everything else, everything explained everything else...'' -- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum %% ``Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.'' -- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5 %% ``An adventure game is a crossword at war with a narrative.'' -- Graham Nelson, "The Craft of Adventure" %% ``Enemies, as well as lovers, come to resemble each other over a period of time.'' -- Sydney J. Harris %% ``I have a hangup about the truth. I think its important to know what the truth is before you go jawing about how something or other is eroding the fabric of this or that.'' -- Adrian Colesberry %% ``Freedom is when the people can speak, democracy is when the government listens.'' -- Alastair Farrugia %% ``Contempt for humanity in the name of saving humanity is one of our oldest problems.'' -- David Dickerson %% ``Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.'' -- John Godfrey Saxe (in 1869) %% ``Only the dead have seen the end of war.'' -- George Santayana %% ``The real meaning of "cloud computing" is to suggest a devil-may-care approach towards your computing. It says, "Don't ask questions, just trust every business without hesitation. Don't worry about who controls your computing or who holds your data. Don't check for a hook hidden inside our service before you swallow it." In other words, "Think like a sucker." I prefer to avoid the term.'' -- Richard Stallman %% ``Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.'' -- Clay Shirky %% ``There is much pleasure in useless knowledge.'' -- Bertrand Russell %% It's amazing what can be accomplished when no one cares who gets the credit %% ``When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.'' -- Pablo Picasso %% ``There's glory in using inappropriate tools. You can tell you're pushing a new frontier when all available tools are inappropriate.'' -- David Berkstresser %% Brevity is for the weak. %% The early worm is for the birds. %% With great power comes great heat sinks. %% ``One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.'' -- Martin Luther King %% ``My favorite animal at the Zoo is the lesser kudu. You have to admire an animal with a name like that, laboring as he must in the shadow of the greater kudu. It must be like having an older brother who excelled at sports and academics in school, to whom you have always been compared and found lacking. A few months ago, I was visiting the Zoo at lunch with a friend and discovered the area where the lesser kudu is ordinarily found was empty. I hope he made a break for it. I hope he made his way out into the world, free of expectations, shedding labels, determined only to be the best damn kudu he could be.'' -- Brad Graham %% ``This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box.'' -- Broadcast journalism pioneer Edward R. Murrow about television %% ``Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.'' -- Plato %% Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now. %% ``Detta skall jag visa dig medelst ett stort papper som jag har fyllt med faktiska upplysningar!'' -- August Strindberg %% ``A good programming language ought to be better for explaining software than English. You should only need comments when there is some kind of kludge you need to warn readers about, just as on a road there are only arrows on parts with unexpectedly sharp curves.'' -- Paul Graham, "Hackers and painters" %% ``Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design -- deciding too early what a program should do.'' -- Paul Graham, "Hackers and painters" %% ``Superficially he's deep, but deep down he's shallow.'' -- Peter DeVries %% ``The exploitation of accidents is the key to creativity, whether what is being made is a new genome, a new behavior, or a new melody.'' -- Daniel Dennett %% ``Vi i norden talar ju egentligen samma språk, fast norrmännen kan inte stava det, danskarna kan inte uttala det och finnarna förstår det inte.'' -- Slasher %% Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives. %% ``Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.'' -- Mark Twain %% ``All problems in Computer Science can be solved by another level of indirection.'' -- Butler Lampson %% ``We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.'' -- Norbert Wiener, mathematician %% ``Rumor has it that if you play Microsoft CDs backwards you will hear Satanic messages. Worse still, is that if you play them forwards they will install Windows.'' -- Sean Falloy %% Alt är under kontroll. %% ``The fastest way to get an engineer to solve a problem is to declare that the problem is unsolvable.'' -- Unknown %% ``Where would we be now if it hadn't been for religious zealots burning the thinkers and scientists?'' -- meuon %% ``The burden of proof is on that which has none.'' -- Unknown %% ``For me, the most baffling thing about the creationist position is how anyone who believes in an omniscient God could "credit" such a being with creating the forms of life we see today. Study biology for awhile, and you'll see that it's absolutely full of bad engineering, incomplete assembly, and shoddy workmanship. If God designed the gastropod digestive tract, the human knee, and the reproductive system of Plecia nearctica, then God is a moron. Creationism, in other words, is heresy.'' -- alandove %% ``But Macs cost too much, and Linux is too hard. And Microsoft only hits me because he loves me.'' -- Unknown %% ``In my experience, those who claim to be able to 'multitask' are simply able to do three things badly at the same time! I can't imagine anyone ever wrote a best-seller or painted a masterpiece while simultaneously chatting on the phone and watching TV.'' -- Justin %% ``Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave Had twenty-three sons, and she named them all Dave? Well, she did. And that wasn't a smart thing to do. You see, when she wants one, and calls out "Yoo-Hoo! Come into the house, Dave!" she doesn't get one. All twenty-three Daves of hers come on the run!'' -- Dr. Seuss %% ``Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time. [...] It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion.'' -- Robert Grudin, `Time and the Art of Living', quoted in the GNU coreutils documentation in the section on 'Date input formats'. %% ``When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun. Now they've taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it.'' -- http://www.paranoia.com/ %% ``========================================== | ,dP""8a "888888b, d8b "888b ,888" | | 88b " 888 d88 dPY8b 88Y8b,8888 | | `"Y8888a 888ad8P'dPaaY8b 88 Y88P888 | | a, Y88 888 dP Y8b 88 YP 888 | | `"8ad8P'a888a a88a;*a888aa88a a888a | | ;*;;;;*;;;*;;;*,, | | _,---'':::';*;;;*;;;*;;*d;, | | .-' ::::::::::';*;;*;dII; | | .' ,<<<,. :::::::::::::::ffffff`. | | / ,<<<<<<<<,::::::::::::::::fffffI,\ | | .,<<<<<<<<<;,::::::::::fffKKIP | | | ``<<<<<<>>>>;,::::fffKKIPf ' | | \ `mYMMV?;;;;;;;\>>>>>>>>>,YIIPP"` / | | `. "":;;;;;;;;;i>>>>>>>>>>>>>, ,' | | `-._``":;;;sP'`"?>>>>>=========. | | `---..._______...|<[Hormel | | | `=========' | =====================================(FL)='' -- ron@centerline.com %% ``I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively -- or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show -- or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone's /heart/ -- only by someone's /head/.'' -- "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand %% ``There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one /makes/ them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted -- and you create a nation of law-breakers -- and then you cash in on guilt.'' -- Atlas Shrugged %% A rather unusual way to dismount from a bicycle. (*) __o (*)|-__o- --+ --| \ / |__ o - \o/ o _`\<,_ --/ \ @\| \o | o/ o/--- /\ | /|\ (*)/ (*) (*) (*)` ( \ /o\ / ) | (\ / | / \ / \ -- minyard4 %% Xgl on this system with its crappy i945 graphics card makes me sad. it's like running OSX on a G3 It's like riding a bike when you own a car. it's like getting an iced coffee when you wanted a coffee slurpee It's like smashing your hand in a car door when you wanted ice cream. it's like getting killed in many horrible ways when you just wanted a hug It's like bad when you wanted good. it's like bud when you wanted something that doesn't suck It's like pepsi when you wanted coke. it's like running vi and finding out it's been aliased to vim. %% ``Din rätt att svinga näven upphör där din grannes näsa börjar.'' -- Afrikanskt ordspråk %% [1] Done rm -rf * %% Security through Obscenity. %% ``3. Send large donations, checks, and money orders to the author of the FAQ, or the moderator of the group, whichever you prefer. Then, cross the top question off the FAQ, answer the question at the bottom, and mail it to three people. Within two weeks, you will receive 729 answers to various questions! Do not break the chain; Emily Postnews broke the chain, and now no one listens to her.'' -- Peter Seebach, from The *other* C FAQ %% ``Again, why buy the software that single handedly supports an entire industry of help book writers and lets you get together with friends to talk about what you can't do and how much it crashes? I see little reason to jump on a bandwagon headed for a cliff.'' -- Maxx Daymon %% ``No! Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.'' -- Yoda on error handling. %% ``People spend too much time finding other people to blame, too much energy finding excuses for not being what they are capable of being, and not enough energy putting themselves on the line, growing out of the past, and getting on with their lives.'' -- J. M. Straczynski %% ``The scales always balance, what goes around comes around. Bear in mind, though, you might be long dead by the time the books are even.'' -- D. T. King %% ``Cheap, intemperate propaganda sometimes achieves impressive short-term gains, but it will be more advantageous in the long run to keep the loyalty of a small number of intelligently committed people than to arouse the passions of an unthinking, fickle mob who will change their attitude as soon as someone comes along with a better propaganda gimmick.'' -- Unabomber %% Two drunks were walking home one night. They stopped on a bridge to pee. "Oh, look at the fish playing in the moonlight! They're so happy!" "You're not a fish, you can't know whether they're happy or not." "You're not me, you can't know whether I know or not." -- Taoist parable %% ``Like my (automobile) driving instructor used to say: when the light turns green, yield to the idiots, wait for the taxi drivers, then go slow.'' -- Simon Hawkin %% If you can't explain it to someone else, you don't understand it yourself. %% ``Coding standards or guidelines will not make good programmers out of bad programmers. They have absolutely no effect at all on the correctness of the code that a programmer produces. You cannot legislate good design.'' -- Robert Martin %% ``They say that from the moment of birth we begin to die, and that personal growth can be painful. So with that in mind, may you die slowly, and painfully.'' -- Ed Ming %% ``However, if a program has many source-syntax errors, we should expect many logic and coding errors as well -- after all, a slob is a slob is a slob.'' -- Boris Beizer %% ``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 to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.'' -- C.A.R. Hoare %% ``I won't say OOP and x-platform libraries have no value, but I do often think that a main reason for their push is that organizations want to be able to produce good software with crappy people, and that's a bit of a pipedream.'' -- Jeff Rogers %% ``Run along, child. You're way out of your depth here, as you'd be anywhere there was noticeable dewfall, and you wouldn't want to get hurt.'' -- Geoff Miller %% ``Too many people still can't think their way out of a wet paper bag and insist on being happy about it.'' -- Dan Sorenson %% ``I don't want the keywords highlighted anymore than I want the prepositions in green and the verbs in blue when I read English.'' -- Peter Seebach %% ``If you were to design a house from Use Cases, it would not be obvious that you need a roof.'' -- Unknown %% ``(There is no truth to the rumor that a delta will be issued to fix bugs discovered when Gamma's code was beta-tested on an Alpha.)'' -- Norman H. Cohen %% ``Tom [Cargil]'s suggestion with a further idea: Propsers of new [C++] features should be required to donate a kidney. That would -- Jim [Waldo] pointed out -- make people think hard before proposing, and even people without any sense would propose at most two extensions.'' -- Bjarne Stroustrup %% ``Objects in calendar are closer than they appear.'' -- Stephan Somogyi %% ``Brain work will cause her [the 'new' woman] to become bald, while increasing masculinity and contempt for beauty will induce the growth of hair on the face. In the future, therefore, women will be bald and will wear long mustaches and patriarchal beards.'' -- Hans Friedenthal, Berlin University, 1914 %% ``That's no oatmeal, that's my wife!'' -- Ed Devinney %% ``No, he has coined the politically correct term for roadkill: Aspect Ratio Challenged.'' -- Bill Lynn %% ``I would light my hair on fire and place a live salmon in my vest pocket to attract her. I know I'm in love when she can enjoy my salmon, but still respect my mind. I show her my love by doing interpretive dancing with fluorescent lightbulbs, followed by splashing multicolored dayglow paint against my thighs, and then dinner at McDonalds. And I know she loves me when there's an absence of gunfire and lawsuits.'' -- Unknown %% ``The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..."'' -- Isaac Asimov %% ``Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the hammer.'' -- Jim Edwards-Hewitt %% ``Then again, the reason that you often lose one sock in the washer is someone leaving the washing machine set on odd parity.'' -- Michael Ardai %% ``What is considered "left-wing" in America is considered "right wing" in most of Europe. What is considered "right wing" in America is considered foaming-at-the-mouth-dangerous-lunatic-with-toothbrush-moustache on this side of the Great Undrinkable.'' -- Charlie Stross %% ``Have you not read The Book? Do you not believe the miracles? Barny can rouse the sleeping (Third Cordovians, 15:69:1). Barney can walk across shag carpet (Genitals, 2:75). Barney can make the deaf to see (Genitals, 9:1.5). Barney lied for your sins (Locutus, 13:71).'' -- Richard Ward %% ``Bedrock does support a form of drag and drop. Development dragged on for about 2 years, and then was dropped.'' -- Brian Clark %% 13. Spend all your money on Transformers. Play with them at night. If your roommate says anything, tell him/her with a straight face, "They're more than meets the eye". %% ``And I also think Ayn Rand had a fetish for naked shoulders.'' -- Sean Conner %% ``Verily I say unto you, that no one bearing the mark of ketchup on his lap or shirt shall enter the kingdom of God.'' -- alt.ketchup heretic %% ``K--- greps the entire newsfeed for his nickname, and tends to reply to any message that mentions him -- he's a lot like 'Cthulhu' from Lovecraftian mythology, only more terrifying.'' -- Scott Forbes %% ``At any rate, C++ != C. Actually, the value of the expression 'C++ != C' is implementation-defined.'' -- Peter da Silva %% ``Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will drink with my nose.'' -- Inspector General %% "Hmmm... I wonder what this button doe %% ``YES! Drums, guitars, and death! They finally got it right!'' -- Butthead %% ``Ever notice how the murder rate climbs as the quality of cereal toys declines?'' -- Rob Cruickshank %% ``I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.'' -- Unknown %% Ask me about my Vow of Silence. %% ``C++ is a large set of partially inconsistent and partially incompatible features without a clear model of how they should be used or how they interact.'' -- Ross Huitt %% ``Don't write to ROM. It wastes your time and annoys the ROM.'' -- Newton Programmer's Guide %% ``I can't speak for anyone else, Laura, but my life changed when I let Our Lord Jesus Christ into my life as my personal savior yesterday. I got over it, though.'' -- Rick Gordon %% Things don't mean nothing if they ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi. %% Doctor of subliminimalism. %% Avoid looking at laser with remaining eye. %% ``It was mentioned on CNN that the new prime number discovered recently is four times bigger then the previous record.'' -- John Blasik %% ``Machine independent? Of course it's machine independent! It doesn't work on *any* machine!'' -- Jigman %% A jester unemployed is nobody's fool. %% ``Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.'' -- Alain van der Heide %% ``Forty years from now nursing homes will be filled with demented hackers, studying their blank laptop screens nicely placed on knitted quilts to keep their knees warm.'' -- K. Mitchum %% ``Spear is the Mime killer.'' -- Frank Herbert %% Today is the last day of the first of your life. %% ``Mmmrmfh mmrhrhf, mrmhrmmfm mrmfh, mrhm mrfhhrhfhff mmmrmfmmmfhfhhf!'' -- Nirvana, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" %% ``One of us really does not understand what the other is saying. I haven't yet figured out whether that's you or me.'' -- Eric Berdahl %% ``1492 AD: Columbus discovers America and therefore tomatoes. Southern Italian cuisine, especially pizza, will never be the same.'' -- Philip Greenspun %% ``Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think you are fucked.'' -- Philip Greenspun %% ``JavaScript use is very highly correlated with lack of anything interesting.'' -- Dan Lyke %% ``In practice, humans are lazy, sloppy, and easily distracted by more interesting projects.'' -- Philip Greenspun %% ``Tcl is really Scheme with most of its brain removed.'' -- Philip Greenspun %% ``I know [canned music] makes chickens lay more eggs and factory workers produce more. But how much more can they get out of you on an elevator?'' -- Victor Borge %% ``Profanity is the inevitable linguistic crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker.'' -- Bruce Sherrod %% ``SCSI is not magic. There are *fundamental technical reasons* why you have to sacrifice a young goat to your scsi chain every now and then.'' -- BitPoet %% ``You've misinterpreted our apathy and laziness for dislike.'' -- jo2y %% ``I'm actually a really nice and normal person, but i'm like a magnet for filth and depravity.'' -- rzolf %% ``That's how I decided to start Crazy Apple Rumors Site. Actually, it's a much longer story than that. I'm leaving out the whole car chase, the battle with the ninja warriors and the spiritual journey that culminated in meeting the Entity for the first time at the Waffle House in Lancaster, PA.'' -- John Moltz %% ``I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.'' -- Marcus Cole %% ``It is my firm belief that there is no belief so asinine, no course of action so bizarre, that it can not have a half dozen web sites strongly devoted to its practice. If their maintainers ever learned to check their spelling, we might be in real trouble.'' -- Jeff Vogel %% ``As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.'' -- Matt Cartmill %% ``Hitting age 50 and realizing that you've never pursued your dreams is one of the great horrors of the human condition. And totally inexcusable. Not following your passions is the greatest sin you can commit, it means surrendering the fire of your ambitions to the fears of other people. It's psychological treason.'' -- jms %% ``Running a service -- any service -- on the internet is like putting a child with a hammer in a room full of coloured eggs and telling them not to break any.'' -- Matthew Hunt %% ``I often think the dominant life form in the US is the automobile, and we humans are merely its reproductive organs.'' -- Joe Delta %% ``Java cleverly blends the complexity of C++ with the execution speed of Smalltalk and the elegance of DOS.'' -- tblanchard %% ``I don't mind people making mistakes, I just wish they'd make new ones.'' -- redtoade %% ``There's nothing wrong with believing in something bigger than yourself, just don't ever trust someone that NEEDS to.'' -- redtoade %% ``If you look at all of the products of Gen X, they really only have one thing in common: a deep loathing for the establishment gently wrapped in sardonic wit.'' -- redtoade %% ``The US attitude to free speech is like their attitude to democracy, food and football. They are big fans, but they just don't get it.'' -- David Cake %% ``The ease with which a language allows you to solve easy problems is not interesting.'' -- mikeash %% ``The amount of advance planning about nitpicky details is inversely proportional to the chance of finishing the project.'' -- mikeash %% ``The Good Life Coop introduced us to a wonderful concept for communication: Desperanto. Desperanto is the language you speak in foreign countries after your high school and college language courses have faded into phrases like 'Ou est la plume de ma tante?' and the ability to remember the Spanish word for spoon. The Desperanto theory is that any combination of Romance languages, when spoken in earnest and with a smile, will be understood by people around the Mediterranean. Amazingly it works well, even better than speaking English slowly and loud.'' -- Grand Rapper E/D %% ``Not knowing how to use the right tool is not a good reason to use the wrong tool.'' -- mikeash %% ``With the second line of code, you already have a legacy.'' -- Kent Beck %% ``Light bulbs are not actually "light bulbs" but dark absorbers. When you turn them on, they suck the dark out of the room. You can prove this by holding your hand under a "light bulb". The dark will stack up under your hand where its path to the absorber is blocked by your hand. When they quit working and turn a dark color, it's not because they burnt out, it's because they're full.'' -- Ceph %% ``Every time I think about the immigration issue, I end up thinking that illegal immigrants are exactly the sort of folks we need: They're the ones who are bad-ass enough to crawl under the barbed-wire and across the desert so that they can *work*.'' -- Dan Lyke %% ``Don't be evil unless you know how.'' -- AngryLuke %% ``Every well-designed architecture you create will be discarded without being exploited. Every quick & dirty hack you write will last for years.'' -- grob %% ``If you don't watch TV, I can't help you.'' -- Verizon DSL Tech Support %% ``Listen to a man's question, and he will annoy you today. Answer it, and he will annoy you for the rest of his life.'' -- mikeash %% ``Buahahahaha. It's situations like this that separate the true programmers from the sane people.'' -- Ahruman %% ``If you accept that programming is merely the art of debugging an empty file, then software exists merely to work around bugs in hardware.'' -- mikeash %% ``For a presentation or a speech, you need your audience, otherwise it's just you in an empty room talking to no one in particular, and we already have a word for that... it's called writing.'' -- rands %% ``A few days ago I had the realization that a command line is interacting with a computer using language, and a mouse was the equivalent of pointing and grunting.'' -- Dan Lyke %% ``It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.'' -- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World %% ``Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.'' -- Arthur Koestler %% ``If the Internet has taught us anything, it is that you can always get people to do what they already want to do.'' -- Lawrence Lessig %% ``The secret to success is being able to make mistakes faster.'' -- Stuart McFarlan %% ``Don't think outside the box. Build a box.'' -- Unknown %% ``There is no law against composing music when one has no ideas whatsoever. The music of Wagner, therefore, is perfectly legal.'' -- Mark Twain %% ``Han slog upp dörren, ögonen, den hemliga älskaren, förlovningen och ett stort glas whiskey.'' -- Hans Landvik %% ``Person saying it cannot be done should not interrupt person doing it.'' -- Chinese proverb %% ``Tala i vredesmod och du kommer hålla det bästa tal du någonsin ångrat.'' -- Winston Churchill %% ``All people are born alike -- except Republicans and Democrats.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``Why waste time reinventing the wheel, when you could be reinventing the engine?'' -- Damian Conway %% ``Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death.'' -- Adolf Hitler %% ``Konsensus är döden för ett resonemang.'' -- Ingvar Storm, Spanarna %% ``Nu ska branscherna och vuxna se till att vi får ordning på det här.'' -- Beatrice Ask om fildelning, Aktuellt 081204 %% ``Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.'' -- Alan J. Perlis %% Save the environment! Add "set >>$HOME/.thinkofthechildren" to your .bash_logout. %% ``The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.'' -- Sir Winston Churchill %% ``Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.'' -- Martin Luther King Jr. %% ``Love is OK. But I prefer pain, it doesn't hurt as much.'' -- Unknown %% ``I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I've done it before and I will do it again.'' -- Steve Ballmer %% ``An office environment is supposed to be something that *helps* you work, not something you work despite.'' -- Paul Graham %% ``The tsunami was not an Act of God. But 9/11 was.'' -- Matt Ridley %% ``I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.'' -- Bjarne Stroustrup %% ``Den som vet hur korv och lagar kommer till sover inte längre gott om natten'' -- Otto von Bismarck %% ``Psh, is that all? Do four or five of these, and you'll get used to the idea that people in lateral thinking puzzles solve all their psychological traumas with suicide. Someone wakes up to a shipwreck? Suicide. A man deduces that his wife is having an affair? Suicide. A guy can't reach the elevator buttons? Suicide!'' -- Cosmologicon, in the xkcd logic puzzle forum %% Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Clarke's Law Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. -- Clark's Law %% ``Nobody's ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the general public.'' -- Unknown %% ``In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.'' -- Nathaniel Hawthorne %% ``A complex design is the sign of an inferior designer.'' -- Jamie Hyneman, Myth Buster %% ``Give a lie twenty-four hours start, and it will take a hundred years to overtake it.'' -- C. F. Dixon-Johnson %% ``When all think alike, no one is thinking very much.'' -- Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) %% ``Pain is temporary, failure is forever.'' %% ``Parity is for farmers.'' -- Seymour Cray %% ``The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.'' -- Hunter S Thompson %% ``To ask permission is to seek denial.'' -- Scott McNealy %% ``A skilled general will get his victory from manipulation of the situation and not from demanding it of his men.'' -- Sun-Tzu %% ``Any proposition advanced without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.'' -- Christopher Hitchens %% ``If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal'' -- Emma Goldman %% ``That is of course the real problem with [R2-D2]: He's just a little rolling Deus Ex Machina device, who can pull out the right tool in any random situation as though he were Inspector Gadget. When the same tool would be handy in dozens of other situations, it's never seen again.'' -- Ian Fortey %% ``There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.'' -- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods %% ``On two occasions I have been asked, -- "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.'' -- Charles Babbage %% ``There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch.'' %% Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver. %% Mathematics is the part of science you could continue to do if you woke up tomorrow and discovered the universe was gone. %% ``Just think how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of them are even stupider!'' -- George Carlin %% ``The right to speak PGP is the right to speak Navajo'' -- Eben Moglen %% Den stora faran är inte att datorerna ska börja tänka som människor, utan att människorna ska börja tänka som datorer. %% ``I was in Disney World recently, specifically the part of it called the Magic Kingdom, walking up Main Street USA. This is a perfect gingerbready Victorian small town that culminates in a Disney castle. It was very crowded; we shuffled rather than walked. Directly in front of me was a man with a camcorder. It was one of the new breed of camcorders where instead of peering through a viewfinder you gaze at a flat-panel color screen about the size of a playing card, which televises live coverage of whatever the camcorder is seeing. He was holding the appliance close to his face, so that it obstructed his view. Rather than go see a real small town for free, he had paid money to see a pretend one, and rather than see it with the naked eye he was watching it on television.'' -- Neal Stephenson, 'In the Beginning was the Command Line' %% When a proposition is ludicrous enough, we lend it undeserved credibility when we respond too politely. %% She sells seashells on the sea shore, and the seashells she sells are seashells for sure. %% ``Anyone who quotes me in their sig is an idiot.'' -- Rusty Russell %% ``"Alf Todd," said Ukridge, soaring to an impressive burst of imagery, "has about as much chance as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild cat's left ear with a red-hot needle."'' -- P. G. Wodehouse %% ``The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned Things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned to it. The theologians call it a sinner and try to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychotherapist calls it a neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots.'' -- Illuminatus! %% ``Never bring tequila to a key-signing party.'' -- xkcd %% ``Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.'' -- M. C. Escher %% ``If you're in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it'll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.'' -- Unknown %% ``Unga viljor viner likt herrelösa spjut.'' -- Karin Boye %% A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right. Q: Why should i start my reply below the quoted text? -- http://www.i-hate-computers.demon.co.uk/ %% ``Programmers [...] often take refuge in an understandable, but disastrous, inclination towards complexity and ingenuity in their work. Forbidden to design anything larger than a program, they respond by making that program intricate enough to challenge their professional skill.'' -- Michael A. Jackson %% ``Web 2.0 is a commemorative coin minted in celebration of the end of the dot-com crash. Like all commemorative coins, it has no actual value.'' -- Michael Swaine %% ``Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.'' -- Alan J. Perlis %% ``An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.'' -- H. L. Mencken %% Even if you are one-in-a-million, there are still 6000 people just like you. %% ``An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.'' -- Eric Hoffer %% Den som väntar på att känna sig riktigt säker, blir aldrig fri från stödhjulen. %% God apa gavs galna anlag, svag apa dog. %% ``What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.'' -- Herbert Simon %% Fun game: Try to post a YouTube comment so stupid that people realize you must be joking. (Hint: This is impossible) -- xkcd.com %% ``Two years from now, spam will be solved.'' -- Bill Gates, 2004 %% Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it. -- Conway's Law %% ``I remember when cartoons weren't all about half-cat androids who shoot magical beams of fire at ball-inhabiting ninja teenage girls from the moon.'' -- Encyclopedia Dramatica on Anime %% I'm just a nobody. Therefore, I'm perfect. %% ``Göbbels was in favor of free speech for views which he liked. So was Stalin. If you're in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.'' -- Noam Chomsky %% ``A smile is the shortest distance between two people.'' -- Victor Borge %% ``Avoid macros. Do not ever ever ever even consider starting to think about writing a macro that is a common word or abbreviation.'' -- Herb Sutter %% ``The design team wasn't as much a team as a series of sequential programmers. It was originally developed by a guy who quit, development continued with a new guy until he quit, ad nauseam. And like the rings of a beautiful, majestic redwood, chunks of code bearing each fallen developer's coding style left unique impressions in the code.'' -- Jake Vinson %% ``The great thing about mod_rewrite is it gives you all the configurability and flexibility of Sendmail. The downside to mod_rewrite is that it gives you all the configurability and flexibility of Sendmail.'' -- Brian Behlendorf, Apache Group %% Programming is like sex, one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. %% ``Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.'' -- Benford's law of controversy %% ``Before I criticize someone, I walk a mile in their shoes. That way, if they get angry, they are a mile away and barefoot.'' -- Unknown %% ``Kvinnor och soppor skall man ej låta vänta, ty då kallna de.'' -- Otto Serrander %% Bearded men can obtain the appearance of an upper class Arctic explorer by simply applying Tippex to their beards, painting their noses blue, and cutting off a couple of toes. It never fails to impress the girls. %% ``What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.'' -- from "Leisure" by W. H. Davies %% ``For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do.'' -- Gene Weingarten, Washington Post %% The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. %% ``If atheism is a religion then not collecting stamps is a hobby.'' -- Dennett %% ``In a post Genghis Khan world, should we allow anyone to ride a horse?'' -- .sig of Richie %% ``C++ doesn't have a compiler, it has a complainer.'' -- Maybe_Factor %% ``On IRC everyone is male until proven IRL.'' -- Psytroll %% ``Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.'' -- Oscar Wilde %% ``Jag tror på köttets lust och själens obotliga ensamhet.'' -- Hjalmar Söderberg %% ``You only live once, and the way I live, once is enough.'' -- Frank Sinatra %% ``If I give you a pfennig you will be one pfennig richer and I'll be one pfennig poorer. But if I give you an idea, you will have a new idea, but I shall still have it, too.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``It is easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code.'' -- Unknown %% ``It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.'' -- Edsger Dijkstra %% ``They sicken of the calm, who know the storm.'' -- Dorothy Parker %% Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed. %% People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs. %% Exhilaration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you, and just before you realize what is wrong with it. %% ``The key to happiness is self-delusion. Don't think of yourself as an organic pain collector racing toward oblivion.'' -- Scott Adams %% ``We must remember that in time of war what is said on the enemy's side of the front is always propaganda and what is said on our side of the front is truth and righteousness, the cause of humanity and a crusade for peace.'' -- Walter Lippmann %% Depression, n.: Anger without enthusiasm. %% In man's struggle against the world, bet on the world. %% The shortest distance between two points is under construction. %% Due to recent cutbacks and until further notice, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off. %% ``Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.'' -- Oscar Wilde %% ``My fake plants died, because I did not pretend to water them.'' -- Mitch Hedberg %% In Spanish, "mensa" means stupid. %% Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic. %% ``If you're not versed in DRM doublethink this concept gets quite tricky to explain, but in terms of quantum mechanics the content enters a superposition of simultaneously copied and uncopied states until a user collapses its wave function by observing the content (in physics this is called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox). Depending on whether you follow the Copenhagen or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, things then either get wierd or very wierd. So in order for Windows Vista's content protection to work, it has to be able to violate the laws of physics and create numerous copies that are simultaneously not copies.'' -- Peter Gutmann %% ``The Sun will pass between the Earth and the Moon tonight for a total Lunar eclipse.'' -- WCBS Radio Newsbrief, Oct 27 2004, 12:01 pm EDT %% /* If you can read this, your preprocessor is broken. */ %% ``Superman? Superman never worked hard for anything. I suppose he's moral; but his morality comes from an egotistical understanding that there's really nothing that can stop him. He is a tyrant about enforcing the rules. Furthermore, Superman's great deeds don't come from him being clever or smarter or more dedicated or a better person. No, he gets everything that makes him unique from a difference he was just born with. If he lived on Krypton, he'd be just another scumbag. But because Earth's yellow sun gives him powers, he is able to horde them over us and rub our faces in this fact; a fact that he had no hand in and is merely the result of his illegal immigration to the United States. Superman's whole schtick is the same as if I went to a group of school children and, with simple riddles, double-speak, and mathematics, bargained them out of their lunch money. No, Superman is no one we should look up to and, in fact, should be looked upon with fear. What happens when he decides he's no longer amused just being an enforcer of rules? What if he decides to start making rules? What then?'' -- Richard Nixon at thedailywtf.com %% ``If you can dream it, you can do it. Always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse.'' -- Walt Disney %% ``I put the sexy in dyslexia.'' %% ``See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction.'' -- George W. Bush, Oct. 3, 2003 %% ``Any proposition advanced without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.'' -- Christopher Hitchens %% Nonconformists unite for paradox! %% If you park, don't drink. Accidents cause people. %% ``Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.'' -- Brian W. Kernighan %% ``There's the problem... The Token Ring has fallen out of the network. Maybe it's in the Ethernet?'' -- Dilbert %% Politics is the fountain of compromise, and compromise is the enemy of engineering. %% ``It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.'' -- Krishnamurti %% ``See, this is why you don't design systems so that they can be maintained by unskilled users. Because then unskilled users will maintain them.'' -- Zemyla %% Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A. D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice. -- Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual %% ``Dieselbilar drar minst bensin.'' -- Aftonbladet %% Religious protection fault. Ave satani. %% ``I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.'' -- Mark Twain (1835-1910) %% ``The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'' -- George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists %% ``for me, CodeRed, Sobig, Slammer, Slapper, and Cthulhu have been as unpleasant as the bubonic plague was to one of its 13th-century survivors: stepping over the disgusting bodies of those who were not immune was quite distressing, but -- I survived and they didn't.'' -- mjr %% ``For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.'' -- R. P. Feynman %% ``If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.'' -- James Madison, fourth US president (1751-1836) %% ``Hurra! Jag vaknade i morse utan att ha förvandlats till en skalbagge!'' -- D.H.K. %% ``Structure is nothing if it is all you've got. Skeletons spook people if they try to walk around on their own; I really wonder why XML does not.'' -- Erik Naggum %% ``Being a medical doctor, and speaking a little conversational french, I feel it's safe to say that I know more than a little about browser compliance.'' %% After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box. -- Italian proverb %% ``The last good thing written in C was Franz Schubert's Symphony number 9.'' -- Erwin Dieterich %% ``I have stopped reading Stephen King novels. Now I just read C code instead.'' -- Richard A. O'Keefe %% ``If I remove a stop sign and someone is killed in a car accident at that intersection, I can be sued and perhaps go to jail for contributing to that accident. If I lock an exit door in a crowded theater or restaurant that subsequently burns, I face lawsuits and jail time. If I remove or disable the fire extinguishers in a public building, I again face lawsuits and jail time. If I remove the shrouding from a gear train or a belt in a factory, I (and my company) face huge OSHA fines and lawsuits. If I remove array bounds checks from my software, I will get a raise and additional stock options due to the improved "performance" and decreased number of calls from customer service.'' -- Henry Baker %% ``The intelligence of any discussion diminishes with the square of the number of participants.'' -- Adam Walinsky %% There are 10 kinds of people in the world: The dumb ones, the smart ones, and those who mistake binary for ternary. %% Join the dark side, we have cookies... %% DRM 'manages access' in the same way that jail 'manages freedom'. %% ``Det finns inget skäl att tvivla på att solen är bebodd.'' -- William Hersche, hovastronom 1800-talet. %% ``Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience.'' -- Dilbert %% Beware of the cheesy song lyrics... They tend to bite. %% Mine is an evil laugh. %% Work like you don't need the money. Dance like nobody's watching. Love like it's never going to hurt. %% ``There he goes. One of God's own prototypes... Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production... Too weird to live, and too rare to die...'' -- Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas %% ``There are no differences but differences of degree between degrees of difference and no difference.'' -- William James %% If you're too open-minded, your brains might fall out. %% Trying is the first step towards failure. %% We are Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated. %% The maze was so small that people got lost looking for it. -- Terry Pratchett: Men at arms. %% And for all you telepathics out there...... %% You know you've been hacking too long when you discover that you're balancing your checkbook in octal. %% 0464 Did you ever write a program that ran correctly the first time? 0465 ... Was it longer than 20 lines? 0466 ... 100 lines? 0467 ... Was it in assembly language? 0468 ... Did it work the second time? -- from THE HACKER TEST %% Pentium instruction of the day: PAUD: PAUse Dramatically %% Pentium instruction of the day: BAM: Branch And Melt %% Pentium instruction of the day: FLI: Flash Lights Impressively %% File not found: (A)bort (R)etry (L)ook behind sofa? %% ``A picture may say a thousand words. But a melody paints a thousand pictures.'' -- Unknown %% ``Do not try to think outside of the box. That's impossible. Instead, only realise the truth. There is no box.'' -- Unknown %% ``If you think C++ is not overly complicated, just what is a protected abstract virtual base class with a pure virtual private destructor, and when was the last time you needed one?'' -- Tom Cargil, C++ Journal, Fall 1990. %% Carpe noctem. %% If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation? %% Seraphim, n.: In medieval Christian theology, the Seraphim belong to the highest order of the hierarchy of angels. They are said to be the caretakers of God's throne, continuously singing "'Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh'" -- Wikipedia %% ``Change is inevitable -- except from a vending machine.'' -- Unknown %% Only a mediocre person is always at his best. %% ``Man is a dog's ideal of what God should be.'' -- Unknown %% A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? -- http://www.i-hate-computers.demon.co.uk/ %% if (packet_not_very_much_data_to_write()) channel_output_poll(); -- from the OpenSSH source code %% ``Asante Sana! Squash banana! We we nuga! Mi mi apana!'' -- Rafiki (The Lion King) %% ``One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code.'' -- Ken Thompson %% ``It is better to solve the right problem the wrong way than the wrong problem the right way.'' -- Dick Hamming %% ``Your wisdom is like vision from the corner of the eye. It seems to exist, but disappears when examined.'' -- Zen Master Greg %% ``A well-written program is its own heaven; a poorly-written program is its own hell.'' -- The Tao Of Programming %% There once was a master programmer who wrote unstructured programs. A novice programmer, seeking to imitate him, also began to write unstructured programs. When the novice asked the master to evaluate his progress, the master criticized him for writing unstructured programs, saying, "What is appropriate for the master is not appropriate for the novice. You must understand the Tao before transcending structure." -- The Tao Of Programming %% ``I don't know whether I am Turing dreaming that I am a machine, or a machine dreaming that I am Turing!'' -- The Tao Of Programming %% Qui peut lécher, peut mordre. %% ``Predicting is difficult, especially when it involves the future.'' -- Unknown %% Every task involves constraint, Solve the thing without complaint; There are magic links and chains Forged to loose our rigid brains. Structures, strictures, though they bind, Strangely liberate the mind. -- James Falen %% ``A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.'' -- Mitch Ratliffe %% The early bird gets the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese. %% Rhetorical questions are persuasive, aren't they? %% A camel is a horse designed by a committee. -- Unknown %% ``Testing is usually regarded as an important stage of the software development cycle. Testing will never be a substitute for reasoning. Testing may not be used as evidence of correctness for any but the most trivial of programs. Software engineers some times refer to "exhaustive" testing when in fact they mean "exhausting" testing. Tests are almost never exhaustive. Having lots of tests which give the right results may be reassuring but it can never be convincing. Rather than relying on testing we should be relying in reasoning. We should be relying on arguments which can convince the reader using logic.'' -- from the Gentle Introduction To ML %% ``Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear, but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT. I'm hoping that as IT folks become more seasoned and less impressed by superficial convenience at the expense of real freedom, they will yearn for the kind of freedom and responsibility UNIX allows. When they do, UNIX will be there to fill the need.'' -- Thomas Scoville %% ``I will admit NT made my life easier in some respects. I found myself doing less remembering (names of utilities, command arguments, syntax) and more recognizing (solution components associated with check boxes, radio buttons, and pull-downs). I spent much less time typing. Certainly my right hand spent much more time herding the mouse around the desktop. But after a few months I started to get a tired, desolate feeling, akin to the fatigue I feel after too much channel surfing or videogaming: too much time spent reacting, not enough spent in active analysis and expression. In short, image-culture burnout.'' -- Thomas Scoville %% Den som tager spøg for spøg og alvor kun alvorligt Han har faktisk fattet begge dele lige dÃ¥rligt! -- Piet Hein %% ``The hardest thing in life is to learn how to lose. Winning and making massive profits is easy, but learning what matters is more important.'' -- Alf Poier %% ``By making music, we inspire... if we made perfect music, we could not inspire, just overwhelm. By striving, we create, and thus we achieve.'' -- Carolina Casaril %% ``Technology is a word for something that doesn't work yet'' -- Douglas Adams %% ``Elle aime bien ça -- les stratagemes.'' -- Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain %% ``It is... pink!'' -- Guybrush Threepwood %% The best weapon against logic is ignorance. %% A person who does not want to be struck by the enemy's arrows will have no divine protection. For a man who does not wish to be hit by the arrows of a common soldier, but rather those of a warrior of fame, there will be the protection for which he asked. -- The Hagakure %% economist, n.: Someone who's good with figures, but doesn't have enough personality to become an accountant. %% When everything's coming your way, you're in the wrong lane. %% The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only): Don't do it yet. -- Michael Jackson %% My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right. %% ``What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?'' -- Bertolt Brecht %% Hit any user to continue. %% I don't have a solution but I admire the problem. %% Ever stop to think, and forget to start again? %% There's no future in time travel. %% Going the speed of light is bad for your age. %% () Join the ASCII ribbon campaign against HTML /\ e-mail and Microsoft attachments. %% Here's the truth: People, even regular people, are never just any one person with one set of attributes. It's not that simple. We're all at the mercy of the limbic system, clouds of electricity drifting through the brain. Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions, and then again within those twenty-four hours. It's a daily pantomime, one man yielding control to the next: a backstage crowded with old hacks clamoring for their turn in the spotlight. Every week, every day. The angry man hands the baton over to the sulking man, and in turn to the sex addict, the introvert, the conversationalist. Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots. -- from "Memento Mori" by Jonathan Nolan %% ``Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?'' -- Douglas Adams %% ``The biblical account of Noah's Ark and the Flood is perhaps the most implausible story for fundamentalists to defend. Where, for example, while loading his ark, did Noah find penguins and polar bears in Palestine?'' -- Judith Hayes %% ``How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.'' -- Abraham Lincoln %% ``Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.'' -- Henry Spencer, University of Toronto Unix hack %% ``Editing is a rewording activity.'' -- Alan J. Perlis %% Don't have good ideas if you aren't willing to be responsible for them. -- Alan J. Perlis %% ``When someone says 'I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done', give him a lollipop.'' -- Alan J. Perlis %% ``It is the user who should parameterize procedures, not their creators.'' -- Alan J. Perlis %% ``The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.'' -- Alan J. Perlis %% You walk through the park 'til the clouds seem to darken the sky And you wish you could soften your mind But you feel like they've locked you in time And you think you'll be perfectly fine once you get to the water -- Transatlantic, "All Of the Above" %% ``You have the right to free speech as long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it.'' -- Unknown %% ``Even more amazing was the realization that God has Internet access. I wonder if He has a full newsfeed?'' -- Matt Welsh %% ``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.'' -- Marus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corporation %% ``A right is not what someones gives you, it's what no one can take from you.'' -- Ramsey Clark %% ``In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind.'' -- E. W. Dijkstra in his Turing Award lecture. %% ``The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.'' -- E. W. Dijkstra %% ``Software is a gas. It will expand to fill whatever container it is placed in.'' -- R. Martell, 1999 %% How can I make that Other, no longer part of me, who of his own accord will do what I alone desire? What a predicament for a god, a grievous disgrace! With disgust I find only myself, every time, in everything I create. The Other man for whom I long, that Other I can never find: for the Free man has to create himself; I can only create subjects to myself. -- Wotan (Odin) discovers the crux of A.I. programming. Richard Wagner (1813-1883), "Die Walküre". %% ``Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.'' -- E. W. Dijkstra %% ``Don't treat fictional people as if they were human beings. It only encourages them.'' -- Karl Ove Hufthammer %% ``When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.'' -- Corinthians 13:11 %% Living is a thing you do now or never -- which do you? -- Piet Hein %% You'll probably find that it suits your book to be a bit cleverer than you look. Observe that the easiest method by far is to look a bit stupider than you are. -- Piet Hein %% Whenever you're called on to make up your mind, and you're hampered by not having any, the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find, is simply by spinning a penny. No -- not so that chance shall decide the affair while you're passively standing there moping; but the moment the penny is up in the air, you suddenly know what you're hoping. -- Piet Hein %% If you knew what you will know when your candle has burnt low, it would greatly ease your plight while your candle still burns bright. -- Piet Hein %% A bit beyond perception's reach I sometimes believe I see that Life is two locked boxes, each containing the other's key. -- Piet Hein %% ``What do you mean that we exist outside the box? Fuck the Box!'' -- sig of Jaymz Julian (alih@artificial-stupidity.net) %% ``Life begins when you can spend your spare time programming instead of watching television.'' -- Cal Keegan %% ``I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either.'' -- Jack Benny %% ``A word of warning about matrices -- each column must have the same number of elements in it. The world will end if you get this wrong.'' -- eqn user manual %% "I meant," said Iplsore bitterly, "what is there in this world that makes living worthwhile?" Death thought about it. "CATS," he said eventually, "CATS ARE NICE." -- Terry Pratchett, Sourcery %% WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. DELETE IS BACKSPACE. %% At age 4 success is . . . not peeing in your pants. At age 12 success is . . . having friends. At age 16 success is . . . having a drivers license. At age 20 success is . . . having sex. At age 35 success is . . .having money. At age 50 success is . . . having money. At age 60 success is . . . having sex. At age 70 success is . . . having a drivers license. At age 75 success is . . having friends. At age 80 success is . . . not peeing in your pants. %% The four stages of life: 1) You believe in Santa Claus. 2) You don't believe in Santa Claus. 3) You are Santa Claus. 4) You look like Santa Claus. %% Wisdom comes with age, but sometimes age comes alone. %% It's frustrating when you know all the answers, but nobody bothers to ask you the questions. %% You're getting old when you get the same sensation from a rocking chair that you once got from a roller coaster. %% Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground. %% Beware the chickens, for in their silence, they plot... %% Eagles may soar, but weasels are seldom sucked into jet engines. %% ``Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.'' -- Gregory S. Sutter %% ``Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.'' -- Voltaire %% ``The UNIX system has a command, nice, which allows a user to voluntarily reduce the priority of his process, in order to be nice to other users. Nobody ever uses it'' -- A. S. Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems %% ``Computer games don't affect kids... I mean, if Pacman affected us as kids, we'd all run around in a darkened room munching pills and listening to repetitive music.'' -- Unknown %% ``So welcome to the Kali Yuga of the Pandaemonaeon wherein nothing is true and everything is permissible. For in these post-absolutist days it is better to build upon the shifting sands than the rock which will confound you on the day it shatters. Philosophers have become no more than the keepers of useful sarcasms, for the secret is out, that there is no secret of the universe.'' -- Anonymous, http://www.io.com/~shub/amc/faq05.html#magick %% ``Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world'' -- Agent Smith %% ``Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.'' -- E. W. Dijkstra %% Rincewind squinted up at the notice. "Of course I can read it", he said. "I just don't happen to believe it." "Multiple exclamation marks", he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind." -- Terry Pratchett, "Eric" %% ``Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.'' -- President Jimmy Carter, Message to Congress, August 2, 1977 %% ``Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.'' -- Socrates, 470BC - 399BC %% ``I did have several acquaintances who died slumped over keyboards at least two of them had heart attacks or some such, but none of them were Amiga users. I don't know of anyone who was an Amiga user who died slumped over their Amiga.'' -- Paula Lieberman %% Frasier and Niles cross to the table where quotations books are laid across the table along with Frasier's speech. Niles: I see your "Bartletts" is out. You're not pulling any punches! Frasier: Hardly. I go in swinging with Le Roché Va Coe; "If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others". Niles: Ouch! Frasier: And when I've knocked them realing, I go in with a jab of Dorothy Parker; "Wit has truth in it, wise-cracking is merely calous thenix with words". Niles: Pow! Frasier: And when they're bloody and against the ropes, I go in with the kill; Twain! Wilde! Twain! Twain! Menkan! Niles: It's not a fight, it's an execution! %% Spam was, Spam is and Spam shall be. After summer is winter, and after winter, summer. It ruled once where Man rules now; where Man rules now, it shall rule again. As a foulness shall ye know it. Spam! %% ``I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'' -- Francois Voltaire %% ``Screw everybody but ourselves. Screw each other once we get bored. They are turning the Internet, something created with taxpayer funds, from a distributed, user-driven technology, into another television channel. Why? Because TV they understand: It sells you stuff every 5 1/2 minutes, like clockwork. They could never get the Internet to do that, in its original permutation. All that messy Usenet and IRC and ICQ and Napster and Gnutella gumming up the works, and giving the software away, to boot!. So...Control it, get congress to pass some laws you wrote. They don't mind "The Dark Dungeons of The Internet", as long as someone can sell you something in them dungeons, have the merchandising franchise.'' -- Skal Loret %% ``Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.'' -- Cyril Connolly %% ``The life of the coder is that of the hermit, except the hermit can't make shadebobs.'' -- Leviathan %% ``Forgive me if this is the booze talking, but what is a classy place like this doing around a transvestite like you?'' -- The Spark %% ``If Arsenic Fails, Try Algebra'' -- Unknown %% Yes, God had a deadline. So He wrote it all in Lisp. %% ``In trying to be both a tutorial and reference work, this book aims itself in style halfway between the two extremes of manual, Tedium and Gnawfinger's Elements of Batch Processing in COBOL-66, third edition, and Mr Blobby's Blobby Book of Computer Fun. (This makes some sections both leaden and patronising.)'' -- the Inform manual %% ``For the previous comment on a Users imagination, this is 2001, we're not supposed to have imaginations anymore, we're all locked in our houses & spied on every minute of our lives by the government. Never tell your best friend he has a Vivid Imagination, or you'll find him dead the next day.'' -- Blue, on rec.arts.int-fiction %% ``The PROPER way to handle HTML postings is to cancel the article, then hire a hitman to kill the poster, his wife and kids, and fuck his dog and smash his computer into little bits. Anything more is just extremism.'' -- attributed to Paul Tomblin on ASR %% I wish I had a shilling for every senseless killing I'd buy a government -- NOFX, "The Decline" %% The world will end in 5 minutes. Please log out. %% Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love. -- Turkish proverb %% ``Do not follow where the path may lead; go, instead, where there is no path, and leave a trail.'' -- Unknown %% While reading ordinary books to my son (who turns three next month), I frequently stop and ask him questions about the story... his favorite book of late is "101 Dalmations," and sometimes I ask him, "If you saw Cruella De Vil chasing after those puppies, what would you say?" One time, he said, "I would tell her, 'You don't hit puppies because that's mean." "And what would Cruella do?" "She would get back in her car and drive away." "And then what would the puppies do?" "They would get into a helicopter and fly home." "And what would you do?" (pause) "I wouldn't do anything because I'm not in the book." -- Dennis G. Jerz, on rec.arts.int-fiction %% ``If a picture is worth a thousand words, when it comes to a story, I'd rather have the thousand words.'' -- Dennis G. Jerz, on rec.arts.int-fiction %% ``Functionless art is merely tolerated vandalism, we are the vandals.'' -- Christopher Jenkins, head of Electronic Arts graphics devision. %% If God didn't want us to eat cows, he wouldn't have made them out of meat. %% ``There is only one computer program, and we're all just writing pieces of it.'' -- Thant Tessman (on comp.lang.scheme) %% ``You can only examine 10 levels of pushdown, because that's all the fingers you have to stick in the listing.'' -- Anonymous programmer - "TOPS-10 Crash Analysis Guide" %% ``At the time, it was the thing to come up with recursive acronyms -- tint = "Tint Is Not Teco," eine = "Eine Is Not Emacs," mint = "Mint Is Not Tex," and, of course, much later, gnu. I was getting *really* tired of this one-note joke, so I suggested we rename U to be "line," which stood for "Line Is Not Recursive." Even better, we could then say things like "I don't use emacs; I prefer the line editor." Which would have been fun. But we decided that, itself, was kind of a one-note joke that wouldn't wear well. So we settled on "lime," which has the advantage of being a real word, and stood for "Lime Is Mostly Recursive." But I digress.'' -- Olin Shivers %% I'm your only friend I'm not your only friend but I'm a little glowing friend but really I'm not actually your friend but I am... %% A hacker does for love what others wouldn't do for money. %% Once he was strong and filled with visions With life ahead he set his aims Then things went wrong... Now his ambitions have turned to smiles Conserved in frames -- Pain Of Salvation, "Entropia" %% The Wright Brothers first flight at Kitty Hawk was lower and shorter than the height and length of a Boeing 747. %% Punk pretty soon becomes criminal. Jailed, criminal becomes, soon, pretty punk. -- Jean Genet %% The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. -- Shakespeare %% If god can be god, why couldn't I? %% ``She's input herself into the game; we have to download her.'' -- Agent Scully %% And Semper Cuni Linctus, the very night that he reamed his subaltern for taking native superstitions seriously, passed an olive garden and saw the Seventeen ... and with them was the Eighteenth, the one they had crucified the Friday before. "Magna Mater", he swore, creeping closer, "am I losing my mind?" The Eighteenth, whatshisname, the preacher, had set up a wheel and was distributing cards to them. Now, he turned the wheel and called out the number at which it stopped. The centurion watched, in growing amazement, as the process was repeated several times, and the cards were marked each time the wheel stopped. Finally, the big one, Simon, shouted "Bingo!" The scion of the noble Linctus family turned and fled ... Behind him, the luminous figure said, "Do this in commemoration of me." "I thought we were supposed to do the bread and wine bit in commemmoration of you?" Simon objected. "Do both", the ghostly one said. "The bread and wine is too symbolic and arcane for some folks. This one is what will bring in the mob. You see, fellows, if you want to bring the Movement to the people, you have to start from where the people are at." -- "Illuminatus!" by R. Shea / R. A. Wilson %% It is getting dark again Dusk shuffle across the fields The evening trees moan as if they knew At night I always dream of you wwwhhhHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAARRRRRRRRHHHHHHHhhhhhhhh -- Opeth, "Black Rose Immortal" %% ``The Organizer is an organizer. If you want that sort of thing, you may want to get it.'' -- Dan Englender, trying to help a newbie %% Trust in Allah, but tie your camel. -- Arabian proverb %% "But it can't be", Joe Malik says, half weeping. "It can't be that crazy. Buildings wouldn't stand. Planes wouldn't fly. Dams would collapse. Engineering colleges would be lunatic asylums." "They aren't already?" Simon asks. -- "Illuminatus!" by R. Shea / R. A. Wilson %% ``What concerns me even more is this: under Windows I created a new spreadsheet, inserted an image (http://blahblah), saved it and exited, then ran it through strings, and saw some data from an email I sent a while ago. WTF???'' -- Kurt Seifried %% ``All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power.'' -- Ashleigh Brilliant %% The problem with paradigms is that shift happens. %% ``I'm much more interested in the fiction side of [interactive fiction] than the gaming side; I've always been rather wretched when it comes to figuring out puzzles, which is why I enjoyed A MIND FOREVER VOYAGING so: the rewards came not from figuring out to look under the rug and open the trap door to find the piece of coal to feed to the furnace in the basement so that 150 moves later the ice will melt in four turns instead of five and dilute the poison in the cup you're forced to drink, but rather from wandering around and looking at things.'' -- Adam Cadre %% checking for mass_quantities_of_bass_ale in -lFridge... no checking for mass_quantities_of_any_ale in -lFridge... no Warning: No ales were found in your refrigerator. We highly suggest that you rectify this situation immediately. -- configure script of Enlightenment %% witlag, n.: the delay between delivery and comprehension of a joke. %% Piracy is a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark. -- .sig of Solignac Julien %% ``Windows 2000: A local user may create a customized folder, and if the the Administrator opens it as a web page (which is default) then the administrator account is compromised. It is amazing that when the Administrator opens the folder a security warning '...may be unsafe... Do you want to allow it to be initialized and accessed by scripts?' with 'Yes/No' buttons. Whatever button you choose, the content is executed. I find this funny.'' -- Georgi Guninski %% ``Darkness reigns at the foot of the lighthouse.'' -- Japanese proverb %% Atheism is a non-prophet organization. %% Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7th of your life. %% Illiterate? Write for free help! %% An optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is sure of it! %% X Windows: A terminal disease. %% VI VI VI: The editor of the beast. %% Intel: where Quality is job number 0.9998782345! %% Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down. %% ``Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.'' -- Philip Greenspun %% /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ %% ``If you're afraid of loneliness, do not marry.'' -- Anton Chekhov %% Philosophical error: Demonstrate the existence of a key to continue. %% ``There's a thin person inside every fat person -- I ate mine...'' -- Graffiti %% Please let me know if you did not receive this message. %% I can resist everything except temptation. %% Don't be sexist. Chicks hate it. %% health, n.: The slowest possible way of dying. %% ACRONYM: Abbreviated Coded Rendition Of Name Yielding Meaning %% Eat right, exercise, die anyway. %% ``Everyone has the right to freedom of expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without intereference, and to seek, recieve and impart information and ideas, through any media, regardless of frontiers.'' -- Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights %% ``Life is about the freedom of choice and the ability to express one's self without having to restrict yourself because you made a comment about a product.'' -- Kirk Kimmel %% ``The great question... which I have not been able to answer... is, "What does woman want?"'' -- Sigmund Freud %% :D1ck! :what is yure d? /dev/hda2? :D1ck! :what is yure d? /dev/dba1 :D1ck! :? :J4n3! :.Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on :J4n3! :./dev/hda8 1935132 878956 957780 48% / :J4n3! :./dev/hda7 23302 2650 19449 12% /boot :J4n3! :./dev/hda1 2064032 1230496 833536 60% /mnt :D1ck! :oki :D1ck! :mkdir /win; mount -t vfat /dev/hda2 /win :D1ck! :wait, what is /dev/hda7 :D1ck! :? :J4n3! :linux swap partition :D1ck! :ok -- Actual IRC l33t script kiddie logs, http://www.securityfocus.com/focus/ids/articles/kye/motives.html %% :J4n3! :oye tell me how do i mount my drive d ? :D1ck! :d: :D1ck! :? :J4n3! :hmmm let me check :D1ck! :mount /mnt/cdrom :J4n3! :yaar drive d :D1ck! :mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy :J4n3! :no no :D1ck! :mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/win :J4n3! :for mounting drive c i write mount -t msdos /dev/hda1 /mnt :D1ck! :? :D1ck! :i write :D1ck! :mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /heh -- Actual IRC l33t script kiddie logs, http://www.securityfocus.com/focus/ids/articles/kye/motives.html %% :Sp07 :what is lahore ? :D1ck :lahore==city :D1ck :Sp07 give me a good quote :Sp07 :I thought it was the whore in french :Sp07 :ill go get a quote fo you :D1ck :heh :D1ck :ok :Sp07 :I dont know any in my ehad :Sp07 :hea :Sp07 :d :Sp07 :Silence is gold, if nothing better you hold. :Sp07 :tahts gay :Sp07 :I heard a quote before :Sp07 :goes something like "If you want peace, you must prepare for war" :Sp07 :I herad it in a simpsons episode -- Actual IRC l33t script kiddie logs, http://www.securityfocus.com/focus/ids/articles/kye/motives.html %% :D1ck :i want some one with good writing skillz :D1ck :to write About, FAQ :D1ck :etc [...] :D1ck :K1dd13 came into existance almost a year ago. It was born out of hate and contempt for violence, atrocities and human rights violations against Muslims, specially the affectees in Kashmir. It was precipitated to bring the attention of world leaders and :D1ck :organizations to the issue in cyberspace which is today the leading source of communication. :D1ck :is that fair enuff? :Sp07 :eyah I guess :Sp07 :I thought it was like a hacking group -- Actual IRC l33t script kiddie logs, http://www.securityfocus.com/focus/ids/articles/kye/motives.html %% I hate reading Victor Hugo, said Les miserably. %% ``But as an interface on a computer when I want to get some work done, this animated stuff is like a chocolate coating on the handle of a screwdriver.'' -- Don Cox %% When all you have is an axe, every problem looks like hours of enjoyment. %% ``Guy sits at his computer and boots it. [...] while the computer is booting he looks at the monitor and thinks. The guy wispers 'damm, I forgot were I wanted to go today'; he closes his computer and goes to bed.'' -- Anonymous @ Slashdot %% ``There can be 13 year old programmers but not 13 year old lawyers.'' -- Amstrad 6128 manual %% # human firmware exploit # Word will insert into your optic buffer # without bounds checking "BLAHFOOM" -- Dave Booth %% ``Ordinary decent people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary decent people in this country are fed up with being sick and tired. I am certainly not, and I'm sick and tired of being told that I am.'' -- Monty Python %% The meek shall inherit the earth, if that's OK with you? %% ``Where does revenge end, and justice begin?'' -- Sheridan %% The best things in life aren't things. %% The sooner you fall behind, the more time you will have to catch up. %% Life is like an analogy. %% Dawn crept silently across the yard... searching for her car keys. %% ``We've combed the parsing subroutine. Yes, Sir, twice.'' -- Tech team trying to figure out a way to revive a recently killed artificial intelligence in an X Files episode. %% ``Adopted kids are such a pain -- you have to teach them how to look like you.'' -- Gilda Radner %% Latest figures show the death rate remaining steady at one per person. %% ``A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.'' -- Unknown %% 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321 %% The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and doesn't stop until you get to work. %% "Then again--'BEFORE SHE HAD THIS FIT--' you never had fits, my dear, I think?" he said to the Queen. "Never!" said the Queen furiously, throwing an inkstand at the Lizard as she spoke. (The unfortunate little Bill had left off writing on his slate with one finger, as he found it made no mark; but he now hastily began again, using the ink, that was trickling down his face, as long as it lasted.) "Then the words don't FIT you," said the King, looking round the court with a smile. There was a dead silence. -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" %% "Read them", said the King. The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?" he asked. "Begin at the beginning", the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop." -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" %% `Are they in the prisoner's handwriting?' asked another of they jurymen. `No, they're not,' said the White Rabbit, `and that's the queerest thing about it.' (The jury all looked puzzled.) `He must have imitated somebody else's hand,' said the King. (The jury all brightened up again.) -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" %% The first witness was the Hatter. He came in with a teacup in one hand and a piece of bread-and-butter in the other. `I beg pardon, your Majesty,' he began, `for bringing these in: but I hadn't quite finished my tea when I was sent for.' `You ought to have finished,' said the King. `When did you begin?' The Hatter looked at the March Hare, who had followed him into the court, arm-in-arm with the Dormouse. `Fourteenth of March, I think it was,' he said. `Fifteenth,' said the March Hare. `Sixteenth,' added the Dormouse. `Write that down,' the King said to the jury, and the jury eagerly wrote down all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer to shillings and pence. -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" %% One of the jurors had a pencil that squeaked. This of course, Alice could not stand, and she went round the court and got behind him, and very soon found an opportunity of taking it away. She did it so quickly that the poor little juror (it was Bill, the Lizard) could not make out at all what had become of it; so, after hunting all about for it, he was obliged to write with one finger for the rest of the day; and this was of very little use, as it left no mark on the slate. -- Lewis Carroll, "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" %% All generalizations are false. %% ``The rule which forbids ending a sentence with a preposition is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put.'' -- Winston Churchill %% Time is a great teacher. Unfortunately it kills all of its pupils. %% ``Why does bottled water have an expiration date?'' -- Trent %% ``Perhaps tech-hacking -- the mischievous manipulation of technology -- goes back even further. One of the old favourites of US campus life was to rewire the control panels of elevators in high-rise buildings, so that a request for the third floor resulted in the occupants being whizzed to the twenty-third.'' -- Hugo Cornwall %% ``A cashless world would make everything available, but our greed would thereby exhaust everything'' -- Anonymous %% An informal survey conducted on about a dozen Internet sites (educational, military, and commercial, with over 200 hosts and 40000 accounts) revealed that [...] it was not uncommon to have well over one hundred entries in an account's .rhosts file, and on a few occasions, the number was over five hundred! (This is not a record one should be proud of owning.) [...] Although it was very difficult to verify how many of the entries were valid, with [...] hostnames such as "Makefile", "Message-Id:", and "^Cs^A^C^M^Ci^C^MpNu^L^Z^O" -- from the text file "Improving the Security of Your Site by Breaking Into it" %% ``My fingers are corssde.'' -- Gary Cunningham-Lee %% ``I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man'' %% Your mistakes are not behind you until you face them. %% #exclude %% ``The only difference between theory and practice is that in theory there isn't any.'' %% ``Talking about music is like fishing about architecture.'' -- Frank Zappa %% ``I use a $4 word, therefore I am.'' -- John Parmet %% Procrastinators UNITE... tomorrow. %% T-Shirt saying: Sorry but my karma just ran over your dogma. %% If I had something funny to say, I'd say it here. %% If I want your opinion, I'll read your entrails. %% ``Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.'' -- Will Rogers %% Nobody needs to learn compassion, only to unlearn avoiding it. %% ``These days, you can make a standard two basic ways: be Microsoft and release something totally incompatible with existing standards that does the same thing, or give it away.'' -- Dave Haynie %% ``I put my faith in God, and my trust in you. Now there's nothing more fucked up I could do.'' -- Nine Inch Nails (Wish) %% ``Alcohol is the cause of, and solution to, all of our problems.'' -- from The Simpsons %% She sells C shells. %% Talk is cheap because supply exceeds demand. %% ``It takes two to lie: One to lie and one to listen.'' -- Homer Simpson %% If you try and don't succeed, cheat. Repeat until caught. Then lie. %% ``Play it three more times and call it jazz.'' -- Mingus, on "wrong notes". %% ``Talking about love is like dancing about architecture.'' -- Music critic %% Thoughts while Eating at McDonald's "...if people were actually shaped like those little "throw litter away" people-figures with the pointy limbs that appear on the boxes the burgers come in, they'd fall into gratings all the time and get stuck. But getting out of jail would be really easy." -- Kevin Madden %% Now you've got your voice Your own speech Don't wait 'till Someone else agrees -- Rafael Bittencourt, Angra %% ``In an infinite universe, anything is possible.'' -- Ford Prefect %% ``Fate lies on the other side. But fate lied before...'' -- GAS %% ``If, at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.'' -- Albert Einstien %% ``All options are optional.'' -- Documentation for the GNU Assembler %% ``Never trust a spiritual leader who can't dance.'' -- Mr Miyagi %% Sometimes, when I would read a very good book, I would stop and thank my teacher. At least, I used to, until she got an unlisted number. %% ``I bequeath my entire estate to my wife on condition that she marries again. I want to be sure that there will be at least one man who will regret my death.'' -- Heinrich Heine %% ``When in Paris, I always eat at the Eiffel Tower restaurant because it's the only place I can avoid seeing the damn thing.'' -- William Morris %% ``Core files are the dog shit of UNIX.'' -- Jason Lindquist %% ``I've found that spaghetti sauce simmers best when you play opera at it.'' -- Dave Morgan %% ``The IO's a bitch.'' -- A.C. Patel on neurological computing. %% ``It's everything about 0's and 1's... or much ado about nothing and its complement.'' -- Prof. Loui of Boolean Algebra %% ``Nothing sucks like a Sun.'' -- Joe Gross, commenting on ux4 rebooting. %% ``F is for Fun (and Fortran)'' -- Jeremy Leboy, commenting on CS110F %% ``We puke on the shoes of traditional design.'' -- Dave Morgan, commenting on the "Let's put a FPGA in there and worry about what it does later" philosophy of board layout. %% ``I think that's illegal in Illinois.'' -- Ben Gross, after listening to Dan Pape read off names of Thai dishes. %% ``Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake: he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.'' -- from "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand %% "Before they get out of that room, I want to run them through every emotion in the book." "Oh. Well, which emotion are they being put through now?" "Boredom. Which is going to take a while." -- from "Interface" %% "We don't print around here. That's barbaric." "Ahr. If it can't be faxed, it's crap!" -- B. Swetland and D. Wellman %% ``The moral of the story is there's no PEZ today, but you can still learn X.'' -- Alan Braverman at a SigSoft Meeting %% ``At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.'' -- The Washington Post Magazine, 9 June, 1985 %% ``I can't say 'We're doing this because we're violating patents'... that's the *wrong* answer'' -- Chris Dunlap %% "Did you know there's a 'places of interest' section in the phone book?" "We're trying to find something to eat and he's surfing the phone book!" -- Mike Lee, Scott Powers %% Don't throw shit on an armed man. Don't stand next to someone throwing shit on an armed man. Don't shoot lasers at mirrors. -- from Niven's laws %% ``It would have helped if the Culture had used some sort of emblem or logo; but, pointlessly unhelpful and unrealistic to the last, the Culture refused to put its trust in symbols. It maintained that it was what it was and had no need for such outward representation. The Culture was every single human and machine in it, not one thing. Just as it could not imprison itself within laws, impoverish itself with money or misguide itself with leaders, so it would not misrepresent itself with signs.'' -- from "Consider Phlebas", by Iain M. Banks %% Martin Silenus made an expansive gesture. "I was baptized a Lutheran," he said. "A subset which no longer exists. I helped create Zen Gnosticism before any of your parents were born. I have been a Catholic, a revelationist, a neo-Marxist, an interface zealot, a Bound Shaker, a satanist, a bishop in the Church of Jake's Nada, and a dues-paying subscriber to the Assured Reincarnation Institute. Now, I am happy to say, I am a simple pagan." He smiled at everyone. "To a pagan," he concluded, "the Shrike is a most acceptable diety." -- from Dan Simmons' "Hyperion" %% > Duh. it's called the "interweb" now. Woman, you are so yesterday afternoon. It's the "intraweb", "hyperweb," and "supra-dupra-web" now. -- KC Smith and Paul Watts on uiuc.test %% ``IF FICUS DOESN'T QUIT COMPLAINING ABOUT C++, HE WILL BE FOREVER REVOKED THE LICENSE TO USE EDDIE, REGARDLESS OF THE HARDWARE PLATFORM, OPERATING SYSTEM OR JURISDICTION.'' -- Pavel Cisler, in the Eddie license %% ``If I have hacked deeper than them, it is because I stand in their trenches.'' -- Graham Nelson %% ``scsi_cd_write does nothing, barring a major device physics breakthough.'' -- Wisdom from BeOS's src/nukernel/drivers/scsi_cd.c %% FILO. Which Randy knows is short for Finux Loader, a program that allows you to choose which operating system you want to run. "Finux," Avi mumbles, answering Randy's unspoken question. Randy types "Finux" and hits the return key. "How many operating systems you have on this thing?" "Windows 95, for games and when I need to let some lamer borrow my computer temporarily," Avi says. "Windows NTY for office type stuff. BeOS for hacking, and screwing around with media. Finux for industrial-strength typesetting." "Which one do you want now?" "BeOS. Going to display some JPEGs. I assume there's an overhead projector in this place?" -- "Cryptonomicon", pg 184, by Neal Stephenson %% ``Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Indiana: It has been found that a circular area is to the square on a line equal to the quadrant of the circumference, as the area of an equilateral rectangle is to the square on one side.'' -- House Bill No. 246 of the Indiana State Legislature, 1897 %% ``Running after women never hurt anybody - it's catching them that does the damage.'' -- Jack Davies %% ``I've got all the money I'll ever need if I die by 4 O'clock this afternoon.'' -- Henny Youngman %% What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant? %% Cannibal's recipe book: How to Serve Your Fellow Man. %% -What is a cannibal's favorite game? -Swallow the leader. %% -- When do cannibals leave the table? -- When everyone's eaten. %% ``A life? Which BBS can I download that from?'' %% Everything about you so perfectly restrained, but everything inside you bites you. -- The Space..., Marillion %% ``Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.'' -- Oscar Wilde %% Psychiatrists say that 1 out of 4 people are mentally ill. Check three friends. If they're OK, you're it. %% There is no task so simple that you can't screw it up. %% Never pet a burning dog. %% ``Friends are people who'll help you move. REAL friends are people who'll help you move BODIES.'' %% This email will self-destruct upon deletion. %% ``Wow, I haven't taken a shower this whole millenium (we gotta kill this joke 'till it's really, really dead, cuz we don't get to use it again for another 1,000 years!)'' -- Fran Brennan %% ``I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.'' %% I like to go down to the dog pound and pretend that I've found my dog. Then I tell them to kill it anyway because I already gave away all of his stuff. Dog people sure don't have a sense of humor. %% ``Prayer has no place in school, just like facts have no place in religion.'' -- Superintendent Chalmers from "The Simpsons" %% ``We blew a fuse with a BALLAD?!?'' -- Scott Henderson %% ``Is Murder Meat?'' -- Phil Bos %% Sometimes silence is not golden, it's yellow. %% ``Basically, I have this theory that there are five kinds of truth. (This is Joe's Theory of the Five Truths.) There is the truth you tell to casual strangers and acquaintances. There is the truth you tell to your general circle of friends and family members. There is the truth you tell to only one or two people in your entire life. There is the truth you tell to yourself. And finally, there is the truth that you do not admit even to yourself. And it's that fifth truth that provides some of the most interesting drama.....'' -- J. Michael Straczynski (creator of Babylon 5) %% ``Marketing is the science of convincing us that What You Get Is What You Want.'' -- John Carter %% ``Every film should have a beginning, a middle, and an end -- not necessarily in that order.'' -- Jean-Luc Goddard %% ``My big hope is that Marc has a near-death experience and realizes to save his soul form the clutches of evil he needs to support HTML 3.0 with style sheets in the next release of Netscape 8)'' -- Nesta Stubbs %% ``Boycott whaling? Then what will my cat eat?'' %% ``Where time or intelligence are lacking, a goto may do the job.'' -- M. E. Hopkins, "A Case for the GOTO," 1972. %% Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this document are not necessarily those of the author. At least one of them belongs to Oscar Wilde, though he allows the author to borrow it from time to time. Others may belong to the small hairy man who lives in the mouldy shoebox at the bottom of his garden, and who probably uses his vast technical knowledge and uncontrolled access to the author's telephone cable to tap into his Internet account and post all manner of weird things without his knowledge or consent, or at least that would explain a lot of things. -- .disclaimer of danielf@senet.com.au (Daniel Frankham) %% ``In keeping with my non-Aristotelian or relativist-Existentialist bias, I do not classify ideas as simply "true" or "false." I prefer to assign them probabilities, on a scale from 0 (the Aristotelian "false") to 10 (the Aristotelian "true"). A rating of 5 means that I am still sitting geometrically on the middle of the fence, above 5 means that I presently lean somewhat toward belief and below 5 means that today I lean somewhat toward finding no value in this gloss at all (for me). I admit cheerfully that I am such an advanced case of Aggravated Agnosticism that whenever I do move something into 0 or 10, I get nervous, wonder if I am becoming as simple-minded as the Pope or Dr. Carl Sagan and start looking for evidence to move that meme toward 1 or 9.'' -- Robert Anton Wilson, in the Introduction to his play "Wilhelm Reich in Hell" %% ``If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as "lines produced" but as "lines spent".'' -- Edsger Dijkstra %% ``They're not suicidal. They just think they can fly.'' -- Donna Lypchuk, on Cats that jump off balconies %% ``Minsky and I require every graduate student to take an oath at the grave of E.E. "Doc" Smith before he can receive a PhD in AI.'' -- John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305 %% ``I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.'' -- Chang-tzu %% ``... A socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.'' -- Pat Robertson on feminism %% ``[T]he lesson [comic books] taught children -- or this child, at any rate -- was perhaps the unintentionally radical truth that exceptionality was the greatest and most heroic of values; that those who were unlike the crowd were to be treasured the most lovingly; and that this exceptionality was a treasure so great that it had to be concealed, in ordinary life, beneath what the comic books called a 'secret identity'.'' -- Salman Rushdie %% one with nintendo halcyon symbiosis hand thinks for itself -- Damon Koronakos and Brian Roberts: HI-TECH HAIKUS %% the sand remembers once there was beach and sunshine but chip is warm too -- Damon Koronakos and Brian Roberts: HI-TECH HAIKUS %% I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder WHY I wonder why I wonder why I wonder! -- Richard P. Feynman %% ``Nature has neither kernel nor shell; she is everything at once.'' -- Goethe (Goethe advocated Lisp machines?!) %% ``Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.'' -- Unknown %% ``A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular.'' -- Adlai Stevenson %% Rumor has it that when they closed down the 7094 at MIT in 1973, they found a low-priority job that had been submitted in 1967 and had not yet been run. %% ``Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.'' -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982 %% ``The only difference between a madman and myself is that I am not mad.'' -- S. Dali %% ``You wake me up early in the morning to tell me I am right? Please wait until I am wrong.'' -- John von Neumann, on being phoned at 10 a.m. %% ``The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.'' -- Anatole France %% ``Majority: That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law.'' -- Unknown %% ``You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1.'' -- Ernest Rutherford %% ``The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.'' -- Tacitus, 56-120 A.D. %% ``There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.'' -- Mark Twain %% ``The world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.'' -- Sean O'Casey %% Q: If man evolved from the ape, how come there are still apes around? A: Some of them were given choices. -- from Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C." %% ``If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life.'' -- Thoreau's Law %% ``If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.'' -- John F. Kennedy %% ``There is nothing that somebody, somewhere, will not consider immoral.'' -- Jan.Six@uku.fi %% Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe? Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ITEM'S. Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when creating hand- lettered small-business signs is that you should put quotation marks around random words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S. -- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's" %% ``Oh wait. You are a self-admitted Communist; therefore, you *cannot* judge for yourself, but must obey 'the will of the people'. Must make it hard to order food in a restauraunt. 'Waiter, what are the masses having?''' -- Lizard (lizard@expressway.com) %% ``_I_ think we have not had visitors from other planets because they have tried to decode our character encoding, and concluded that it wouldn't be worth it.'' -- Erik Naggum %% ``We trained hard -- but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.'' -- Popularly attributed to Petronius Arbiter (210 B.C.), but probably of modern origin %% ``To say that 1 gram of plutonium could kill everyone on the planet is like saying one drop of sperm could impregnate all of the women in China.'' -- Tom Orth %% ``The first alteration I would suggest is to change the spelling of netiquette because it is just too difficult.'' -- Stephen Boursy, alt.culture.usenet %% ``In America, sex is an obsession; in the rest of the world, it is a fact.'' -- Marlene Dietrich %% ``As I grow older and older, And totter toward the tomb, I find that I care less and less Who goes to bed with whom.'' -- Dorothy Parker %% ``Businesses may come and go, but religion will last forever, for in no other endeavor does the consumer blame himself for product failure.'' -- Unknown %% ``No, I don't think smoking should be illegal. Smokers are already getting the death penalty!'' -- from Stev0's "rant of the week" on smoking %% Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. %% ``Putting smokers and non-smokers in the same room is like having a urinating and a non-urinating section in a swimming pool.'' -- Ross Parker %% ELECELLERATION: Pressing an elevator button a lot to speed it up. %% Fleishman: I guess in a way, we're all one big tribe. Ed: That's true. -- (Pause) -- But you can't hang out with five billion people. -- NX, episode "Our Tribe" %% ``For any twentieth-century American who'd been paying attention at all, the phrase 'criminal justice system' should have been warning enough.'' -- L. Neil Smith (W.W. Curringer, in "Pallas") %% ``We are a nation of laws, poorly written and randomly enforced.'' -- Frank Zappa %% ``I don't like your I-can-use-anything-as-an-adjective attitude.'' -- Larry Wall %% Contrary to popular belief, the world is not ASCII. -- from the xemacs 19.12 documentation on define-key %% ``The Wittenberg church door was Usenet for Luther's community.'' -- Nick Arnett %% ``Usenet is essentially Letters to the Editor without the editor. Editors don't appreciate this, for some reason.'' -- Larry Wall %% ``If you have been to Moscow during Soviet times, you will probably remember paying almost nothing to be ignored by a waiter in a restaurant. Now you pay a fortune to be ignored by ten waiters.'' -- Ken Thompson %% ``Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.'' -- Susan Ertz %% ``Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.'' -- "Creatures of Light and Darkness", Roger Zelazny (1937-14.6.1995) %% C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung. %% ``C++ is the only current language making COBOL look good.'' -- Bertrand Meyer %% The "abort()" function is now called "choice()." -- from the "Politically Correct UNIX System VI Release notes" %% When asked *why* he was dragging a lobster through the the Bois de Boulogne on a length of pink(?) ribbon, Nerval replied "it does not bark and it knows the secrets of the sea." The same goes for a good cat except that, I fancy, it knows everything. -- Jane Skinner %% VAXORCIST: Everything looks okay to me. SYSMGR: Maybe it's hibernating. VAXORCIST: Unlikely. It's probably trying to lure us into a false sense of security. SYSMGR: Sounds like VMS alright. (VAXORCIST gives him a dirty look) -- from "The Vaxorcist", (C) 1991 by Christopher Russell %% ``Someone once calculated that with all the addressing modes the longest instruction was 104 words.'' -- Peter da Silva, on the TRON architecture %% ``Read the OSI protocol specifications? I can't even *lift* them!'' -- henry@zoo.toronto.edu %% ``Every time i see the LaTeX message "Labels may have changed", i silently complete it with "... but not the fact that I am right".'' -- Unknown %% ``I've always thought of these die-hard libertarians as people who haven't yet figured out that the government is just another natural resource to be exploited.'' -- David Zink %% ``People are flexible enough to make any theory look good for a while.'' -- Jaron Lanier %% ``Architecture is Politics.'' -- Mitch Kapor %% In an essay about programming, Ellen Ullman tells a great anecdote about a programmer who was so socially inept that they could only communicate with him via email, even they all shared the same office. She also writes: "Pretty graphical interfaces are commonly called user-friendly. But they are not really your friends. Underlying every user-friendly interface is terrific contempt for the humans who will use it. ...to build a crash-proof system, the designer must be able to imagine--and disallow--the dumbest action possible. He or she has to think of every single stupid thing a human being could do. Gradually, over months and years, the designer's mind creates a construct of the user as an imbecile. This image is necessary. No crash-proof system can be built unless it is made for an idiot." %% Life starts at '030, fun starts at '040, impotence starts at '86 %% ``It is very common to give natural language words technical meanings.'' -- John McCarthy %% ``Paradise is exactly like where you are right now .... Only much, much better.'' -- Laurie Anderson %% ``What experience and history teach is this -- that people and government never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.'' -- Hegel %% ``I made my fortune the old fashioned way... I inherited it!'' -- Malcom Forbes %% ``If in the last few years you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead.'' -- Gelet Burgess %% ``HTML has followed nature's example... bright, sometimes flashing, colors are a sign of indigestiblility.'' -- Rob Hartill %% Actually, the *real* definition of millennium states that (for whatever reason) every other millennium is of 999 years, as opposed to 1000. You can go look it up, "Dictionary of the English Language" London Press, 1925. ... That seems to make everyone happy, the new millennium starts in 2000 and the lack of year 0 is accounted for. -- Someone called "Dan" on a mailing list, December 24, 1999. %% ``The last thing we want is a "cover-up." ...there's no reason to take out intelligent and purely speculative posts. Even if they're true.'' -- Chris Dornfeld, 4 November 1998 %% ``Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.'' -- Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton %% ``In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``On the other hand, you have different fingers.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I have an answering machine in my car for my cellular phone. It says "I'm home now. But leave a message and I'll call when I'm out."'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I once saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I once saw a sign at a gas station. It said 'help wanted'. There was another sign below it that said 'self service'. So I hired myself. Then I made myself the boss. I gave myself a raise. I paid myself. Then I quit.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``It doesn't matter what temperature the room is, it's always room temperature.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I put contact lenses in my dog's eyes. They had little pictures of cats on them. Then I took one out and he ran around in circles.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I watched the Indy 500, and I was thinking that if they left earlier they wouldn't have to go so fast.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I was trying to daydream, but my mind kept wandering.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I wrote a song, but I can't read music so I don't know what it is. Every once in a while I'll be listening to the radio and I say, 'I think I might have written that.''' -- Steven Wright %% ``I went to a general store. They wouldn't let me buy anything specific.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``When I turned two I was really anxious, because I'd doubled my age in a year. I thought, if this keeps up, by the time I'm six I'd be ninety.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I was in a job interview and I opened a book and started reading. Then I said to the guy, "Let me ask you a question. If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?" He said, "I don't know." I said, "I don't want your job."'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I xeroxed a mirror. Now I have an extra Xerox machine.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``In school, every period ends with a bell. Every sentence ends with a period. Every crime ends with a sentence.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``The sign said "eight items or less". So I changed my name to Les.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I got a chain letter by fax. It's very simple. You just fax a dollar bill to everybody on the list.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?'' -- Steven Wright %% ``You can't have everything. Where would you put it?'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I got pulled over by a cop, and he said, 'do you know the speed limit here is 55 miles per hour?'. So I said, 'oh, that's OK, I'm not going that far.''' -- Steven Wright %% ``Sponges grow in the ocean ... that *kills* me. I wonder how much deeper the oceans would be if that didn't happen.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``In my house there's this light switch that doesn't do anything. Every so often I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Germany. She said, 'Cut it out'.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I once made wine out of raisins so I wouldn't have to wait for it to age.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``I spilled spot remover on my dog... now he's gone.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``No, you *can't* call 911 now. I'm downloading my mail.'' %% If it's raining, a cute thing to tell a child is "God is crying." If they ask why, another cute thing to say is, "Probably something you did." %% ``Never check for an error condition you don't know how to handle.'' -- Anonymous (Henry Spencer?) %% ``(This feature enables rc to export functions using here documents into the environment; the author does not expect users to find this feature useful.)'' -- from the rc(1) man page %% ``Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from sarcasm.'' -- Erik Naggum %% ``Kernels should stay kernels.'' %% ``PATRIOTISM A great British writer once said that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying a friend he hoped he would have the decency to betray his country.'' -- The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan %% ``And with so many pages sprouting every day, there is a desperate striving for uniqueness, which has resulted in some of the stupidest uses of cutting edge technology ever seen.'' -- Ashley Dunn of the NY Times, writing about the World Wide Web. %% Oh, you're too kind. Cyberpunk is not merely a sewer; it is a fetid bog, fen, and mire, a compost of urSchleim and cadaverine -- a menace, in short, to the literary traveler, who might sink into its foul-smelling depths and suffocate in its horrifying slime. -- Tom Maddox (Meant as a joke, but still funny.) %% A Sept 13 1987 Boston Globe story indicated polls show almost half of Americans think the phrase 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need' comes from the US Constitution. -- Chomsky, "Necessary Illusions" %% ``WWW is the MS-DOS of hypertext systems...'' -- Erik Naggum %% ``The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.'' -- Richard W. Hamming, 1962 %% ``There is a difference between eating a varied diet and chowing down on a cup of lard and sugar once a day. Programmers know this instinctively: they balance their daily menu among the four major food groups: caffeine, sugar, grease, and salt.'' -- From John Walker's "The Hacker's Diet" ( http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html ) %% ``I generally regard flipping through 'popular' publications on technical subjects in the same category as consulting the faqs for various newsgroups or reading most annotated bibliographies. Or perhaps in the same vein as pornography; nobody (well, nobody worth mentioning, anyway) seriously thinks that that's the way things actually work, but some can take consolation in it when the real thing is in abscence or is inconvienient.'' -- SubG %% ``The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates [sic] can read and write.'' -- Alberto Moravia %% ``Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.'' -- George Bernard Shaw %% Q: I think my PC is broken. A: Really? How can you tell? -- sig. of Volker Herminghaus-Shirai %% ``Actually, Posix requires that leap seconds be ignored; see IEEE Std 1003.1b-1993 section 2.2.2.106 (page 22 lines 448-458). There is some excellent doublespeak attempting to justify this in the annexes; my favorite is "it is inappropriate to require that a time represented as seconds since the Epoch precisely represent the number of seconds between the referenced time and the Epoch" (section B.2.2.2 page 306 lines 620-622).'' -- Paul Eggert %% ``Everybody raise your hand who thinks Usenet would benefit from a month or two in padded room.'' -- Michael Handler %% ``You are caught in a maze of twisty little Sendmail rules, all obscure.'' -- "Sendmail: Theory and Practice", Avolio and Vixie %% ``The complex-type shall be a simple-type.'' -- ISO 10206:1991 (Extended Pascal) %% What garlic is to food, insanity is to art. %% ``I have to post. Buddha insists on a warm computer.'' -- Keith "Justified And Ancient" Cochran %% ``No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical.'' -- Neils Bohr %% ``If it can't be understood, it's not finished yet.'' -- Paul Herbig %% ``In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.'' -- Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi", 1874 in Darrell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954. %% "Tuez-les tous; Dieu reconnaîtra les siens." (More literally, this is "Kill them all; God will recognize his own.") A writer of the time records that it was said by Amalric Arnaud, during the siege of Béziers (1209 AD), addressing soldiers who asked him how to tell the difference between the heretics and the orthodox Catholics. %% I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total oblivion. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me and turn my inner eye to follow its path. When the fear is gone, only I will remain. -- The Litany Against Fear (Frank Herbert, -Dune-, 1965) I must not have fun. Fun is the time-killer. Fun is for inferiors, servants and the help. I will ignore fun. I will work through it. And when the fun is gone only I will remain -- I, and my will to win. Damn, I'm good. -- The Litany Against Fun (-Doon-, Harvard Lampoon) %% ``[...] nothing banned in Singapore can be all bad.'' -- Cosma R. Shalizi, on The Economist %% ``Today's solutions are tomorrow's problems.'' -- Bruce Sterling at the American Center for Design "Living Surfaces" Conference, San Francisco, October 1994 %% ``When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.'' -- Steve Haflich, in comp.lang.c++ %% ``No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese could not care less.'' -- Lazlo's axiom of Chinese relativity %% ``Words are cheap and vitriol flows like water down the crumbling, mossy mountainsides of prose. Megabytes of gibberish grind forth like glaciers from the keyboards of the thirty million guinea pigs participating in the largest clinical trial ever: the testing of a new reality completely devoid of common sense.'' -- Charlie Stross, commenting on the Usenet %% ``An assertion is Zen only when it is itself an act and does not refer to anything that is asserted in it.'' -- from Bruce Lee's book, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do %% ``In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed.'' -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays %% ``The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.'' -- Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism %% ``I remember hearing precisely analogous complaint from the Oral Traditionalists when the Book People were trying to get their toe in the door.'' -- Philomath %% ``Too much of a good thing is WONDERFUL.'' -- Mae West %% Question. Which country has the greatest number of English speakers? Answer. China. Fact. More people in the world can speak english than any other language. Problem. Nobody can understand most of them. -- Julian Bond %% ``Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.'' -- Charlotte Whitton %% ``How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.'' -- Ronald Reagan, Arlington, Virginia, September 25, 1987 %% ``'All you need is love'? Yeah? Try payin' the fuckin' rent with it.'' -- Keith Richards %% ``...in Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had the brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo-clock.'' -- Orson Wells to Joseph Cotton in the movie "the third man" %% ``Brilliance is typically the act of an individual, but incredible stupidity can usually be traced to an organization.'' -- Jon Bentley %% ``Football players, like prostitutes, are in the business of ruining their bodies for the pleasure of strangers.'' -- Merle Kessler %% ``Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.'' -- Ronald Reagan (?) %% Calvin: You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. Hobbs: What mood is that? Calvin: Last-minute panic. %% Life, n.: a sexually transmitted disease that is fatal. %% In closing, I'd like to repost my 3 axioms of Usenet. I originally posted these in 1987 and 1988. In my opinion as a semi-pro curmudgeon, I think they've aged well: *Axiom #1:* "The Usenet is not the real world. The Usenet usually does not even resemble the real world." *Corollary #1:* "Attempts to change the real world by altering the structure of the Usenet is an attempt to work sympathetic magic -- electronic voodoo." *Corollary #2:* "Arguing about the significance of newsgroup names and their relation to the way people really think is equivalent to arguing whether it is better to read tea leaves or chicken entrails to divine the future." *Axiom #2:* "Ability to type on a computer terminal is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense." *Corollary #3:* "An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards could produce something like Usenet." *Corollary #4:* "They could do a better job of it." *Axiom #3:* "Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) applies to Usenet." *Corollary #5:* "In an unmoderated newsgroup, no one can agree on what constitutes the 10%." *Corollary #6:* "Nothing guarantees that the 10% isn't crap, too." Which of course ties in to the recent (1992): "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." -- Gene Spafford %% ``If you evaluate C++, you still get C, but C gets bigger.'' -- Erik Naggum %% ``Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation.'' -- Johnny Hart %% ``Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time -- I think I've forgotten this before.'' -- Stephen Wright %% ``I am sick unto death of obscure english towns that exist seemingly for the sole accommodation of these so-called limerick writers -- and even sicker of their residents, all of whom suffer from physical deformities and spend their time dismembering relatives at fancy dress balls.'' -- Editor of the Limerick Times (Limerick, Ireland) %% When primitive humans first came along, they did not engage in business as we now think of it. They engaged in squatting around in caves naked. This went on for, I would say, roughly two or three million years, when all of a sudden a primitive person, named Oog, came up with an idea. "Why not," he said, "pile thousands of humongous stones on top of each other in the desert to form great big geometric shapes?" Well, everybody thought this was an absolutely terrific idea. It wasn't until several thousand years later that they realized they had been suckered into a classic "pyramid" scheme, and of course, by that time, Oog was in the Bahamas. -- Dave Barry on pyramid schemes %% ``I decided to leave and go to California, so I packed up my Salvador Dali print of two blindfolded dental hygienists trying to make a circle on an Etch-a-Sketch, and I headed for the highway and began hitching. Within three minutes I got picked up by one of those huge trailer trucks carrying 20 brand new cars. I climbed up the side of the cab and opened the door. The guy said, "I don't have much room up here, why don't you get into one of the cars out back." So I did. And he was really into picking people up because he picked up 19 more. We all had our own cars. Then he went 90 miles per hour and we all got speeding tickets.'' -- Steven Wright %% ``Let's talk about how to fill out your 1984 tax return. Here's an often overlooked accounting technique that can save you thousands of dollars: For several days before you put it in the mail, carry your tax return around under your armpit. No IRS agent is going to want to spend hours poring over a sweat-stained document. So even if you owe money, you can put in for an enormous refund and the agent will probably give it to you, just to avoid an audit. What does he care? It's not his money.'' -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes" %% ``... Now you're ready for the actual shopping. Your goal should be to get it over with as quickly as possible, because the longer you stay in the mall, the longer your children will have to listen to holiday songs on the mall public-address system, and many of these songs can damage children emotionally. For example: "Frosty the Snowman" is about a snowman who befriends some children, plays with them until they learn to love him, then melts. And "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is about a young reindeer who, because of a physical deformity, is treated as an outcast by the other reindeer. Then along comes good, old Santa. Does he ignore the deformity? Does he look past Rudolph's nose and respect Rudolph for the sensitive reindeer he is underneath? No. Santa asks Rudolph to guide his sleigh, as if Rudolph were nothing more than some kind of headlight with legs and a tail. So unless you want your children exposed to this kind of insensitivity, you should shop quickly.'' -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide" %% ``If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because, man, they're gone.'' -- Jack Handey %% ``If meat's bad for you, then how come it's food?'' -- Butt-head, on vegetarianism %% ``Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.'' -- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny" %% ``I can't decide whether to commit suicide or go bowling.'' -- Florence Henderson %% ``Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?'' -- Unknown %% I cannot overemphasize the importance of good grammar. What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: "Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America," or "Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II." -- Dave Barry, "An Utterly Absurd Look at Grammar" %% ``Why do so many men name their penises? Because they don't want 95% of their decisions made by a complete stranger!'' -- Simon LeBon, LoveLines, 14 Febuary 1992. %% ``Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.'' -- Mike Adams %% ``I was stinging under Raphael's (his professor of Philosophy) reproach that I was a lazy thinker and never criticized my thoughts, so I got busy and thought for five minutes. As a consequence, I have a thorough knowledge of the psychological foundations of the state and got an A in the quiz this morning.'' -- Philip Johnson, while studying at Harvard. %% ``Calm down. It's only ones and zeros.'' -- Unknown %% NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier, Guiseppe? Everything he says is wrong. GUISEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right. -- G. B. Shaw, "The Man of Destiny" %% ``I wait for my girlfriend to break up with me. When that happens, I have creativity for miles.'' -- Songwriter Buddy Mondlock, on how he keeps his creative juices flowing. %% ``Probably the question asked most often is: Do one-celled animals have orgasms? The answer is yes, they have orgasms almost constantly, which is why they don't mind living in pools of warm slime.'' -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know" %% ``That wasn't made as a reference to the fact that he talked too long.'' -- Peter Jennings, following the State of the Union Address. %% ``Well I can't go back to Nashville Tennessee, 'Cause that's a place I've never been.'' -- The Austin Lounge Lizards %% ``Ski that way really fast...if anything gets in your way, TURN!'' -- Better Off Dead %% ``Aye, 'tis not a man. 'Tis a remorseless eating machine!'' -- The Cap'n, referring to Homer Simpson %% Ink, n.: A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic, and water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote intellectual crime. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" %% ``Kids, don't try this at home!!! Go over to your neighbors house and practice!'' -- Jim Rose, of "Jim Rose's Circus" fame %% ``If you throw a New Year's Party, the worst thing that you can do would be to throw the kind of party where your guests wake up today, and call you to say they had a nice time. Now you'll be be expected to throw another party next year. What you should do is throw the kind of party where your guests wake up several days from now and call their lawyers to find out if they've been indicted for anything. You want your guests to be so anxious to avoid a recurrence of your party that they immediately start planning parties of their own, a year in advance, just to prevent you from having another one... If your party is successful, the police will knock on your door, unless your party is very successful in which case they will lob tear gas through your living room window. As host, your job is to make sure that they don't arrest anybody. Or if they're dead set on arresting someone, your job is to make sure it isn't you....'' -- Dave Barry %% To reduce risk of injury or death: 1. Do not read while bathing. 2. Do not place or store where book can fall or be pulled into tub, toilet or sink. 3. If book falls into water, stop reading immediately. Do not reach into water. -- From the manual for Layer Express v2 (an AutoCAD extension), page 88. %% Under penalty of law This page not to be removed Except by consumer -- From the manual for Layer Express v2 (an AutoCAD extension), page 70. %% ``This page unintentionally left blank.'' -- The manual for Layer Express v2 (an AutoCAD extension), page 44. %% Written on Page 12 (Blank page separating Ch. 1 & 2): To reduce the risk of shock, Do not remove the cover of this book. No serviceable components inside. -- warnings from the manual for Layer Express v2 (an AutoCAD extension) %% ``We will occasionally use this arrow notation unless there is danger of no confusion.'' -- Ronald Graham, "Rudiments of Ramsey Theory" %% ``I stopped believing in Santa Claus when my mother took me to see him and he asked for my autograph!'' -- Shirley Temple. %% ``Next year is going to be a very important day for us!'' -- Chicago Mayor Daley %% ``The notion that this is mostly about sex is nonsense. The vast majority of our customers have little or no interest in it.'' -- Steve Case, founder and chairman of AOL, Washington Post article 10/1/1996. %% ``In earlier times, they had no statistics, and so they had to fall back on lies.'' -- Stephen Leacock %% ``Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.'' -- Emo Phillips %% ``We have them just where they want us.'' -- J. T. Kirk %% Randomly heard at an english class: Q: Do you like Kippling? A: Err... well, to be honest, I have never Kippled. %% ``Independence Day? I haven't gotten to see it yet. Maybe when the lines get shorter... The plot seems simple enough, though: Aliens arrive from space and destroy Washington. But later they turn out to be hostile.'' -- Steve Jackson (of Steve Jackson Games) 7/6/96 %% ``My uncle just turned 75. He never married, and someone asked him if it was because he had never found the perfect woman. 'I found her,' he said. 'But she was looking for the perfect man.''' %% ``Let me assure you that to us here at First National, you're not just a number. You're two numbers, a dash, three more numbers, another dash and another number.'' -- James Estes %% ``Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... Now you tell me what you know.'' -- Groucho Marx, "Animal Crackers" %% ``There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.'' -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977 %% ``Folks are basically decent, conventional wisdom would say. Yet we read about the exceptions in the papers everyday.'' -- Neil Peart %% If you and your friend are being chased by a grizzly bear, don't worry about out-running the bear. Just worry about out-running your friend. %% If you can't beat your computer at chess... try kickboxing. %% ``Thank God I'm an atheist.'' -- Luis Bunel %% ``I'm not a vegetarian because I like animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.'' -- A. Whitney Brown %% The light at the end of the tunnel is coming from a sign saying "You are here." %% ``I want a GUI, but I want one that look like a multidimensional map, NOT a bunch of random pictograms that bear no contextual relationship whatsoever to one another..... in a well-ordered room, for example, the door is in an area which is -not- blocked for access, and the windows are on the walls, not on the floor, and pictures hang on the walls where there's light, not in corners in front of the sink with the water spraying all over them, and the refrigerator in in the kitchen, not in under the bathtub....'' -- Paula Lieberman %% ``I leave you as I found you -- only some time later.'' -- John Lennon %% ``I'm going into an unknown future, and where there's life there's hope.'' -- John Lennon, approx. 5 hours before he was killed %% ``I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now? Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.'' -- John Lennon %% ``Living is easy with your eyes closed...'' -- John Lennon %% ``If The Beatles or the 60's had a message, it was 'Learn to swim.' And once you've learned - swim!'' -- John Lennon %% ``If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.'' -- John Lennon %% ``Those in the cheaper seats clap. The rest of you rattle your jewelry.'' -- John Lennon, 1963 (Royal Variety Performance) %% ``Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans'' -- John Lennon (Beautiful Boy) %% What would it take to re-unite the Beatles? Three more bullets. (Yeah, this joke is obsolete.) %% What would you find if you dug up John Lennon? Four slugs and a dead Beatle. %% What Christmas message is conveyed by these letters? ABCDEFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ABCDEFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ (Answer: Noel, Noel (no l, no l)) %% What does Santa Claus do with his three gardens? (Answer: Hoe, hoe, hoe.) %% What's the difference between a one-winged angel and a two-winged angel? It's a matter of a pinion. %% Money is the root of all evil. Send $20 for more information. %% If life only had a scroll-back buffer with cut & paste. %% Lifting shadows off a Dream once broken She can turn a drop of water Into an ocean And she listens openly He pours his soul into the water reflecting the mystery She carries him away and the winds die slowly -- Dream Theater, "Lifting Shadows Off A Dream" %% Sin without deceivers A God with no believers I could sail by on the Winds of Silence and maybe they won't notice -- Dream Theater, "The Silent Man" %% ``Memory is necessary for all operations of reason.'' -- Blaise Pascal %% ``There were chat rooms, and filter software for obscenity -- it censored out "Matsushita" because of the last four of the last letter. It censorsed out "Chardonnay" because it contained "hardon". I know this because I was -quite- put out at having the offending posts containing the "offensive" language bitbucketed by the stupid censor software, which was easily defeated by using alternate or missing vowels or other letters, adding or removing a letter, etc., even while it censored out "Matsushita" and "Chardonnay."'' -- Paula Lieberman %% Don't be hesitant. Digital electronics can smell fear. %% ``Preserve ecology -- seal it in non biodegradable plastic.'' -- Bumper sticker %% ``The problem with being in the middle of the road is that you tend to get run over.'' -- Aneurin Bevan %% Sevareid's Rule: "The chief cause of problems is solutions." %% ``Those who can -- do. Those who cannot -- teach. Those who cannot teach become deans.'' -- Thomas L. Martin %% ``Harvard is a storehouse of knowledge because the freshmen bring so much in and the graduates take so little out.'' -- Charles W. Eliot %% I used to be an Atheist, until I found out I was God. %% You work so hard peddling up the hill that you hate to brake on the way down. %% A bird in the hand is worth what it will bring. %% Q. What sound does a space turkey make? A. hubble, hubble, hubble. %% Asked to write a composition entitled, "What I'm thankful for on Thanksgiving," little Timothy wrote, "I am thankfull that I'm not a turkey." %% Mother turkey to her disobedient children: If your father could see you now, he'd turn over in his gravy! %% Just because I have a short attention span doesn't mean I %% Company policy on shooting oneself in the foot. 1. Place foot in mouth. 2. Insert head into anus. 3. Rest gun muzzle in navel. 4. Pull trigger. %% Insanity is hereditary -- you get it from your kids. -- bumper sticker %% I intend to live for ever, or die in the attempt. %% - Why did the cube cross from the second to the third dimension? - The second dimension was too square. %% ``It is not your job to complete the work, But neither are you free to abstain from it.'' -- R. Tarfon, Pirkei Avot %% ``Hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.'' -- Hoffer %% /*pi, tagline teaser by Linus Akesson*/ #include main(){float x=0,y,a=0,r=100,d=2*r;for(;x "Woof" Jeez, it's really raining today. %% ``That's what I love about GUIs: They make simple tasks easier, and complex tasks impossible.'' -- John William Chambless %% ``Television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.'' -- Fred Friendly, former head of CBS News %% ``[analogy with cicero deleted: analogies are like instant coffee]'' -- Peter da Silva %% ``It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.'' -- Jackson, Andrew (1767-1845) %% ``Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?'' -- Harry Warner of Warner Brothers, 1925 %% ``Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.'' -- is often attributed to Freud, but noone can find it %% ``Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.'' -- Richard Chevenix Trench (1807-86) %% BUM: Say, mister, can you spare a dollar? CRACKERS: I can easily spare the sum you name, but it seems to me that most beggars would customarily suggest a more modest amount, such as a nickel. BUM: I guess they would, at that; but I am ambitious, and mean to rise in my chosen calling. -- Horatio Alligator, "Admiral Boniface's Parrot" (in "American Pie") %% ``It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.'' -- Alfred Adler %% ``It's not denial. I'm just very selective about what I accept as reality.'' -- Calvin ("Calvin and Hobbes") %% A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation." -- Stephen Crane %% ``Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.'' -- Steve Eley %% ``The Air Force is reacting to the EPA ban on CFC's by replacing them in the cooling systems of the intercontinental (ballistic) missiles with 2 to 10 nuclear warheads on board. If they are ever fired, it will be an environmentally friendly nuclear holocaust, not threatening the Ozone layer.'' -- Access to Energy, July 1993 %% ``Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.'' -- John von Neumann %% "90% of everything is crap" -- T. Sturgeon "111% of crap is everything" -- L. Wall %% ``Several recent languages have adopted an Intercal-like, asynchronous computed COME-FROM concept. Only they refer to it with funny terms like "exception handling".'' -- Hans Mulder %% Scotty: Captain, we din' can reference it! Kirk: Analysis, Mr. Spock? Spock: Captain, it doesn't appear in the symbol table. Kirk: Then it's of external origin? Spock: Affirmative. Kirk: Mr. Sulu, go to pass two. Sulu: Aye aye, sir, going to pass two. -- anonymous fortune %% ``It's not *you* that is the problem, it's all the other people on the net.'' -- Peter da Silva %% ``It seems to be impossible to parody PC. Any suggestion, no matter how outrageous, will be taken seriously by someone out there. I'm now convinced there must be people who use "vertically challenged" (short) and "metabolically challenged" (dead) with a straight face. Until people stop this madness, there's little hope of succeeding with sane proposals like avoiding "he" and "man" as gender-neutral terms.'' -- Keith Ivey Washington, DC [alt.usage.english, Date: 13 Aug 1994 14:59:08 MET] %% ``It had all the earmarks of a CIA operation; the bomb killed everybody in the room except the intended target.'' -- William F. Buckley %% haiku's inventor must have had seven fingers on his middle hand %% ``Real punks help little old ladies across the street because it shocks more people than if they spit on the sidewalk.'' -- Unknown %% Dilbert: "I created a computerized, interactive, multimedia training tool for the department." Boss: "Wonderful. Make some photocopies and route them around." %% ``There isn't a word in the English language that can't be verbed.'' -- attributed to Alexander Haig %% ``It's truly a shame that Knuth never really got into Lisp. His books would be _more_ readable, and TeX might actually have been a decent language.'' -- Henry Baker %% ``I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't the guts to bite people themselves.'' -- August Strindberg %% ``Chaos is but unperceived order.'' -- attributed to Fred Hoyle %% ``This sort of reasoning is the long-delayed revenge of people who could not go to Woodstock because they had too much trig homework.'' -- Stewart A. Baker, Chief Counsel for the NSA, on crypto anarchy, Wired, June 1994 %% ``A Meltdown? One of those annoying buzzwords. We prefer to think of it as an unrequested fission surplus.'' -- Montegue Burns (The Simpsons) %% Dykstra once pointed out the *real* problem with lisp: It's too tempting to fiddle interactively until you've made a bad design work in an ugly way, rather than use your brain. %% ``I don't know why everyone thinks that The Last Action Hero was such a flop. We were Number One in Zaire'' -- Arnold Schwarzenegger (on Letterman 7/20/94) %% ``Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.'' -- Larry Wall %% ``Perl IS a psychological study.'' -- Larry Wall %% ``Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.'' -- Phillip K. Dick, 1928-1982 %% ``Faith means not _wanting_ to know the truth.'' -- Nietzsche %% ``Faith is believing what you know ain't so.'' -- Mark Twain %% "In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?" I thought a moment and replied, "The word chess". -- Jorge Luis Borges %% ``Not so, just scared. Think of the poor lady who feared the metric system because she couldn't afford to have her gas tank removed from her car and replaced with one that holds liters instead of gallons.'' -- Kenneth S. Manning %% ``I am amazed at the things people try to connect with "if"s and "then"s.'' -- Ken Arromdee (email: arromdee@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu) %% ``If we took the bones out, it wouldn't be crunchy, would it?'' -- Monty Python %% zellner@stsci.edu wrote: : But my real fear is that the quality of reporting may be equally : bad in other domains, like politics! It does take a perverse form of optimism to have any faith in the news media when almost every time they cover something you _know_ about, they get it wrong. Maybe they're wrong that often covering subjects in which I'm not an expert? Naw, it just couldn't be. -- Grant Edwards %% Was it Ritchie or Thompson who said about X: "Sometimes, when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks"? %% ``I have enough money to last me the rest of my life, unless I buy something.'' -- Jackie Mason %% ``Indeed, 'brute force' solutions are often characteristic of advanced cultures, not primitive ones. The Romans and their predecessors spent a long time figuring out how to build arches... and virtually all our buildings today use post-and-lintel construction, precisely what the arch was devised to replace. We have better materials and more money, and given that, arches are usually not worth the extra complexity.'' -- Henry Spencer %% ``The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.'' -- Douglas Adams %% ``When in doubt, use brute force'' -- Ken Thompson %% ``Some people say that EMACS belongs in : Editor too big!'' -- Louis Larry %% ``How do we persuade new users that spreading fonts across the page like peanut butter across hot toast is not necessarily the route to typographic excellence?'' -- Peter Flynn %% "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of the pox!" "That, my Lord, depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress" -- John Wilkes to The Earl of Sandwich, Parliament, November 1763 %% ``I'll need daily status reports on why you're so behind'' -- Diblert's boss %% ``Buy a rifle, encrypt your data, and wait for the Revolution!'' -- .sig of Travis J.I. Corcoran (TJIC@icd.teradyne.com) %% ``It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.'' -- attributed to Arthur C. Clarke %% ``It's always easier to apologize than to ask permission.'' -- Grace Hopper %% ``Verbing weirds language.'' -- Calvin (from "Calvin and Hobbes") %% ``Many things do not happen as they ought. Most things do not happen at all. It is for the conscientious historian to correct these defects.'' -- Herodotus %% ``Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid, the second is pleasant and highly paid.'' -- Bertrand Russell %% ``Unix has been feverishly evolving for over 20 years, sort of like bacteria in a cesspool, only less attractive.'' -- Unix for Dummies %% ``obviously those people needed a union or something'' -- hugh@netcom.com, about the harkonnen's employees' "heart-plugs" in the DUNE movie. %% ``Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding he sings.'' -- Ed Gardner %% ``We don't have a patent on irony and satire; those tools are available for you to use in your own work.'' -- Guerrilla Girls (a New York City performance group) %% ``Ah, Benson, you are so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence!'' -- TimeBandits %% LOAD "vmunix",8,1 -- dack@este.darmstadt.gmd.de (Sven C. Dack) %% ``Everyone complains about their memory, but no one complains about their intelligence.'' -- La Rochefoucault %% ``The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this, "What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?" and my answer must at once be, "It is no use." There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. It's no use. So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.'' -- George Leigh Mallory, 1922 %% ``[another poster] cultivates an admirable elegance of expression that I'm sure will take him far on the Net. (To put it more precisely, his postings sound like my postings.)'' -- Bill Higgins, HIGGINS@FNAL.FNAL.GOV %% ``Not at all tricky. We do this sort of stuff every day before breakfast. Then I fly to work on my winged pig, Swilma.'' -- David Chase, answering some compiler- or OS-related question. %% ``Syntactic sugar leads to cancer of the semicolon.'' -- Alan Perlis %% ``For I do not believe that the stars are spread over a spherical surface at equal distances from one center; I suppose their distances from us to vary so much that some are 2 or 3 times as remote as others.'' -- Galileo %% ``The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.'' -- E. W. Dijkstra, 18th June 1975. %% ``I believe it was Heinlein who pointed out that science fiction is about things for which there is some scientific evidence, such as ghosts; while fantasy is about things for which there is no scientific evidence, such as faster than light travel.'' -- Dan Goodman dsg@maroon.tc.umn.edu %% ``Tiger gotta hunt. Bird gotta fly. Man gotta sit and wonder why, why, why. Tiger gotta sleep. Bird gotta land. Man gotta tell himself he understand.'' -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. %% Definitions of "AI": Military definition: Anything Invincible Marketing definition: Anything Improved Academic definition: Anything Impossible -- .sig of David Bofinger %% ``A sucker is born every minute.'' -- Phineas T. Barnum %% ``C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.'' -- Dennis M. Ritchie. %% ``B can be thought of as C without types; more accurately, it is BCPL squeezed into 8K bytes of memory and filtered through Thompson's brain.'' -- Dennis Ritchie %% There were in this country two very large monopolies. The larger of the two had the following record: the Vietnam War, Watergate, double- digit inflation, fuel and energy shortages, bankrupt airlines, and the 8-cent postcard. The second was responsible for such things as the transistor, the solar cell, lasers, synthetic crystals, high fidelity stereo recording, sound motion pictures, radio astronomy, negative feedback, magnetic tape, magnetic "bubbles", electronic switching systems, microwave radio and TV relay systems, information theory, the first electrical digital computer, and the first communications satellite. Guess which one got to tell the other how to run the telephone business? -- anonymous fortune %% ``The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.'' -- Bertrand Russell %% ``Atilla The Hun's Maxim: If you're going to rape, pillage and burn, be sure to do things in that order.'' -- P. J. Plauger, Programming On Purpose, p147 %% ``Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue.'' -- Winston Churchill %% ``An expert is a man who never makes small mistakes.'' -- Tom Phipps %% ``...all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.'' -- HPL, from "The Silver Key" %% ``Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.'' -- Lily Tomlin %% ``The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected '' -- UNIX Prg Man, 2nd ed, June 1972 %% Fowler contends that "a dozen sentences are spoilt by ill-advised avoidance of repetition for every one that is spoilt by ill-advised repetition." %% Reporter: Mr. Gandhi, what do you think about Western Civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea. %% ``Now you can install your new kernel and try it out.'' -- SunOS 4.1.3, config(8) %% ``You are, of course, correct, and I disagree completely.'' -- Michael F. Howard %% ``The only person who believes a new theory is the theorist who invented it, while the only person who questions the results of an experiment is the person who performed it.'' -- J. A. Carr %% ``To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.'' -- Cardinal Bellarmine 1615, during the trial of Galileo %% "...it doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are -- if it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." -- R.P. Feynman "It doesn't matter how beautiful your experiment is, it doesn't matter how carefully you collect your data -- if it is based upon a faulty understanding of what is being tested, it's most likely useless." -- L.D. Hosford :-) %% ``Software is like Entropy: it's hard to grasp, weighs nothing and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics, i.e. it always increases'' -- Norman Augustine %% ``He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Do not use procedures; they are expensive.'' -- from IBM's PL/I (F) documentation, circa 1966 %% Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. -- Macbeth, Act V %% ``There are few situations in life that cannot be resolved promptly, and to the satisfaction of all concerned, by either suicide, a bag of gold, or thrusting a despised antagonist over a precipice on a dark night.'' -- Ernest Bramah (Kai Lung stories) %% "Even the AI hated [my book]?" "The AI _loved_ it. That's when we knew for sure that _people_ were going to hate it." -- Dan Simmons, "Hyperion" %% ``Why can't life be menu driven or at least have an 'undo' feature?'' -- David M. DeFelice - NASA Lewis Research Center - Community Relations Office %% ``A "quantum gravity expert" is presumably someone well acquainted with the details of our immense ignorance of the subject. I suppose I count.'' -- baez@guitar.ucr.edu (john baez) %% ``[A computer is] like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.'' -- Joseph Campbell %% ``Remember, high-tech means breaks down next week, while cutting edge means breaks down this afternoon.'' -- Bruce Sterling %% ``Never express yourself more clearly than you think.'' -- N. Bohr %% We all live in a yellow subroutine. %% ``Imagine if brick-and-mortar stores operated like most online retailers do. You'd walk through the front door and enter a large room with nothing in it but a big sign that read: `Welcome to Clothes-a-Rama! Please wait two minutes for the door leading to the merchandise to unlock.' Then a door would slide open to reveal another room with nothing in it but more doors, each with a sign that read: `This way to the Men's Department,' or `This way to the Women's.' By that time, you would have left. That's what happens online. People don't like waiting around for useless web pages full of blinking lights and theme songs to load [...]'' -- Playboy "Living Online" Nov 1999 %% ``The first million is the hardest.'' -- Cornelius Vanderbilt %% To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. %% ``As far as I know we never had an undetected error.'' %% ``We didn't send you to Washington to make intelligent decisions. We sent you to represent us.'' -- Kent York, Baptist minister to US Rep. Bill Sarpalius. %% ``Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again.'' -- F. P. Jones %% ``Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.'' -- Olivier %% ``The scientific name for an animal that doesn't either run from or fight its enemies is lunch.'' -- Michael Friedman %% For a good Prime, call: 29819592777931214269172453467810429868925511217482600306406141434158089 %% ``Quick! Get me my colored pencils! I'm having a paradigm shift.'' -- Paul Callahan %% The Average Person's Axioms of First Order Predicate Logic: * (A => B) => (B => A) * Exists x A(x) => For all x A(x) * (A => C) & (B => C) => (A => B) -- Warren Vonroeschlaub %% ``If you lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge.'' -- Henry Spencer %% ``Features -- just say no!'' -- found in sig of: Andy Glew, glew@ichips.intel.com, Intel Corp., M/S JF1-19 %% ``Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.'' -- Albert Einstein %% ``Die Mathematiker sind eine Art Franzosen: Redet man zu ihnen, so uebersetzen sie es in ihre Sprache, und dann ist es alsobald ganz etwas anderes.'' -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe %% ``The fact that it works is immaterial.'' -- L. Ogborn %% ``Life is too short to be taken seriously.'' -- Oscar Wilde %% ``Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.'' -- Oscar Wilde %% ``The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.'' -- Oscar Wilde %% ``For every complex question, there is a simple answer -- and it's wrong.'' -- H.L. Mencken %% A Law of Computer Programming: Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find the programmers cannot write in English. %% ``First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack.'' -- George Carrette %% ``As practiced by computer science, the study of programming is an unholy mixture of mathematics, literary criticism, and folklore.'' -- B. A. Sheil, 1981 %% ``The first time I encountered setjmp() was in an Amiga program ported from Unix. "Hmm, what's setjmp()?" I said, pulling up the man page. I read the man page. "*GASP* GLARGGGPPPHHTT!!! ARGHJKLKJ#@$!^&^U!" I exclaimed, and rolled my chair over backwards as I fainted.'' -- ogre@netcom.com %% Stroustroup writes in the ARM: "C programmers think that memory allocation is too important to be left to the computer, Lisp programmers think that memory allocation is too important to be left to the programmer." %% ``It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.'' -- Unknown %% ``As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.'' -- Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949 %% ``A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author.'' -- S. C. Johnson %% ``Pointers are like jumps, leading wildly from one part of the data structure to another. Their introduction into high-level languages has been a step backwards from which we may never recover.'' -- C.A.R.Hoare "Hints on Programming Language Design" 1973 %% ``One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.'' -- Robert Firth %% A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. %% ``There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.'' -- Ken Olson, President of DEC, World Future Society Convention, 1977 %% ``You are in a twisty little passage of standards, all conflicting.'' -- Michael Meissner, meissner@osf.org %% ``A witty saying proves nothing.'' -- Voltaire %% 2 monograms = 1 diagram %% 3+1/3 tridents = 1 decadent %% 10 rations = 1 decoration %% 1 billion microphones = 1 megaphone %% - General Motors Help Line, how can I help you? - Hi! I just bought my first car, and I chose your car because it has automatic transmission, cruise control, power steering, power brakes, and power door locks. - Thanks for buying our car. How can I help you? - How do I work it? - Do you know how to drive? - Do I know how to what? - Do you know how to DRIVE? - I'm not a technical person! I just want to go places in my car! %% - General Motors Help Line, how can I help you? - I got in the car and closed the door, and nothing happened! - Did you put the key in the ignition and turn it? - What's an ignition? - It's a starter motor that draws current from your battery and turns over the engine. - Ignition? Motor? Battery? Engine? How come I have to know all of these technical terms just to use my car? %% What boots up must come down. %% Fax is stranger than fiction. %% The modem is the message. %% Home is where you hang your @. %% ``This will end your windows session. Do you want to play another game?'' %% Things the Movies Teach Us: Searches on the internet will always return what you are looking for, no matter how vague your keywords are. (See "Mission Impossible", where Tom Cruise searches with keywords like "file" and "computer" and 3 results are returned.) %% Things the Movies Teach Us: If you display a file on the screen and someone deletes the file, it also disappears from the screen. %% Things the Movies Teach Us: You can bypass the "PERMISSION DENIED" message by using the "OVERRIDE" function. (See "Demolition Man".) %% Things the Movies Teach Us: Powerful computers beep whenever you press a key or the screen changes. Some computers also slow down the output on the screen so that it doesn't go faster than you can read. (Really advanced computers will also emulate the sound of a dot-matrix printer.) %% Things the Movies Teach Us: You can infect a computer with a destructive virus by simply typing "UPLOAD VIRUS". %% Things the Movies Teach Us: Command line interfaces will give you access to any information you want by simply typing "ACCESS THE SECRET FILES" on any near-by keyboard. %% SCSI: System Can't See It. %% PCMCIA: People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms. %% File not found, but if you hum a few bars... %% Why does Windows have to be rebooted for the smallest thing? Microsoft gives the following explanation: "The Windows codebase is so huge that we have no track of what state the OS is in after it's been running for a while. Therefore a reboot is needed to get Win in a known state to do modifications." %% ``What, behind the rabbit?'' -- King Arthur %% ``Using Windows NT [...] on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor.'' -- Anthony DiGiorgio, Atlantic Fleet Technical Service Center, after the USS Yorktown was disabled by a "divide-by-zero" error. %% ``C combines all the power of assembly language with all the ease of use of assembly language.'' -- trad. %% I made a mental note and now I can't remember where I put it! %% And god said, "rm -rf /", and all was null and void. %% Windows doesn't just crash -- it opens a dialog box and lets you press OK first, then crashes before you can. %% Fund = give money; amentalism = mindlessness. %% Grep... grep... grep... (Frog with UNIX stuck in its throat) %% Bigamy: One wife too many. Monogamy: Same idea. %% "Intel inside" is a government warning required by law. %% ``I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying FLEE AT ONCE - ALL IS DISCOVERED. They all left town immediately.'' -- Mark Twain %% Sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug. %% Note: The light at the end of the tunnel is a dead end with a mirror, reflecting the light you're carrying. %% Failing to plan is planning to fail. %% ``Does YOUR computer have an 'Intel Inside' warning label?'' -- Lorens Johansson %% If you go through life with both feet planted firmly on the ground, you'll never change your underwear. %% ``If you're looking to find the key to the Universe, I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is: there is no key to the Universe. The good news is: it has been left unlocked.'' -- Swami Beyondananda %% ``There's no need to change the world. All we have to do is toilet train the world, and we'll never have to change it again.'' -- Swami Beyondananda %% Life is like photography. You develop the negative. %% Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy. %% The only substitute for good manners is fast reflexes. %% I love defenseless animals, especially in a good gravy. %% I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder. %% For Sale: Parachute. Only used once, never opened. Small stain. %% If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends? %% ``I love to go down to the playground and watch the children jump up and down. They don't know I'm firing blanks.'' -- Emo Philips %% ``I much prefer travelling in non-British ships. There's none of that nonsense about women and children first.'' -- Somerset Maugham %% "I wish I could remember the name of that card game", said Tom wistfully. %% ``Bagpipes are the missing link between music and noise.'' -- E. K. Kruger %% Seen on a toilet wall: "HEISENBERG MAY HAVE BEEN HERE" %% It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others. %% ``In a world with no walls or fences, who needs Windows and Gates?'' -- Tony P. Parr %% Sometimes I think I understand everything, then I regain consciousness. %% Just when I was getting used to yesterday, along came today. %% The nice part about living in a small town is that when you don't know what you're doing, someone else does. %% Reason to smile: Every 7 minutes of every day, someone in an Aerobics class pulls a hamstring. %% Insanity is my only means of relaxation. %% # Make the SysAdmin warm and fuzzy -- IRIX 5's /etc/rc2 %% ``It's supposed to be unhappy. It's unix.'' -- Ben Gross %% ``If you have an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of Sparcs, they will eventually code Solaris.'' -- Dave Morgan %% ``Sleep is a poor subsititue [sic] for caffeine.'' -- Pat Dughi %% ``For the 8 months I've been there, I've added 12 lines of source code to Mosaic and 10 of them have been commented out.'' -- Jay Kreibich, about his NCSA job, 4/13/95. %% Dude, your home page is dull. Where is the high school graduation picture? Where's the link to your best friend's girlfriend's home page? Where's the list of the last 25 CD's you listened to? -- Alan Braverman, on uiuc.test. %% ``You can tell Joe's been using EMACS. There are EMACS droppings.'' -- Jill Smith, commenting on a bunch of files endings with tildes. %% ``Repeat after me: 'Prioritized interrupts are braindamage''' -- Linus Torvalds on the linux-680x0 mailing list. %% ``It's everything about 0's and 1's... or much ado about nothing and its complement.'' -- Prof. Loui of Boolean Algebra %% ``Look! They they did the About Box first!'' -- Jay Kreibich, commenting on the fact that the sign in front of the new Chilli's in Champaign was up far in advance of the building. %% ``Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could get the word processor file, but it seemed like too much work'' -- Amy Ryan, after editing postscript for 45 minutes... %% ``Mail? That's so asyncronous.'' -- Dan Simms %% ``The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.'' -- Kosh (Babylon 5) %% ``We don't understand the software, and sometimes we don't understand the hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights!'' -- Unknown %% "Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us." "But I don't think of you." -- Toohey & Roark, "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand %% ``There are only two ways of dealing with women... and neither of them works.'' -- Jeff Thompson %% ``[You] wouldn't know satire if it walked up to you on the street bare naked, bit your ass, and then proceeded to put on a rainbow colored afro wig and started jumping up and down singing 'The time to get a clue is now!''' -- Joel Jones on satire %% ``This patch fixes the Problem of Evil and the dangling-else ambiguity.'' -- Andrew C. Bulhak %% ``Most people aren't aware of the fact that UNIX actually dates back to the Cthulhuvian epoch, and was widely used in R'lyeh. The R'lyehish word "fhtagn" is actually a technical term, and literally means "sleeps on an event". Thus, "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" literally means "in his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits blocked on I/O".'' -- Andrew C. Bulhak %% ``Wrong ID or fish slapped.'' -- one of Max's amazing error messages. %% ``See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too ;-)'' -- Linus Torvalds %% ``Yeah, but the config file... it's like the Necronomicon. You are warned away, but you go regardless, hoping to learn unearthly secrets. If your sanity survives, you spend the rest of your life conversing with daemons, running from shoggoths, and striking fear in to most mortals. I dont know whether it has driven me insane or revealed to me deep secrets about the universe.'' -- ErisE (Brandon Lease) on Sendmail 7/11/96 %% ``The first time, it's a KLUDGE! The second, a trick. Later, it's a well-established technique!'' -- Mike Broido, Intermetric %% Colvard's Logical Premises: All probabilities are 50%. Either a thing will happen or it won't. Colvard's Unconscionable Commentary: This is especially true when dealing with someone you're attracted to. Grelb's Commentary: Likelihoods, however, are 90% against you. %% ``Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.'' -- Matt Groening %% ``If a tree is rendered in the forest and there's no light source, does it cast a shadow?'' -- Ancient SIGGRAPH Zen Riddle %% ``Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.'' -- Donald Knuth %% ``Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction -- from which, by induction, one can deduce that every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work.'' -- Unknown %% If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand. -- Gerald Holton If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders. -- Hal Abelson In computer science, we stand on each other's feet. -- Brian K. Reid %% ``no.. a freudian slip is when you say one thing but you mean your mother.'' -- Unknown, via KC Smith on IRC %% ``I think the purpose of dating is to get warez.'' -- Geoff Raye on #uiuc %% ``I can't union with the null set.'' -- Greg Kaiser, explaining why his social life mathematically sucks. %% ``While any sensible person knows rationally that having a cheering section doesn't actually improve the abilities of artificial intelligence routines, we'd like to give in to the superstition that it actually can help.'' -- Geoff "g0ff" Raye, asking people to come cheer for his team in the MechManiaII programming contest %% ``I don't think I ever use the same memory twice.'' -- Paul Bleisch, after being asked if he copied the URL passed to the load function. %% ``We're almost semi-functional, once I finish this crashing bug.'' -- Brian Swetland %% ``Wow! It built!'' -- Paul Bleisch %% ``It's because the buf is not really a buf... it's just some random data...'' -- Michael Lee %% ``My lady, I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and like them it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts. There are ways of perceiving witches, and of knowing poison streams; there are certain weak spots that all dragons have, and certain riddles that hooded strangers tend to set you. But the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock at the witch's door when she is away, on vaction. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.'' -- Prince Li'r, from "The Last Unicorn". %% Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow. %% ``I want to be a named pipe when I grow up.'' -- Geoff Raye %% 1. When a distinguished, but elderly, scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way to determine the limits of the possible is by going beyond them, into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Clark's Laws %% ``Why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your life automating.'' -- Terence Parr %% ``One principle I generally live by in life is, `Don't lower the bass until you get nauseous'.'' -- Fred Jacobs %% A locked gun cabinet and a primaeval Macintosh desktop-publishing system, green with age, attested to the owner's previous forays into officially discouraged realms of behavior. -- Dr. X's lab, from Stephenson's "Diamond Age". %% ``Look. In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.'' -- Tyrena Wingreen-Feif, a character in Dan Simmons' "Hyperion". %% "I think I'll use the earlier, less deficient NE2000 driver" "Yeah, well, it's full of... features... now" -- Brian Swetland and Doug Armstrong %% ``Well that makes life a lot easier ... I can take her out of my home directory now.'' -- Ari, after breaking up with someone %% ``How can you be depressed in a world where a man makes a living selling concrete wildlife?'' -- Matt Ruff, Fool on the Hill %% ``I love typing NULL. It's like shouting at pointers and bossing them around. Nullify him.'' -- Sean O'Connor %% ``Just because they taste like ass doesn't mean they're bad cigarettes.'' -- Matt Hellige %% ``In my opinion, shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software (no sources) with the worst of free software (no finishing touches). I simply do not believe in the shareware market at all.'' -- Linus Torvalds %% ``You know, me asking you what your name is, is never going to be as fast as calling you Fuckhead'' -- Nathan Schrenk, explaining why static typing is more efficient. %% ``Cool! We've gone to a version 2 of our protocol and we haven't released anything yet.'' -- Paul Watts on the SigOps DFP %% ``This is tradition! This is our *culture*!'' -- Matt Hellige on the pronunciation of LaTeX %% ``... here we have to go back through and flush any blocks that are still dirty. with an arched brow you astutely ask, "but how could this happen given the above loop?" Ahhh young grasshopper I say, the path through the cache is long and twisty and fraught with peril.'' -- Dominic Giampaolo, in a comment in bcache.c %% groobot: don't crash. *** Signoff: Groobot (EOF From client) he can't follow instructions yet. -- Matt Williams, demonstrating some of the neater bits of software development. %% ``I think I've given enough to society, society should get me a home theater system.'' -- Jeff Thompson %% ``We have enough people here who know about UNIX and enough people who play Quake that we can make sys-admins out of parts.'' -- Ficus, about Be's lack of a fulltime sysadmin. %% ``I officially redefine "free" as meaning "provided with ketchup". Any other usage with me is misleading. Is that burger free?'' -- puge@pobox.com on gnu.misc.discuss %% ``All that really mattered was the user experience of the software. It didn't really matter what was in the box, or who it was from, because it was dark in the box and that was that.'' -- Joe Palmer (Designer of the BeBox), in "It's Dark in the Box". %% ``A program without a "main" is like a fish without a bicycle.'' -- Jon Watte, being helpful on the bedevtalk list. %% ``You're right, it needs bubble help to warn them. 'Warning, the time 2:30am occurs during the witching hour, and will be unavailable once a year. Blame the cows.''' -- Brandon Long, discussing the limitations of cron. %% ``Cheery didn't bother to answer. There was no use denying it. Somehow, people could tell if you were a dwarf just by looking at you.'' -- Terry Pratchett: Feet of clay. %% I'm not a complete idiot - several parts are missing. %% First things first, but not necessarily in that order. %% If you want breakfast in bed, sleep in the kitchen. %% Gravity... It's not just a good idea. It's the law. %% Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional. %% I didn't climb to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian. %% Veni, Vedi, Visa: I came. I saw. I did a little shopping. %% ``I used to be schizophrenic, but we're ok now.'' %% I suffer occasional delusions of adequacy. %% ``There is an old saying that if a million monkeys typed on a million keyboards for a million years, eventually all the works of Shakespeare would be produced. Now, thanks to Usenet, we know this is not true.'' %% Unix, BASIC, C, PASCAL, APL, ADA, and PROFANITY spoken here. %% A good programmer makes all the right mistakes. %% ``The further you are from your server, the more likely it is to crash.'' -- Woodhead's Law %% ``Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.'' -- Dick Brandon %% ``Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea; massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.'' -- Gene Spafford, 1992 %% All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegtops awound? %% Helpdesk tip #2: When the support analyst says "Click...", wait for the rest of the sentence. %% Of course my password is the same as my pet's name. My macaw's name was Q47pY!3, but I change it every 90 days. %% Intel: We put the "um..." in Pentium. %% ``Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.'' -- Rich Cook %% ``Hey! It compiles! Ship it!'' %% Life's unfair - but root password helps! %% To know recursion, you must first know recursion. %% Programming graphics in X is like finding sqrt(pi) using Roman numerals. %% Standards are industry's way of codifying obsolescence. %% Premature optimization is the root of all evil. %% Epigram: Ada is the 400-pound gorilla of programming languages. %% ``I have yet to meet a C compiler that is more friendly and easier to use than eating soup with a knife.'' -- Unknown %% I feel like a genocidal maniac when emacs asks me if I want to kill 10789 characters. %% 665.9238429876 - Number of the Pentium Beast. %% Microsoft Windows: Computing While U Wait. %% If your computer says, "Printer out of Paper," this problem cannot be resolved by continuously clicking the "OK" button. %% Wishing life had an UNDO function... %% Computers follow your orders, not your intentions. %% Computer Science: Solving today's problems tomorrow. %% Beta. Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it's released. Beta is Latin for "still doesn't work." %% At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer, you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer. %% ``Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.'' -- Brooks' law %% A user friendly computer first requires a friendly user. %% The programmer's national anthem is 'AAAAAAAARRRRGHHHHH!!'. %% A printer consists of three main parts: the case, the jammed paper tray and the blinking red light. %% A hacker does for love what others would not do for money. %% Your mouse has moved. Windows NT must be restarted for the change to take effect. Reboot now? [ OK ] %% EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road or did the road move beneath the chicken? %% To die. In the rain. %% If God didn't want people to steal office supplies, he wouldn't have given us briefcases, purses, and pockets. In fact, no major religion specifically bans the pilfering of office supplies. -- Scott Adams, in The Dilbert Principle %% Money talks - mine says "Goodbye". %% ``God is the only being who doesn't need to exist to rule.'' -- Charles Baudeleire %% ``Why be politically correct if you can be right?'' -- Erik V. Petersen %% ``Many of us wear the scars of life as badges.'' -- Erik V. Petersen %% ``Silence is argument carried out by other means.'' -- Ernesto "Che" Guevara %% ``The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.'' -- Oscar Wilde %% TOWER: "Say position." PILOT: "Position." %% I can't walk on water, but I can stagger on alcohol. %% Two rules for success: 1. Don't tell everything you know. %% "Bother," said Pooh, as he wandered into the meat slicer. %% Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. "No" is the answer! %% ``One Galileo in two thousand years is enough.'' -- Pius XII %% ``Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.'' -- George Bernard Shaw %% Speed Kills - Use Windows! %% Life is a bitch, but some of the puppies are cute. %% ``At least, that's what the wizards in the High Energy Magic building say. And they've got proper pointy hats and letters after their name, so they know what they're talking about.'' -- Terry Pratchett: Men at arms. %% The Archchancellor had also given him a long drink of something he said was a marvellous remedy, although he'd been unspecific as to what it cured. Verticality, apparently. -- Terry Pratchett: Men at arms %% ``Cease, in the name of everything that doesn't suck!'' -- Butthead %% Anything worth taking seriously is worth making fun of. %% Think twice before you think. %% Dragons - the ORIGINAL flying toasters! %% Luxuriantly hand-crafted of only the finest ASCII. %% `` '' -- Marcel Marceau %% This is not a paradox. %% No raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood. %% Taglines are a waste of time. Take this one, for example - it makes no sense at all. %% Nostalgia ain't what it used to be. %% ``Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research.'' -- Wilson Mizner %% ``I refuse to spend my life worrying about what I eat. There is no pleasure worth foregoing just for an extra three years in a geriatric ward.'' -- John Mortimer %% What is a revolution but a dynamic vector that returns to the place it started from? %% Mean people suck. %% May your screen live long and phosphor. %% ``Flying is the second greatest experience known to man. Landing is the first.'' -- Andreas Mixich %% According to the most recent surveys, five people out of ten are half. %% Despite the high cost of living, it remains popular. %% Aibohphobia: Fear of palindromes. %% I think I think, therefore I think. (I think...) %% I'd love to, but I'm building a pig from a kit. %% ``Work to become, not to acquire.'' -- Confucius %% ``Good morning, doctors. I have taken the liberty of removing Windows 95 from my hard drive.'' -- HAL's first words contest winner, judged by Arthur C. Clarke. %% ``Well, let's just say, 'if your VCR is still blinking 12:00, you don't want Linux''' -- Bruce Perens %% ``It was shaped like a pair of artificial breasts, the sort that are highly amusing to rugby players and anyone whose sense of humor has been surgically removed.'' -- Terry Pratchett: Men at arms. %% Maths and alcohol don't mix. Don't drink and derive. %% I am willing to make the mistakes if someone else is willing to learn from them. %% Just for today, I will not sit in my living room all day watching TV. Instead I will move my TV into the bedroom. %% False hope is nicer than no hope at all. %% Blessed are the flexible, for they can tie themselves into knots. %% I am at one with my duality. %% How many Zen Masters does it take a light bulb to change? %% Use the Fork at the dinner table, Luke. Not the Force. %% To iterate is human -- to recurse is divine. %% I am Bill Gates of Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimil- Error - General protection fault in module "BORG.EXE" %% Geneology: chasing your own tale. %% ``On the road of life, there are drivers & passengers...'' %% ``Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work.'' -- Robert Orben %% Mistakes/misspellings are fictional: any similarities to real ones are incidental. %% Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs. %% Diplomacy - the art of letting someone have your way. %% The three "R"s of Microsoft support: Retry, Reboot, Reinstall. %% ``I'm desperately trying to figure out why kamikaze pilots wore helmets.'' -- Dave Edison %% ``Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.'' -- Paul Rodriguez %% ``A lawyer will do anything to win a case. Sometimes, he will even tell the truth.'' -- Patrick Murray %% Call me if you need my phone number! %% If at first you don't succeed, DON'T SKYDIVE. %% Only dead fish go with the flow. %% Windows NT = Windows Nice Try. %% ``Sham Harga's coffee was like molten lead, but it had this in its favour: when you'd drunk it, there was this overwhelming feeling of relief that you'd got to the bottom of the cup.'' -- Terry Pratchett: Men at arms. %% My opinions are my own, but sign the right NDAs, pay those royalties on time and in cash, and they may be yours, too. %% Laboratory experiments have shown that 100% of rats died. %% A steak every day keeps the cows dead. %% ``Quote me as saying I was misquoted.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like apple-sauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... Now you tell me what you know.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``Time wounds all heels.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``Do you think I could buy back my introduction to you?'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``Women should be obscene and not heard.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``Either he's dead or my watch has stopped.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``I must confess, I was born at a very early age.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``You've got the brain of a four-year-old boy, and I'll bet he was glad to get rid of it.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``Ice Water? Get some Onions - that'll make your eyes water!'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``Room service? Send up a larger room.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.'' -- Groucho Marx %% ``You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.'' -- Thoreau %% ``Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.'' -- Mark Twain %% ``I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.'' -- Oscar Wilde %% ``Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.'' -- Albert Einstein %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #29: Just about any animal skin can be stretched over a frame to make a pleasant sound once the animal is removed. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Recieved, #28: It is easy to teach anyone to play the maracas. Just grip the neck and shake him in rhythm. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #27: My favorite instrument is the bassoon. It is so hard to play people seldom play it. That is why I like the bassoon best. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #26: A contra-bassoon is like a bassoon, only more so. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #25: Anyone who can read all the instrument notes at the same time gets to be the conductor. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #24: I can't reach the brakes on this piano! %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #23: For some reason, they always put a treble clef in front of every line of flute music. You just watch. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #22: The concertmaster of an orchestra is always the person who sits in the first chair of the first violins. This means that when a person is elected concertmaster, he has to hurry up and learn how to play a violin real good. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Recieved, #21: Question: Is the saxophone a brass or a woodwind instrument? Answer: Yes. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Recieved, #20: A bassoon looks like nothing I have ever heard. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #19: Question: What are kettle drums called? Answer: Kettle drums. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #18: When electric currents go through them, guitars start making sounds. So would anybody. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Recieved, #17: The double bass is also called the bass viol, string bass, and bass fiddle. It has so many names because it is so huge. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #16: Another name for kettle drums is timpani. But I think I will just stick with the first name and learn it good. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #15: You should always say celli when you mean there are two or more cellos. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #14: A tuba is much larger than its name. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #13: A harp is a nude piano. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #12: My favorite composer is Opus. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #11: Most authorities agree that music of antiquity was written long ago. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #10: I know what a sextet is but I had rather not say. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #9: Music sung by two people at the same time is called a duel. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #8: When a singer sings, he stirs up the air and makes it hit any passing eardrums. But if he is good, he knows how to keep it from hurting. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #7: In the last scene of Pagliacci, Canio stabs Nedda who is the one he really loves. Pretty soon Silvio also gets stabbed, and they all live happily ever after. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Recieved, #6: Aaron Copland is one of your most famous contemporary composers. It is unusual to be contemporary. Most composers do not live until they are dead. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Recieved, #5: Henry Purcell is a well known composer few people have ever heard of. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #4: Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling him. I guess he could not hear so good. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died from this. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Received, #3: Handel was half German, half Italian, and half English. He was rather large. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Recieved, #2: John Sebastian Bach died from 1750 to the present. %% Actual Test Answers Music Teachers Have Recieved, #1: Refrain means don't do it. A refrain in music is the part you better not try to sing. %% A subject interesting to the teacher will bore students. %% If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0. %% WinErr 003: Dynamic linking error - Your mistake is now in every file. %% Seek professional help. %% There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives. %% Coders, the only men in the world who brag their's is smaller and faster. %% IE5, puts the pain back into browsing. %% "Bother," said Pooh, as he walked through the security beam. %% Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels good. %% Living on earth is expensive, but it does include an annual free trip around the sun. %% ``Whenever I have to choose between two evils, I always like to try the one I haven't tried before.'' -- Mae West. %% What's the difference between ignorance and apathy? I don't know and I don't care. %% 668: The Neighbor of the Beast. %% 43% of all statistics are worthless. %% 7/5th of all people do not understand fractions. %% A police recruit was asked during the exam, "What would you do if you had to arrest your own mother?" He said, "Call for backup." %% If Speed Kills, Then Windows(tm) Users May Live Forever! %% ``She Woudn't Let Me Kiss Her in the Canoe So I Had to Paddle Her Back.'' %% Driving People Insane: 20. Five days in advance, tell your friends that you can't attend their party because you're not in the mood. %% Driving People Insane: 19. Specify that your drive-through order is "to go." %% Driving People Insane: 18. Ask people what sex they are. %% Driving People Insane: 17. As often as possible, skip rather than walk. %% Driving People Insane: 16. Dont use any punctuation %% Driving People Insane: 15. Finish all your sentences with "In accordance with the prophecy." %% Driving People Insane: 14. Reply to everything someone says with "That's what you think" %% Driving People Insane: 13. In the memo field of all your checks, write "for Bribes and Favors" %% Driving People Insane: 12. Put decaf in the coffee maker for 3 weeks. Once everyone has gotten over their caffeine addictions, switch to espresso. %% Driving People Insane: 11. Send e-mail message that advertise free pizza, doughnuts, etc, in the breakroom. When people complain that there was nothing there, lean back, rub your stomach, and say, "You've got to be faster than that." %% Driving People Insane: 10. Develop an unnatural fear of staplers %% Driving People Insane: 9. Put your garbage can on your desk and label it "IN" %% Driving People Insane: 8. Encourage your colleagues to join you in a little synchronized chair dancing. %% Driving People Insane: 7. Every time someone asks you to do something, ask if they want fries with that. %% Driving People Insane: 6. Insist that your e-mail address be xena-goddess-of-fire@GHC.com %% Driving People Insane: 5. Put mosquito netting around your cubicle. %% Driving People Insane: 4. Send e-mail to the rest of the company to tell them what you're doing. For example: If anyone needs me, I'll be in the bathroom. %% Driving People Insane: 3. Find out where your boss shops and buy exactly the same outfits. Wear them one day after your boss does. (This is especially effective if your boss is the opposite gender.) %% Driving People Insane: 2. Page yourself over the intercom. (Don't disguise your voice) %% Driving People Insane: 1. At lunch time, sit in your parked car and point a hair dryer at passing cars, to see if they slow down. %% The Lords Prayer Has 56 Words The Ten Commandments Has 297 The American Declaration Of Independance Has 300 Yet an EEC Directive on the import of caramel and caramel products required 26,911 words. %% *A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling* For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. -- Mark Twain %% / is the root of all UNIX. %% Love your enemies: they'll go crazy trying to figure out what you're up to. %% Incidentally, it has come to my attention that certain subversives are spreading rumours of the existence of a number between 6 and 8. Needless to say, they are extremely dangerous and should not be approached under any circumstances. Be especially careful with people asking questions such as "What is half of fourteen?" when we all know that fourteen is an odd number. %% No man is an island, but then, no man is a potato salad, either. %% ``I'd love to go out with you, but I'm doing door-to-door collecting for static cling.'' %% This you understand can if FORTH programmer you be can then. %% ``All science is either physics or stamp collecting.'' -- E. Rutherford %% ``Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.'' -- Charles Dickens %% Harvard Law: Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases. %% ``I'd love to go out with you, but the man on television told me to stay tuned.'' %% ``It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one.'' -- Phil White %% On a scale of 1 to 4, what are your feelings about the colour green? %% Eek! %% ``If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.'' -- Maslow %% I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called "brightness", but it doesn't work. -- Gallagher %% Mr. Cole's Axiom: The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing. %% ``I'd love to go out with you, but I never go out on days that end in Y.'' %% Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic. The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of the existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism is beyond the scope of this article.) %% I'm not as think as you drunk I am! %% Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler. %% ``I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says.'' -- Oscar Wilde %% Reality? I'll only go as a tourist! %% In the movies, rich people are unhappy. %% ``I find that very disturbing.'' -- Calvin %% In the movies, cars will explode in all accidents. %% I can't dial 911. There's no 11 on my phone. %% ``Microsoft supports industry standards the same way a rope supports a hanged man.'' %% Evil is just live, spelt backwards. %% recursion, n.: see recursion. %% A paperless office has about as much chance as a paperless bathroom. %% He who laughs last is at 300 baud. %% He who laughs last probably doesn't understand the joke. %% I no wanna work, I wanna bang on keyboard all day. %% ``One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend hearing it a second time.'' -- Gioacchino Rossini %% ``Parsifal -- the kind of opera that starts at six o'clock and after it has been going three hours, you look at your watch and it says 6:20.'' -- David Randolph %% When told that a soloist would need six fingers to perform his concerto, Arnold Schoenberg replied, "I can wait." %% ``Harpists spend 90% of their lives tuning their harps and 10% playing out of tune.'' -- Igor Stravinsky %% Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject. %% At least I have a positive attitude about my destructive habits. %% It might look like I'm doing nothing, but at the cellular level I'm really quite busy. %% I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message... %% I'm really easy to get along with once you people learn to worship me. %% It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off. %% I like you. You remind me of when I was young and stupid. %% ``I have plenty of talent and vision. I just don't care.'' %% Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental. %% The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist. %% ``Never learn to do anything. If you don't learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you.'' -- Mark Twain %% W*&t? I th^$k w& h@$= s$m# l&n$ n*&se. %% An agreeable person: One who agrees with you. %% If you lived in your car, you'd be home by now. %% If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, riddle them with bullets. %% Boldly going nowhere. %% A pat on the back is only a few centimeters from a kick in the butt. %% If you can read this, please flip me back over. -- (seen upside down, on a Jeep) %% ``Fight Crime: Shoot Back!'' %% Seen on the back of a biker's vest: If you can read this, my wife fell off. %% The light at the end of the tunnel is a person with a lamp coming towards you... looking for the end of the tunnel. %% Love is like an hourglass: the heart fills as the brain empties. %% Love, n.: a situation which happens when you think almost as much of another as you do of yourself. %% The only thing that has changed over the millions of years of playing the game of love is that trumps have changed from clubs to diamonds. %% ``I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.'' -- Blaise Pascal %% I plead contemporary insanity. %% Can I trade this job for what's behind door #2? %% I just want revenge. Is that so wrong? %% Adults are just kids who owe money. %% Better living through denial. %% Allow me to introduce my selves. %% And your crybaby whiny-assed opinion would be...? %% Errors have been made. Others will be blamed. %% A hacker doesn't die, his TTL expires. %% ``Dave. Put down those Windows disks. Dave. DAVE!'' %% ``The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it.'' -- Franklin P. Jones %% ``You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.'' -- Al Capone %% ``I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.'' -- Douglas Adams %% "Bother", said Pooh, as Windows swapped out again. %% You know you're getting old when you stop to tie your shoes and wonder what else you can do while you're down there. %% My mind not only wanders, sometimes it leaves completely. %% If you were right I'd agree. %% ``Work is the curse of the drinking class.'' -- Oscar Wilde %% If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done? %% If you ate pasta and antipasta, would you still be hungry? %% If the #2 pencil is the most popular, why is it still #2? %% Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to? %% A fool and his money are soon partying. %% Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day. %% Women like silent men; they think they're listening. %% I doubt, therefore I might be. %% The older you get, the better you realize you were. %% To be intoxicated is to feel sophisticated but not be able to say it. %% One nice thing about egotists: They don't talk about other people. %% Democracy is the counting of heads, regardless of the contents. %% And of course it goes without saying that %% ``Some people hope to achieve immortality through their works or their children. I would prefer to achieve it by not dying.'' -- Woody Allen %% ``Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint.'' -- Mark Twain %% ``Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.'' -- Albert Einstein %% Deliver a pizza? Whoever heard of a liver pizza? %% Actual excuse notes teachers have received, part 14: - Gloria was absent yesterday as she was having a gangover. %% Actual excuse notes teachers have received, part 13: - Please excuse Mary for being absent yesterday. She was in bed with gramps. %% Actual excuse notes teachers have recieved, part 12: - Please excuse Jason for being absent yesterday. He had a cold and could not breed well. %% Actual excuse notes teachers have received, part 11: - Sally won't be in school a week from Friday. We have to attend her funeral. %% Actual excuse notes teachers have received, part 10: - Please excuse Jimmy for being. It was his father's fault. %% Actual excuse notes teachers have received, part 9: - Irving was absent yesterday because he missed his bust. %% Actual excuse notes teachers have received, part 8: - Please excuse Tommy for being absent yesterday. He had diarrhea and his boots leak. %% Actual excuse notes teachers have received, part 7: - Please excuse Ray Friday from school. He has very loose vowels. %% Actual excuse notes teachers have received, part 6: - Chris will not be in school cus he has an acre in his side. %% Actual excuse notes teachers have recieved, part 5: - Carlos was absent yesterday because he was playing football. He was hurt in the growing part. %% Actual excuse notes teachers have received, part 4: - John has been absent because he had two teeth taken out of his face. %% Actual excuse notes teachers have received, part 3: - Dear School: Please ekscuse John being absent on Jan. 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, and also 33. %% Actual excuse notes teachers have received, part 2: - Please excuse Lisa for being absent. She was sick and I had her shot. %% Actual excuse notes teachers have received, part 1: - My son is under a doctor's care and should not take P.E. today. Please execute him. %% Windows is a colorful clown suit for DOS. %% A clean house is a sign of a misspent life. %% Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves for they shall never cease to be amused. %% A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand. %% If we are what we eat, then I'm easy, fast, and cheap. %% Real programmers scorn floating point arithmetic. The decimal point was invented for pansy bed-wetters who are unable to think big. %% User-friendly: (adj.) trivialized, slow, incapable, and boring. %% COBOL: (n.) an old computer language, designed to be read and not run. Unfortunately, it is often run anyway. %% Over 72% believe in statistical claims with no given source. %% Sometimes you just gotta say "What the fuck!" %% Honk if you've never seen an Uzi fired from a car window. %% ``It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs.'' -- Oxford University Press, Edpress News %% It's not hard to meet expenses, they are everywhere. %% This is a tagline mirror --> | <-- rorrim enilgat a si sihT %% Are you interested in making $$$$ fast? Here's an incredibly simple way to do it, and there is nothing to buy, no investment to make, no money to lose! Try it now! Follow this simple procedure: 1) Hold down the shift key. 2) Hit the 4 key four times. %% What do you call a fish with no eyes? A fsh. %% A big enough hammer fixes anything. %% Of all the people I've met you're certainly one of them. %% Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective with who it's friends are. %% ``Hey, dad, remember our car?'' -- Calvin %% ``It might be just possible, by lying very still in a cellar somewhere, to get through a day without committing a crime. But only just. And, even then, you were probably guilty of loitering.'' -- Terry Pratchett: Feet of clay. %% ``Common sense is not so common.'' -- Voltaire %% The Borg assimilated my race, and all I got was this lousy tagline. %% ``The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.'' -- W. C. Fields %% If your feet smell and your nose runs -- you're built upside down. %% Everyone thinks I'm psychotic, except for my friends deep inside the earth. %% Ambivalent? Well, yes and no. %% Chaos, panic & disorder... my work here is done. %% Macho Law forbids me from admitting I'm wrong. %% Back off! You're standing in my aura. %% Here I am. Now what are your other two wishes? %% Stress is when you wake up screaming & you realize you haven't fallen asleep yet. %% I like cats too. Let's exchange recipes. %% Therapy is expensive, poppin' bubble gum is cheap! You choose. %% I started out with nothing & still have most of it left. %% Don't bother me. I'm living happily ever after. %% Earth is full. Go home. %% A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. %% Disclaimer: Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors. %% Plan to be spontaneous tomorrow. %% Energizer Bunny arrested, charged with battery. %% Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don't have film. %% Marriage is grand -- and divorce is about 10 grand. %% America has no drug problems, there's plenty for everyone. %% ``We aim to please, you aim too please'' -- sign on a bathroom door %% Heard the one about the dyslexic devil worshiper? He sold his soul to Santa. %% 6 * 9 = 42. In base 13. %% No beer, wine, or liquor will ever touch my lips... I use a straw. %% Bet you can't stop reading here <--- I knew it... %% ``The most important question when any new computer architecture is introduced is `So what?''' -- someone in comp.arch %% Fractals -- what you see is what you wait for. %% 100 buckets of bits on the bus 100 buckets of bits Take one down, short it to ground FF buckets of bits on the bus %% Mistakes? I don't make misakes! %% Hi. You have just entered the fourth dimension. Small isn't it? %% Ignore any lines above this one - we are having problems with our mailer. %% Without C people would code in Basi, Pasal and Obol. %% Hello, I'm not a .sig virus. Why don't you copy me into your own .sig? %% Goto, n.: A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers to complain about unstructured programmers. -- Ray Simard %% Thesaurus: ancient reptile with an excellent vocabulary %% ``Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.'' -- Mel Brooks %% Puns are bad, but poetry is verse. %% Unibus timeout fatal trap program lost sorry -- An error message printed by DEC's RSTS operating system for the PDP-11 %% AMAZING BUT TRUE: There is so much sand in Northern Africa, that if we spread it out, it would completely cover the Sahara Desert. %% Paranoia: A healthy understanding of the nature of the universe. %% Life is wonderful. Without it, you wouldn't know me. %% ``Why are manhole covers round? How many gas stations are there in the US?'' -- Interview questions asked by Microsoft, 1992 %% ``I like Boolean logic. NOT.'' %% If it works, rip it apart and find out why. %% This tagline will re-format hard drive in 15 seconds. %% If it wasn't so cool out today, it would be warmer. %% 0405 Do you know any people? 0406 ... more than one? 0407 ... more than two? -- from THE HACKER TEST %% Pentium instruction of the day: RJE: Return Jump and Explode %% Pentium instruction of the day: MSP: Mistake Sign for Parity %% ``If you want to eat hippopatomus, you've got to pay the freight.'' -- attributed to an IBM guy, about why IBM software uses so much memory %% ``God is real, unless specifically declared integer.'' -- Tavares Yamanashi %% Windows doesn't just crash - it opens a dialog box and lets you press OK first. %% Fon f le corrup . Press " " to reforma HD or " " to res ore from backup %% In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad move. -- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy %% The relative speed of a computer, regardless of CPU architecture, varies indirectly as the number of micro$oft products installed. %% I tñld yoñ, "Neverñtouch ñhe flopñy disk sñrface!" %% Live long and prosper... But don't let the IRS know. %% Too many errors on one line (make fewer) -- Apple's MPW C compiler Error Message. %% The worst thing about censorship is . %% ``The only thing that stops god from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.'' -- Chamfort %% A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking. %% If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would get done. %% Tomorrow is another day, but it'll suck too... %% A tidy desk is a sign of a cluttered drawer. %% ``Actually, I'm sitting on my butt staring at a computer screen.'' -- Tom Tomorrow %% Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. %% Pentium instruction of the day: BTW = Branch on Third Wednesday %% "One World, One Web, One Program" Microsoft Promotional Ad "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer" Adolf Hitler %% What do you get if you cross an agnostic, an insomniac and a dyslexic? Someone who lies awake at night wondering if there really is a dog. %% My christmas cards this year were all environmentally correct, they were made from recycled christmas trees. %% Windows 95: 32 bit extension and a graphical shell for a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition. %% Programming, n: A pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward. %% Always remember that you are unique, just like everyone else. %% A day without sunshine is like, you know, night. %% Life's a beach, then you dive. %% If it's tourist season, why can't we shoot them? %% Reality is for people who lack imagination. %% The next war will determine not what is right, but what is left. %% ``The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.'' -- FORTRAN manual for Xerox computers %% If at first you don't succeed, redefine success. %% If anything is worth doing, it would have been done already. %% Command, n.: Statement presented by a human and accepted by a computer in such a manner as to make the human feel as if he is in control. %% Imagine that Cray computer decides to make a personal computer. It has an 800 MHz processor, 512 megabytes of RAM, 1500 gigabytes of disk storage, a screen resolution of 2048 x 2048 pixels, relies entirely on voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket and costs $300. What's the first question that the computer community asks? "Is it PC compatible?" %% Lewis' Law of Travel: The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn't belong to anyone, ever. %% Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer, then you find there is nothing in it. %% The C Programmer: Most commonly seen waving a piece of paper around saying "I bet you can't guess what this does". The Lisp Programmer: 43,42,41,40,39,38... Where's that missing bracket... The ADA Programmer: Found in a corner reading the manual to decide if it is legal to add two integers. %% Dolphins are so intelligent that within a few weeks they can train Americans to stand at the edge of the pool and throw them fish. %% Real programmers don't document. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand. %% Programmer, n.: A red-eyed, mumbling mammal capable of conversing with inanimate objects. %% Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN. %% I hit the CTRL key but I'm still not in control! %% Sped up my XT; ran it on 220v! Works greO?_~" %% ``Excuse me for butting in, but I'm interrupt-driven.'' %% ``640K ought to be enough for anybody.'' -- Bill Gates, 1981 %% Error: Keyboard not attached. Press F1 to continue. %% Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue... %% Ultimate office automation: networked coffee. %% Who's General Failure & why's he reading my disk? %% Windows: Just another pane in the glass. %% 24 hours in a day... 24 beers in a case... coincidence? %% An error? Impossible! My modem is error correcting. %% Backups? We don't *NEED* no steenking backups. %% As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing. %% BREAKFAST.COM Halted... Cereal Port Not Responding %% ``My software never has bugs. It just develops random features.'' %% Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are. %% Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes. %% What has four legs and an arm? A happy pit bull. %% Dain bramaged. %% Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change. %% Mental Floss prevents Moral Decay. %% ``I can see clearly now, the brain is gone...'' %% For people who like peace and quiet: a phoneless cord. %% Every morning is the dawn of a new error... %% There are three kinds of people: those who can count, and those who can't. %% Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy and dead. %% We are the Knights who say: MOVE.L USP,A1 %% Laugh and the world thinks you're an idiot. %% Never put off 'til tomorrow what you can avoid altogether. %% If it works, don't fix it. %% Never hit a man with glasses; hit him with your fist. %% F U CN RD THS U CNT SPL WRTH A DM! %% Keep your mouth shut and people will think you're stupid; Open it and you'll remove all doubt. %% Constants aren't; Variables don't. %% Reality? Is that where the pizza delivery guy comes from?