Alan's Quote Collection
It works, for suitably small values of ``works''.
— Pope Icky, paraphrasing the "suitably small" entry in The Jargon File.
As the surface of our bloated Sun cools, it will turn red, and its light will reveal to our distant descendants a Sun swollen into a red giant. Their view will be brief, however, because the expanding sun will engulf them and the Earth.
— Thomas T. Arny, Explorations: An Introduction to Astronomy
BEWARE: Despite our best and most strenuous intentions to the contrary, absolutely anything could be on the other end of this hyperlink, including -- quite possibly -- pornography, or even nudity. NCSA disclaims all responsibility regarding your emotional and mental health and specifically all responsibility for effects of viewing salacious material via Mosaic.
With that in mind, are you *sure* you want to follow this hyperlink???
I have not failed. I have discovered 1000 things that do not work.
— Thomas Alva Edison
It is a wonder that curiosity survives a formal education.
I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.
Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
What was your user name again?
— The Bastard Operator From Hell
The proof is left as an excercise to the professor.
— Traditional
If brute force doesn't work, you ain't using enough!
— Unknown DESCHALL User.
I cannot be captain, for you see dear friends, I am unfit to lead other men into battle, into space, or in a line dance. I submit that if I picked my nose for an half an hour, my head would cave in. I'm nary to know the distinction betwixt shinola -- and that other stuff. I cannot lead because I cannot find my ass with both hands and a flashlight.
— Tom Servo, Mystery Science Theatre 3000
A computer scientist is someone who, when told to "Go to Hell," sees the "go to," rather than the destination, as harmful.
— Dr. Roger M. Firestone, citation unknown, probably Usenet
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
— R. Buckminster Fuller
It's the story of Matt, Igor, Ken and Carson the Muskrat... They're trapped in a world they never made...but are nevertheless striving to create a realistic yet playable simulation thereof!
— John Kovalic, Dork Tower
Just because he made it up doesn't mean it isn't true.
— Jason, Plan 10 From Outer Space
There are many truths, Lucinda. Some are uplifting, others are not.
— Uncle Bob, Plan 10 From Outer Space
Love is a trick that nature plays to make us reproduce. I want no part of it.
— Callisto, Xena: Warrior Princess
I've only written four operating systems. Don't listen to me.
Bart's rule of brain cell usage: You only
have so many brain cells. You may choose to kill them by
thinking, or you may choose to kill them with beer.
Corollary: Minimize
the number of brain cells spent thinking.
why would you want to own /dev/null? "ooo! ooo! look! i stole nothing! i'm the theif of nihilism! i'm the new god of zen monks."
— Kevin Lyda, citation unknown, probably Usenet
I'd rather win than be ethical.
We hate people.
— Tori Anderson and Kara Schwartz
Riley Hale: "You're out of your mind."
Major Deakins: "Yeah, ain't it cool?"
Please don't shoot the thermonuclear device.
— Major Deakins, Broken Arrow
The more different shapes of dice you need, the better the game is.
— Christian Herro, personal email
On role-playing: "Before trying anything else, attempt physical violence. It may not work, but it'll be fun!"
— Christian Herro, personal email
"One hundred and six miles to Chicago; we got a full tank of gas, a half-pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses."
"Hit it."
This message brought to you by the language C and the number F.
— Traditional
What people don't understand, they fear. Explain and they'll get bored enough to find something else to irrationally panic about.
— "Oddjob", citation unknown, probably Usenet
Once an expression or program becomes undefined, *all* aspects of it become undefined.
— The comp.lang.c FAQ, Steve Summit
Thou shalt not screw around with things thou dost not understand.
— Apollonia, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank
Hackworth was a forger, DR. X was a honer. The distinction was at least as old as the digital computer. Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having only explored the outlines of its potential. Honers got less respect because they appeared to sit still technologically, playing around with systems that were no longer new, hacking them for all they were worth, getting them to do things the forgers had never envisioned.
— Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
"Elegance?"
"Pardon me, Your Honor, the concept is not easy to explain--there is an ineffable quality to some technology, described by its creators as a concinnitous, or technically sweet, or a nice hack--signs that it was made with great care by one who was not merely motivated but inspired. It is the difference between an engineer and a hacker."
— Judge Fang and Miss Pao in Neal Stephenson's, The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
So Beck was the hacker and Oda was the backer. The oldest and most troublesome relationship in the technological world.
— Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
Put `em on and be yourself, mister alienated loner steppenwolf bemused distant meta-izing technocrat rationalist fucking shithead.
— Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
Langston Experiment for Chivalry
Come back
cried the anguished squirrel
as his two-striped woman keeled
out of their knot-hole home
What have I done to make you
angry with my soul?
the squirrel asked accordingly
You have taken all the acorns
and the past presence of chivalry
rest so still near the bottom of the knot-hole floor
His pain is great as his woman's
new lover leads her on
to new happiness
He soggies his grief
with sleep
and darkness
— Dan Hetzel, The Wayfarer, Volume VIII, Edgewood High School's yearly literary publication (1992 or 1993, uncertain)
Filtering out [potentially offensive online] material at the user end is a more practical, and far less objectionable, approach than limiting a nation of computer users to baby talk."
— New York Times editorial, July 28, 1995.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
God prevent we should ever be twenty years without a revolution.
— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
First they came for the hackers. But I never did anything
illegal with my computer, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the pornographers. But I thought there was
too much smut on the Internet anyway, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the anonymous remailers. But a lot of nasty
stuff gets sent from anon.penet.fi, so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the encryption users. But I could never
figure out how to work PGP anyway, so I didn't speak up.
Finally they came for me. And by that time there was no one left
to speak up.
— Alara Rogers, signature on Usenet.
In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. They they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.
— Martin Niemoeller, on the Nazi Holocaust, 1945 (Likely this is only an approximation of the original, there are many differing versions circulating.)
When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet.
— Myhr Lyle, usenet signature, 1995
The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.
— Assyrian tablet, c.2800 BC
The Three Great Virtues of a Programmer
- Laziness
- The quality that makes you go to the great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer.
- Impatience
- The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer.
- Hubris
- Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zues zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virute of a programmer.
— Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz, Programming perl (second edition)
Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.
— Jules Renard
And don't tell me there isn't one bit of difference between null and space, because that's exactly how much difference there is. :-)
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl
This is all quite independent of the question of whether I'm mad. :-)
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl on Usenet
Be consistent.
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, in the perl man page
break; /* don't do magic till later */
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, in stab.c from the perl source code.
double value;
/* or your money back! */
short changed;
/* so triple your money back! */
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, in cons.c from the perl source code
if (instr(buf,sys_errlist[errno])) /* you don't see this */
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, in eval.c from the perl source code
if (rsfp = mypopen("/bin/mail root","w")) { /* heh, heh */
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, in perl.c from the perl source code
If you want your program to be readable, consider supplying the argument.
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, in the perl man page
It's all magic. :-)
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl
As a wise man once said, "Move out of your parent's basement."
— Buttery Wholesomeness, T. Shaughnessy, D. Thron, C. Elliot
The Lord forgives, my son. I do not.
— HõL: Human Occupied Landfill, T. Shaughnessy, D. Thron, C. Elliot
At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats.
— The Washington Post, 9 June, 1985
The Internet Is Full.
Go Away.
— Traditional
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
— Doug Gwyn
PROGRAM {PRO-gram} [n] A magic spell cast over a computer which allows it to turn one's input into error messages; [v] to engage in a pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward.
— Traditional
The story you are about to see is a fib. But it's short.
— Mathnet
Somewhere there's danger. Somewhere there's injustice. Somewhere else, the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace. We've got work to do.
— Doctor Who (Sylvestor McCoy)
We have them just where they want us.
— James Tiberius Kirk, Star Trek (The original series)
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
— Hunter S. Thompson, journalist
whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
— Johann Von Goethe
I think that when the aliens come they will look like us, talk like us and think like us. We'd better have some bloody big guns waiting for them.
— B. Liddicott, citation unknown, probably Usenet
If you add a teaspoon of wine to a barrel of sewage, you get sewage. If you add a teaspoon of sewage to a barrel of wine, you get sewage. This, my son, is entropy.
— Traditional
Eat me.
— Lewis Carroll
I've gone to hundreds of fortune-tellers' parlors, and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.
— A New York City Detective
It's good to have double standards, in case one of them breaks.
— Thomas Kettenring
Come to think of it, there already are a million monkeys on a million typewriters...and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare...
— Blair Houghton, Usenet
Cthulhu '96! -- Why Vote for the Lesser Evil?
— Traditional
They're inhabitants of alt.tasteless . . . where they march to a decidedly different drummer, and, when they're done marching, usually shoot him.
— Dave Ratcliffe, usenet post
My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
— Vladimir Nabokov
Love is like a snowmobile flying over the frozen tundra that suddenly flips, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
— Matt Groening, the comic Life in Hell
USENET is not a right.
— Ed Vielmetti
USENET is a right, a left, a jab, and a sharp uppercut to the jaw. The postman hits! You have new mail.
— Chip Salzenberg
This was a test of the tywong flaming system. This was only a test. Had this been a real flame, no lucid points would have been attempted.
— Jon Blow, citation unknown, probably Usenet
It doesn't TAKE all kinds; we just HAVE all kinds.
— Michael Kalen Smith, citation unknown, probably Usenet
How can you stand not to push your own head into the cereal bowl in the morning and spare yourself the misery and ignominy of a life as a pitiable circus clown?
— Felix Gallo, citation unknown, probably Usenet
Never let your friends drive you crazy; you know it's within walking distance.
— Traditional
We are sorry, but the number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
— David Grabiner, citation unknown
A Renaissance man diffuses to refine himself.
— Steve Hug, citation unknown
If you can't make someone happy, make them chocolate fudge cake.
— Duke Euphoria "Ian Crowther" De'Gryn, Trans-Galactic Megapope, citation unknown, probably Usenet
Talent develops in quiet places; character, in the full current of human life.
— Johann Von Goethe
So, let me get this straight. You're worried about this thing you call . . . copyright? What does this strange word mean?
— Joshua Babcock, citation unknown
I'm surrounded by idiots of my own design.
— Joel Hodgson, Mystery Science Theatre 3000
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from ref fiat.
— Metlay
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
— David L. Goodstein, citation unknown
Money talks. Usually it says, 'Bend over.'
— Solomon Short, citation unknown
My name is Homer Montoya. You killed my father; prepare to--ooh, donuts!
— Keith Rupp, citation unknown, probably usenet
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
He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
— Traditional
A Discordian is anyone willing to look at the windmills and concede that they might be giants.
— The Principia Discordia: or, How I Found the Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her. By Malaclypse the Younger. Really.
The NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and ask for one.
— Rogue Agent, citation unknown, probably usenet
What is a European? Someone with the industriousness of the British, the sobriety of the Irish, the sense of humour of the Germans, the generosity of the Dutch, the modesty of the French and the courage of the Italians. In other words, a Belgian.
— Traditional
On the other hand, if we have in view the comprehensibility of a whole of speculative knowledge, which, though wide-ranging, has the coherence that follows from unity of principle, we can say with equal justice that many a book would have been much clearer if it had not made such an effort to be clear.
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith
Cyberpunk realized that the old SF stricture of "alter only one thing and see what happens" was hopelessly outdated, a doctrine rendered irrelevant by the furious pace of late 20th century technological change. The future isn't "just one damn thing after another," it's every damn thing all at the same time.
— Lawrence Person, "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto"
It's not good to forget who you are, but it's even worse to ignore who you're becoming
— SoulOSex, on IRC
A SERMON ON ETHICS AND LOVE
One day Mal-2 asked the messenger spirit Saint Gulik to approach the Goddess and request Her presence for some desperate advice. Shortly afterwards the radio came on by itself, and an ethereal female Voice said YES?
"O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Exquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a heavy burden from my heart!"
WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON'T SOUND WELL.
"I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe."
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?
"But nobody Wants it! Everybody hates it."
OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
At which moment She turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left The Polyfather stranded alone with his species.
— The Principia Discordia: or, How I Found the Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her. By Malaclypse the Younger. Really.
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency... Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
— General Douglas MacArthur, 1957
"What the hell are you getting so upset about? I thought you didn't believe in God."
"I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears, "but the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be."
— Joseph Heller, Catch-22
"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
— G. K. Chesterton
The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true I mean false. It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that what's true?
The answer is no.
— Leonard Nimoy, The Simpsons
Deleted; no longer something I want to be associated with.
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
— Hunter S. Thompson
Deleted; no longer something I want to be associated with.
I have found little that is good about human beings. In my experience most of them are trash.
— Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
I don't really trust a sane person.
— Lyle Alzado, Professional Football Lineman
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.
— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
— Kingslet Amis
Dear Contributor: Thank you for not sending us anything lately. It suits our present needs,
— Letter from publisher received by Snoopy in Peanuts by Charles Schulz
I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves.
— August Strindberg (1849-1912)
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.
— Ovid (43 B.C. - A.D. 18)
We are what we pretend to be.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
— Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple.
— Jesus Christ, Luke 14:26
Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
— Jeff Valdez
People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.
— Book review by Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
This isn't much of a quote book if I'm in it.
— Richard Dowd
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
— Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Only dead fish swim with the stream.
— Unknown
Either I've been missing something or nothing has been going on.
— Karen Elizabeth Gordon
The world is a madhouse, so it's only right that it is patrolled by armed idiots.
— Brendan Behan
Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.
— Claud Cockburn (1904-1981)
The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its behind.
— General Joseph Stilwell (1883-1946)
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
— T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
There are few problems in life that wouldn't be eased by the proper application of high explosives.
— Traditional
Reality is a collective hunch.
— Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner
Adults are obsolete children.
— Dr. Suess
There ain't no rules around here! We're trying to accomplish something!
— Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
I've been promoted to middle management. I never thought I'd sink so low.
— Tim Gould
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
— George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
You don't stop laughing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop laughing.
— Michael Pritchard
What I am forced to tell her is the web is still primarily a big circle jerk for graphics artists and designers who've suddenly discovered a new way to suck money out of anxiety ridden corporate greed-heads.
— A Unix programmer at Netscape Communications
Everything -- every trivial little thing -- matters. But in a real way, none of it does at all.
— Unknown
Love is like a vending machine...You insert a coin and press home the lever. There's some mechanical activity inside the bowels of the device. You receive a small sweet, frown at yourself in the mirror, adjust your hat, take a firm grip on your umbrella and walk away, trying to look as though nothing had happened...
— Nathaniel West, Day of the Locust
He had nothing to offer her, neither money nor looks, and she could only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her. Tod was a "good hearted man," and she liked "good hearted men," but only as friends.
— Nathaniel West
I would ask myself, too, the basic questions which a schoolboy, if he is properly trained, keeps in mind as he listens to his professors.
How does he know?
How can I be sure?
— Nicholas Freeling, The Cook Book
...a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it is what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.
— Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks For All the Fish
If knowing is half the battle, and knowledge is power, and power corrupts, is being corrupt half the battle?
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
— Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
Should the committee decide that our existence is useful, we may continue to exist.
Sabrina: "Salem, guard my door..."
Salem the cat: (indignantly) "Dogs guard. Cats watch... (evil tone) and Judge."
Life is pain, your highness. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
— Westley, The Princess Bride
I wear my unprofessionalism as a badge of honor. Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.
— Jamie Zawinski, Netscape Hacker
Information stolen is information improved.
— Jon Van Oast
'Information' is chaos; knowledge is the spontaneous ordering of that chaos; freedom is the surfing of the wave of that spontaneity.
— Hakim Bey
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
— Nathaniel Borenstein
The reason I think my computer is sentient is that it obviously doesn't like me.
You are a wooden board. Intel is a threaded fastener. Microsoft is a tool that drives threaded fasteners into wooden boards. Are you getting the picture yet?
— Alice Hill and Bill O'Brien, "The Hard Edge", Computer Shopper, Sept. 98
There they sit, the preschooler class encircling their mentor, the substitute teacher.
"Now class, today we will talk about what you want to be when you grow up. Isn't that fun?" The teacher looks around and spots the child, silent, apart from the others and deep in thought. "Jonny, why don't you start?" she encourages him.
Jonny looks around, confused, his train of thought disrupted. He collects himself, and stares at the teacher with a steady eye. "I want to code demos," he says, his words becoming stronger and more confidant as he speaks. "I want to write something that will change people's perception of reality. I want them to walk away from the computer dazed, unsure of their footing and eyesight. I want to write something that will reach out of the screen and grab them, making heartbeats and breathing slow to almost a halt. I want to write something that, when it is finished, they are reluctant to leave, knowing that nothing they experience that day will be quite as real, as insightful, as good. I want to write demos."
Silence. The class and the teacher stare at Jonny, stunned. It is the teachers turn to be confused. Jonny blushes, feeling that something more is required. "Either that or I want to be a fireman."
— - Grant Smith, 14:32, 11/21/93
With government crippled and industry brain-dead to any conceivable moral appeal, the future of decentered, autonomous cultural networks looks very bright. There has never been an opportunity to spread new ideas and new techniques with the alacrity that they can spread now. Human energy must turn in some direction. People will run from frustration and toward any apparent source of daylight. As the planet's levees continue to break, people will run much faster and with considerably more conviction.
— The Manifesto of January 3, 2000, Bruce Sterling
After many years of cut-and-paste, appropriation, detournement and neo-retro ahistoricality, postmodernity is about to end. Immediately after the end of the fin de siecle, there will be a sudden and intense demand for genuine novelty.
— The Manifesto of January 3, 2000, Bruce Sterling
It is also palpably absurd to live in a society where capital can move faster and more easily than human beings. Capital exists for the sake and convenience of human beings.
— The Manifesto of January 3, 2000, Bruce Sterling
Is blue supposed to be soothing when I lose my data?
— Dave Demaagd
DISCLAIMER: The words 'he', 'him' and 'his' are used throughout this book as generic third-person singular pronouns. With this usage the author, a man of great gallantry, does not wish to imply that memebers of the fairer sex are any less likely to have astonishing adventures than their male counterparts despite their frailty, lack of education and great aptitude for giggling and fainting. He does not assume that flouncy crinolines and a decolletage like alabaster might make them any less able to engagee in espionage against the French while disguised as a haddock, or that their extensive skills in needlepoint and household management would be anything but an asset when seducing the Empress of Russia. In short, he believes that in many way women are just as brave, capable and interesting as men, and in occasional circumstances more so. Bless their little hearts.
— James Wallis, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen: A Superlative Role-Playing Game in a New Style
A bug is something you fixed, and an enhancement request is a bug you don't want to fix.
Shipping is a feature.
— Chris Peters
The GM looks confused, we must be doing something right.
— Unknown
Michael Corleone: Soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren't.
Hyman Roth: What does that tell you?
Michael Corleone: It tells me the rebels could win.
There are two basic traits of a good system administrator:
1) infallibility
2) the ability to learn from one's mistakes.
— Unknown
Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long term developer mindshare threat....
Recent case studies (the Internet) provide very dramatic evidence in customer's eyes that commercial quality can be achieved / exceeded by OSS projects....
Linux and other OSS advocates are making a progressively more credible argument that OSS software is at least as robust - if not more - than commercial alternatives. The Internet provides an ideal, high-visibility showcase for the OSS world.
In particular, larger, more savvy, organizations who rely on OSS for business operations (e.g. ISPs) are comforted by the fact that they can potentially fix a work-stopping bug independent of a commercial provider's schedule....
Linux can win as long as services / protocols are commodities...
OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market....
The ability of the OSS process to collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing. More importantly, OSS evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale....
— Vinod Valloppillil in a confidential Microsoft document
"It's fairly mild, and I got the feeling that the person that wrote it actually liked Linux," said Linux creator Linus Torvalds. "But maybe I'm on drugs."
— Linus Torvalds, quoted in Wired News, regarding a Microsoft document discussing Linux
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
1. All information should be free.
2. Access to computers and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works-should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
3. Mistrust Authority - Promote Decentralization
4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not things such as age, race, sex, degrees or wealth.
5. You can create beauty and art on a computer.
6. Computers can change your life for the better.
— Hackers, by Steven Levy
I don't have a solution, but I admire your problem.
— Unknown
Eating kittens is just plain wrong, and no-one should do it, ever!
— The Tick
If your wit was any drier, you'd have to moisturize your mind.
— Jack Scheer
No man who uses EMACS is deserving of love.
— Tom Christiansen to co-author Nathan Torkington in The Perl Cookbook
...dealing with Microsoft Support is about as helpful as calling the Psychic Friends Network for help with your computer....
— Eric Lee Green, "FUD 101"
That can't be it. My co-worker across the hallway uses CDE and he has 3 spouses and a girlfriend...
Ok, I'm switching window managers...
Mimes do not make art. Mimes make filth.
A major vendor shipped it as a way to improve the user interface, so it must be useless.
These lines do not catch the IEEE notations of "Infinity" and "NaN", but unless you're worried that IEEE committee members will stop by your workplace and beat you over the head with copies of the relevant standard's documents, you can probably forget about these strange numbers.
— Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington, The Perl Cookbook
The software required 'Windows 95 or better', so I installed Linux.
— Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington, The Perl Cookbook
Twisted cleverness is my only skill as a programmer.
— Elizabeth Zwicky
Basically, avoid comments. If your code needs a comment to be understood, it would be better to rewrite it so it's easier to understand.
— Rob Pike
Comments on data are usually much more helpful than on algorithms.
— Rob Pike
Of course, we all know that the best ruling body is a Cabal.
PS: There is no cabal.
IP [Intellectual Property] has the shelf life of a banana. It just doesn't last, yet we're all worried about protecting it, hiding it, securing it, storing it in a vault.
— Scott McNealy, Do We Worry Too Much About Protecting IP
NT is simply not a multiuser OS in the sense that Unix, VMS, MVS, OS/400, RSTS/E, or most anything else written in the last two decades is.
— Mitch Blank
Besh? You hate life. Any answers?
— David Carley to Matt Beshta in an email to the UPL junkies mailing list
The only obvious different between that cover and last weeks' edition of the National Enquirer is that Newsweek uses slicker paper and takes better pictures.
— Jon Katz in an article on Slashdot
Pete, you may work for hell, but I've admin'd IRIX, HP-UX, and NT all in the same day.
There really isn't anything you can do that can scare me after that...
— Erik Paulson to Peter Keller by email
Hank: How `bout a beer?
Bill: Beer's a depressant, Hank.
Hank: Don't blame the beer.
This is a dorky way to do it.
— A friend of Alan De Smet's on using two pointer indirections for two dimensional arrays in C++
Something big is bound to happen -- the director wouldn't have set us up like this for nothing. Unless this is "real life..."
— Aaron Hertzmann in email
[The] reusable SW components are in /bin
— "ThwartedEfforts" in a post on Slashdot
Removed, as I no longer like it.
Removed, as I no longer like it.
In the old days, we programmers were very rare.... It seemed appropriate for us, the blessed ones, to create programs out of nothingness and shower them on the world gratis. Did God bill us for six days' labor, F.O.B., 2/10 n/30?
— G. L. Sicherman
"But if we turn off telnet, how will we get into the machine?"
— Michelle Craft quoting an unknown person
Strangely noone asks that before installing NT.
— Mitchell Blank
A country where there are more lawyers than engineers (and perhaps relatedly, more prison inmates than students) cannot expect to have a technological future.
— Martin Vermeer, "Unix as an element of literacy"
Isn't it nice that some cat climbed up a teliphone poll and didn't want too come down untell the local fire department 'rescued' the cat?
— Tom Rutledge, in an email to the upl junkies mailing list
This is a time-honored manner of foreign policy. In World War II, we successfully forced a new constitution on Japan while providing aid. Like any good abusive parent, we can beat them within an inch of their lives and them buy their forgiveness with a few shipments of humanitarian relief.
One could even argue that the fact that these people are dieing isn't really important because it doesn't effect my life.
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No first world country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity -- much less dissent.
— Gore Vidal
Some people believe in laissez faire economics, other believe in reincarnation. Some people even believe that COBOL is a real programming language.
Nobody is really smart enough to program computers.
— Steve McConnel, Code Complete
However, a programming language is really a very tiny part of the world, and as such, it ought not to be taken too seriously.
— Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++
"Isn't it [Windows] nagware already?"
"No... Windows doesn't have any nag screens."
"Then what are those blue and white screens I get every day?"
— Illiad, User Friendly, Jan 4, 1999
Patents are a pair of shackles that innovators wear around every limb they have.
— Tom Rutledge, in an email to the upl junkies mailing list
Consider this Fragboy, even though she is a real person, smelling good, and with all the right curvy parts that you only previously found on your Logitech MouseMan, is giving up what you love for Sex really worth it?
— Iambe
I would rather spend 10 hours reading someone else's source code than 10 minutes listing to Musak waiting for technical support which isn't
— Dr. Greg Wettstein, Roger Maris Cancer Center
Basically, the only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
— Bruce Ediger on comp.os.linux.misc on X interfaces. (Some information on this quote.)
...the linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. wrong one. "Do it yourself.". That's it.
Microsoft is not the answer
Microsoft is the question
NO (or Linux) is the answer
— Unknown
In most countries selling harmful things like drugs is punishable. Then how come people can sell Microsoft software and go unpunished?
— Hasse Skrifvars
How should I know if it works? That's what beta testers are for. I only coded it.
— Linus Torvalds (uncertain)
After watching my newly-retired dad spend two weeks learning how to make a new folder, it became obvious that "intuitive" mostly means "what the writer or speaker of intuitive likes".
— Bruce Ediger in comp.os.linux.misc on the intuitiveness of the Mac interface.
>Linux is not user-friendly.
It _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.
— Unknown
Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.
— Linus Torvalds, announcing Linux 2.0
C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.
— Dennis M. Ritchie
First off, I'd suggest printing out a copy of the GNU coding standards, and NOT read it. Burn them, it's a great symbolic gesture.
— Linus Torvalds, in the Linux kernel coding style document
"Segmentation fault: core dumped" is just your computer's way of saying "I miss you. Play with me some more. I'm free for the next six hours, aren't you?"
— David C. Ross in a post on Slashdot
Methinks if you've got macro virus's running rampant in your machine, you've got bigger problems. Like Word for example.
As I tell anyone who asks, "why are you majoring in Computer Science?" - To make the porn go faster, and cheaper.
— Erik Paulson on the UPL Junkies mailing list
More good code has been written in languages denounced as "bad" than in languages proclaimed "wonderful" - much more.
— Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++
I shall stomp upon all who oppose me.
The stomping shall be swift.
The stomping shall be painful.
And I shall show no mercy
in all of my stomping.
Amen.
— Charlie Wiedman, Lunch Money, "Stomp" (Produced by Atlas Games, a generally cool company that unfortunately uses frames on their web site, so I can't give you a direct link to Lunch Money)
Boies: What non-Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of 1996?
Gates: I don't know what you mean 'concerned.'
Boies: What is it about the word 'concerned' that you don't understand?
Gates: I'm not sure what you mean by it.
Boies: Is the term 'concerned' a term you're familiar with in the English language?
Gates: Yes.
— David Boies and Bill Gates, testimony for Microsoft anti-trust case.
Copyright is designed to protect the intellectual property rights of the people who create something. Copyleft is designed to protect the rights of the users. The Berkeley license is copy central: Take this stuff down to the copier and make as many copies as you want, for whatever you want.
— Kirk McKusick
Cryptography restrictions are the USA's Maginot Line. Big, expensive, ultimately routed around regardless, and once the war is over, difficult to get rid of.
— Russell Nelson
Men are icky and scary.
For more than twenty years now I've dreamed of living in a whole world of software that doesn't suck -- clean, powerful, reliable, well-built code that we techies can love and be proud of instead of cursing because it's all so flaky and broken and sad.
— Eric S. Raymond, "Understand My Job, Please!"
If we want the freedom to protect ourselves as we see fit and the freedom to take out a little 9mm insurance policy against the possibility that our government may get out of hand and need to be dealt with, then we have to put up with 17-year-olds learning how to make pipe bombs on the Internet and running around with shotguns and semi-automatic weapons.
— Scott D. Haring, "Second Sight: A Futile Search for Answers" in Pyramid Magazine.
"White suburban kids are assumed to have an individual psychic development that can be sidetracked into dysfunctional forms of expression, if there is some sufficiently powerful external stimulus -- a video game, a lurid Web site -- that can knock them off course." But when it comes to inner-city black kids, "the explanations are assumed to be socially determined from the get-go." By the media's lights, "Society explains their behavior in a way that strips them of their individuality and retains only their class and race attributes" -- which is why video games are never trotted out to explain homicide in inner-city schools.
— Mark Boal, "The Shooters and the Shrinks", Salon, quoting Andrew Ross, American studies department at NYU
Chairman: Item 6 on the Agenda, the Meaning of Life... Now Harry, you've had some thoughts on this...
Harry: That's right, yeah. I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts... One... people are not wearing enough hats. Two... matter is energy; in the Universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this soul does not exist ab inito, as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.
[Pause.]
Max: What was that about hats again?
Harry: Er... people aren't wearing enough.
— Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
As the digital revolution has resulted in the widespread use of computers by technical incompetents, most traditional software--application programs, operating systems, numerical control instructions, and so forth--is, for most of its users, firmware. It may be symbolic rather than electronic in its construction, but they couldn't change it even if they wanted to, which they often--impotently and resentfully--do.
— Eben Moglen, Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright
So Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law says that if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network. It's an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their un/asy sense of being too alone. The only question to ask is, what's the resistance of the network? Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Ohm's Law states that the resistance of the network is directly proportional to the field strength of the ``intellectual property'' system.
— Eben Moglen, Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright
You've got to understand their market has always been the Windows space, where you're actually doing people a favor by charging them money for things, because that's the only way to keep from confusing them. Linux users are smarter than this, of course
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, in an interview in Linux Journal
Interviewer: How'd you come up with that name [Perl]?
Larry: I wanted a short name with positive connotations. (I would never name a language ``Scheme'' or ``Python'', for instance.)
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, in an interview in Linux Journal
In fact, biologists are just now realizing that any organism which seems to be ``perfect'' for one environment is likely to be in danger of extinction as soon as the environment changes. Over-specialization is only as good as your ecological niche. We're not just talking about dinosaurs here, but also snail darters and cheetahs and a bazillion beetles in Brazil--not to mention Visual Basic.
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, in an interview in Linux Journal
MCSEs (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers) and CNEs (Certified Netware Engineers) don't have to go to college at all. They just have to pass the tests. This sounded great until I remembered my days 20 years ago investigating the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. One of the underlying reasons for that fiasco was that the reactor operators were trained not to run the reactor as much as to pass the test.
— Robert X. Cringley, I, Cringley for June 3, 1999
YOUR MONEY BACK IF NOT SATISFIED!
(however, we suspect that we will be quite satisfied with your money)
The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly.
— Richard Stallman, "The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement", Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates (2021 update: Stallman's been cancelled and deserved it. He was right about Free Software... and too wrong about too much else.)
I'm not saying that they were knowingly dishonest, perhaps they were simply stupid.
— Linus Torvalds, commenting on those who really thought Microkernels were wise. (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)
So right now the only vendor that does such a stupid thing is Microsoft.
— Linus Torvalds on bad file system interface design. (Open Sources , 1999 O'Reilly and Associates.)
I am not convinced that they can write solid stable software. Proprietary software is already hobbled by it's secretive cathedral nature, but Microsoft seems to have a corner on incompetent programming as well.
— Chris DiBona from the introduction, Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates
For something that does not exist, the Internet Engineering Task Force has has quite an impact.
— Scott Bradner, "the Internet Engineering Task Force", Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates
The basic publication series for the IETF is the RFC series. RFC once stood for "Request for Comments," but since documents published as RFCs have generally gone through an extensive review process before publication, RFC is now best understood to mean "RFC."
— Scott Bradner, "the Internet Engineering Task Force", Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates
The IETF motto is 'rough consesus and running code'
— Scott Bradner, "the Internet Engineering Task Force", Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates
We can debug relationships, but it's always good policy to consider the people themselves to be features. People get annoyed when you try to debug them.
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, Second State of the Onion Address
Computers may be stupid, but they're always obedient. Well, almost always.
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, Second State of the Onion Address
Of course, in Perl culture, almost nothing is prohibited. My feeling is that the rest of the world already has plenty of perfectly good prohibitions, so why invent more?
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, Second State of the Onion Address
There are a billion people in China. And I want them to be able to pass notes to each other written in Perl. I want them to be able to write poetry in Perl.
That is my vision of the Future. My chosen perspective.
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)
In a way they were right the basics of operating systems, and by extension the Linux kernel, were well understood by the early 70s; anything after that has been to some degree an exercise in self-gratification.
— Linus Torvalds (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly and Associates)
This is important, and a little hard to understand. English is useful because it's a mess. Since English is a mess, it maps well onto the problem space, which is also a mess, which we call reality. Similarly, Perl was designed to be a mess (though in the nicest of possible ways).
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, Second State of the Onion Address
So I did some research. On the Web, of course. Big mistake...
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, Second State of the Onion Address
You need people who are willing to be partisan on behalf of their chosen culture, while remaining sufficiently non-partisan to keep in touch with the rest of the world. It's no fun to create a new culture and then cut it off from the rest of humanity. No, the fun thing is to try to persuade others to share your opinions about what rules and what sucks. Nothing is more fun than evangelism.
— Larry Wall, creater of Perl, on synthetic cultures (specifically Open Source) in his LinuxWorld Speech
Upside: But you're not paid to do that. Most people would find it bizarre that you could have such a huge unpaid job ...
Torvalds: Even the people who can't imagine doing something just for the love of doing something--they're sad people, but there are probably people like that.
— Upside interview with Linus Torvalds
"...I came out of it dead broke, without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of UNIX."
"Well, that's something," Avi says, "Normally those two things are mutually exclusive."
— Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Data expands to fill the space available for storage.
— Parkinson's Law of Data
The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.
— The Ninety-Ninety Rule (Tom Cargill, Bell Labs)
The time from now until the completion of the project tends to become constant.
— Douglas Hartree
After all, actually fixing the bugs would siphon off the resources needed to implement the next user-interface frill on marketing's wish list -- and besides, if they started fixing security bugs customers might begin to expect it and imagine that their warranties of merchantability gave them some sort of right to a system with fewer holes in it than a shotgunned Swiss cheese, and then where would we be?
— "Security through obscurity" entry in The Jargon File.
Intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think.
— Scott Adams, Dilbert
When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives
— Robert Heinlein, "If this goes on --"
The question is: What do you do with your life?
The wrong answer is: Be the richest guy in the graveyard.
— Larry Ellison, Billionaire and founder of Oracle
Restrictive tools designed to prevent the worst programmers from failing often prevent the best programmers from succeeding.
— Bjarne Stroustrup, "Talking in Code", Red Herring
Much of the relative simplicity of Java is - like for most new languages - partly an illusion and partly a function of its incompleteness.
— Bjarne Stroustrup, Stroustrup's FAQ
Lisp requires an unhealthy relationship with lambda calculus that leads to proposing the dog of food instead of feeding the dog.
— Alan G Carter and Colston Sanger, "The Programmer's Stone"
Do not abuse exceptions to create weird control flow in company time. In particular, do not hide longjump()s in macros or call them from handlers. If you with to experiment with the Powers of Darkness, do it at home.
— Alan G Carter and Colston Sanger, "The Programmer's Stone"
At this point we discover that instead of a computer that requires no skills because it pretends to be another piece of furniture such as a desktop, we have a computer that relevant computer skills don't work on, because after all, a desktop doesn't need to have its user accounts configured, so there are no such things as desktop user account configuration skills out there to be made use of. We eventually discover that even in domestic situations where all one might wish to do is pick a new IP without reloading the whole machine, shareware systems that admit that they are computers are more user friendly that the so called 'user friendly' stuff.
— Alan G Carter and Colston Sanger, "The Programmer's Stone"
THE POINT
you could spend an hour counting the petals in a flower
it might take you a year to count the veins in each petal
if you spent ten lifetimes, maybe you could count its cells
but you'd have completely missed the point
you fuckhead
— Bryan O'Sullivan, cDc #300
Start by putting yourself in your users' shoes. Why are they coming to your site? If you look at some Web sites, you'd presume that the answer is "User is extremely bored and wishes to stare at a blank screen for several minutes while a flashing icon loads, then stare at the flashing icon for a few more minutes."
— Philip Greenspun, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
When fascism comes to this country, it won't be wearing jackbooks; it'll be wearing sneakers with lights in them, and it'll have a smiley face and a Michael Jordan T-Shirt.
— George Carlin in and interview in the The Onion, November 11-17, 1999
Whatever happens, happens, and when it happens, we'll deal with it with guns.
— Erich Henniger in a Deadlands game.
When I wasn't playing rogue at university, I was hacking on code, for which I used a popular rogue-variant called vi.
— Tom Christiansen, Interface Zen
All we have left of a common culture is TV. The primary force that binds us as a nation, as a group, as a hurded flock is that shinie shinie box.
— Tom Rutledge, in an email to the UPL junkies mailing list
Do you realize that when Alexander the Great was 25, he was the ruler of Egypt, Turkey, Persia, and Greece? He had 1.5 million square miles under his control and millions of subjects. What do you have now that you are 25? I bet you have exactly the 12 square feet of your desk and some cute fuzzy stuffed animals on it under your absolute control. How far the ambition of mankind has fallen.
— Peter Keller's "Winter" email to the UPL junkies mailing list from December 1999
craft: I hate people sometimes.
gulfie: You should hate people all the times.
— Michelle Craft (craft) and Tom Rutledge (gulfie) by email on the UPL junkies mailing list
Zach is going to be driving Satan out, and Nick is gonna drive NT out, so you'll be sure and want to come.
— Erik Paulson's email announcement of a UPL Coordinators meeting.
I never really understood how there could be things that would drive you insane just because you knew them until I ran into Windows.
— Peter da Silva, alt.sysadmin.recovery
Windows gives you a nice view of clouds so you can't see any potentially useful boot time messages.
— Bill Hay, alt.sysadmin.recovery
IBM's vision is apparently to make IBM hardware "scream with Microsoft software"
I have visions of screaming with (at and about) Microsoft software, too.
— Joe Moore, alt.sysadmin.recovery
A *huge* proportion of people cannot make *correct and accurate* generalisations of principles. They have to learn everything as if it's an unrelated piece of crap, BECAUSE THEY ARE STUPID! PEOPLE ARE STUPID! YES, THAT'S RIGHT, I'M SHOUTING NOW! AIEEEE!! PEOPLE ARE STUPID!
— Thorfinn, alt.sysadmin.recovery
Hey, you're right. I don't want to call a destructor on my objects, I want to call a *destroyer*. Gozer has come for your memory, little PersistentNode!
— Joel Gluth, alt.sysadmin.recovery
Light a fire for a luser and he'll be warm for a night; set a luser on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
— fun, alt.sysadmin.recovery
PC's are designed by a committee of people who are in different companies in different countries and who never talk to each other.
— Derick Siddoway
And nobody speaks the same language and they hate each other...
— Chris Adams
But I do not particularly want to go where the money is - it usually does not smell nice there.
— A. Stepanov, interview
I am not the first to point out that capitalism, having defeated communism, now seems about to do the same to democracy. The market is doing splendidly, yet we are not.
— Ian Frazier, "On the Rez."
It is one thing to pray; it is another to pray to entities who might not only be listening, but who will search you out on the road and beat you across the head with sticks if you say something that offends them.
— Neil Gaiman, The Dream Hunters
If there is going to be a Big Brother in the United States, it is going to be us -- the FBI
— Paul George, Supervisory special agent for the Michigan bureau of the FBI, in remarks made at the Freedom and Privacy 2000 Conference.
Our code is proof positive that there is magic in the world.
Screw everyone. I didn't go into politics because I like the populace; I did it because they obviously can't be trusted to choose for themselves. Fuck them and their lowbrow entertainment.
— Gus Hartmann, on the UPL junkies mailing list, discussing movies.
Dungeons & Dragons is, at its heart, a game about kicking down doors, killing monsters, and taking their stuff.
— Keith Strohm of Wizards of the Coast, in a post to the 3rd Edition message board
History has shown that one of the best deterrents to pirated product is providing legitimate product at appropriate prices. In the music industry, we have already seen that people will gladly pay fair prices for legally-produced product even when it can be easily reproduced and unlawful copies can be easily acquired.
— Michael Eisner, Chairman and CEO of Disney, addressing the Senate's Joint Economic Committee
I consider the use of C++ iostreams to be a bug and will log it.
— Jeff Hostetler, AbiSource Code Guidelines.
...Then do not expect to learn all the mysteries of Perl in a moment, as though you were consuming a mere peanut, or an olive. Rather, think of it as though you were consuming, say, a banana. Consider how this works. You do not wait to enjoy the banana until after you have eaten the whole thing. No, of course not. You enjoy each bite as you take it. And the next bite motivates you to take the next bite, and the next....
— Larry Wall in the Foreward to Learning Perl
Mostly, when you see programmers, they aren't doing anything. One of the attractive things about programmers is that you cannot tell whether or not they are working simply by looking at them. Very often they're sitting there seemingly drinking coffee and gossiping, or just staring into space. What the programmer is trying to do is get a handle on all the individual and unrelated ideas that are scampering around in his head.
— Charles M. Strauss
We use Linux for all our mission-critical applications. Having the source code means that we are not held hostage by anyone's support department.
— Russell Nelson, President of Crynwr Software
For all those who doubted, here is evidence that I have a boyfriend...or at least a bunch of pictures of the same guy.
— Kathleen Leeds on a web page discussing my brother, Brian
Yeah! Let's rebuild Quohog! We can make the library, and the police station, and the bar, and two Denny's, so we can say "Let's not go to that one, let's go to the good one."
— Kris, The Family Guy television series
The wonderful thing about Tiggers is -
Tiggers are wonderful things.
Their tops are made of rubber.
Their tails are made of springs.
They're bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy.
Full of fun, fun, fun!
The most wonderful thing about Tiggers is-
I'm the only one!
— Tigger, from A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh
Knowledge is now the critical component to production, and access to it represents a key divide between rich and poor.
— OI ACC Planning Papers
If this is the future of the web, I better get a new eyeglass prescription.
— "Reality Master 101" in a post on Slashdot.
Computer security products, like software in general, have a very odd product quality model. It's unlike an automobile, a skyscraper, or a box of fried chicken. If you buy a product, and get harmed because of a manufacturer's defect, you can sue...and you'll win. Car-makers can't get away with building cars that explode on impact; chicken shops can't get away with selling buckets of fried chicken with the odd rat mixed in. It just wouldn't do for building contractors to say thing like, "Whoops. There goes another one. Sorry. But just wait for Skyscraper 1.1; it'll be 100% collapse-free!"
Software is different. It is sold without any claims whatsoever. Your accounts receivable database can crash, taking your company down with it, and you have no claim against the software company. Your word processor can accidentally corrupt your files and you have no recourse. Your firewall can turn out to be completely ineffectual -- hardly better than having nothing at all -- and yet it's your fault. Microsoft fielded Hotmail with a bug that allowed anyone to read the accounts of 40 or so million subscribers, password or no password, and never bothered to apologize.
— Bruce Schneier, Crypto-Gram Newsletter, May 15, 2000
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
— Mario Savio's speech before the FSM sit-in, Dec 3, 1964, Berkeley California
Thus it is clear that the human race has at best a very limited capacity for solving even straightforward social problems. How then is it going to solve the far more difficult and subtle problem of reconciling freedom with technology? Technology presents clear-cut material advantages, whereas freedom is an abstraction that means different things to different people, and its loss is easily obscured by propaganda and fancy talk.
— Ted Kaczynski, "Industrial Society and Its Future" (aka The Unabomber's Manifesto), paragraph 137
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all.
— Robert Heinlein, "Life-Line"
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
— Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813
To think that anyone "owns" something as abstract as software is like saying that someone "owns" a cat.
— Peter Wayner's article "Plugging Holes in the GPL" on Slashdot
Love and stoplights can be cruel.
Capitalism means never having to say you're sorry.
— Unknown
Did you know they outed the Snuffelupagus because they felt teaching children that sometimes they are right when the whole world doubts them was dangerous?
— Unknown, regarding Sesame Street
HELP!! Come see the violence inherent in the sysadmin!
— Illiad, User Friendly, March 16, 1999
Men are from mars, women are evil.
Government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any individual citizen.
— Warren v. District of Columbia
We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
After you burn the books you'll need to go back to the records and find out who read the banned books, then burn them as well.
— Tom Rutledge, in an email to the upl junkies mailing list
You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.
— Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, January 26, 1999
"You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." is the modern equivilant of "Let them eat cake."
— Tom Rutledge, in an email to the upl junkies mailing list
Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant.
— Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Some of us have a chance of seeing the end of the dark ages.
You can't take something off the Internet. That's like trying to take the pee out of a swimming pool.
— Joe, NewsRadio
Sanity is really a one trick pony, all you get is rational thinking, but with insanity the sky's the limit.
— The Tick
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.
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.
I wish I was something cool, like God's Wrath, but I'm not, I'm just some guy with a baseball bat.
The church is near but the road is icy, the bar is far away but I will walk carefully.
— Russian Proverb
My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.
Deleted; no longer something I want to be associated with.
I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.
— H. L. Mencken
If Little Girls are Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice then, logically, Women must be Alcohol, Cinnamon and Chocolate/Caffeine. Wait. That sounds like Irish Coffee. Right, OK, Women are Irish Coffee
— E Teflon Piano
Yeah man, I tell ya what, man...That dang ol' Internet, man...You just go on there and point and click...Talk about W-W-dot-W-com...An' lotsa nekkid chicks on there, man... Click. Click. Click. Click. Click....It's real easy man.
— Boomhauer, King of the Hill
Law of Software Envelopment: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."
— Unknown
We all enter this world in the same way: naked; screaming; soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn't have to stop there.
There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed.
— interview in Focus magazine, Oct 23, 1995 Bill Gates,
USER, n.: The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot."
— Dave Barry, "Claw Your Way to the Top"
You know how dumb the average person is? Well, by definition, half of 'em are dumber than *that*.
Deciding to 'just be friends' is like shooting yourself in the foot and trying to walk it off.
If knowing is half the battle, and knowledge is power, and power corrupts, is being corrupt half the battle?
When, exactly, did the content industry ... start treating their consumers as "the other side," waging a continuous and pointless war? When did every consumer become a potential lawbreaker - to the point where those who respect copyright laws and artists' rights (definitely not the same thing) are subject to restrictions, limitations, and other such rot as to keep them from becoming the "pirates" the industry is convinced they will be (or have the potential to be)?
— "hiryuu" in a post on Slashdot
Take the United States, for example. It's, like, what, 300, 400 years old?
— Overheard by James Sehmer at The Town Pump, a bar in Verona, Wisconsin.
Home? I have no home. Hunted...despised...living like an animal! The jungle is my home. But I shall show the vorld that I can be its master! I shall create a new race of people - a race of atomic supermen that vill conquer the vorld!
— Bela Lugosi as Eric Vornoff in Bride of the Atom
you guys aren't my girlfriend! You're much hairier!
— Joe Rheaume, personal email
I was in the pub last night, and a guy asked me for a light for his cigarette. I suddenly realised that there was a demand here and money to be made, and so I agreed to light his cigarette for 10 pence, but I didn't actually give him a light, I sold him a license to burn his cigarette. My fire-license restricted him from giving the light to anybody else, after all, that fire was my property. He was drunk, and dismissing me as a loony, but accepted my fire (and by implication the licence which governed its use) anyway. Of course in a matter of minutes I noticed a friend of his asking him for a light and to my outrage he gave his cigarette to his friend and pirated my fire! I was furious, I started to make my way over to that side of the bar but to my added horror his friend then started to light other people's cigarettes left, right, and centre! Before long that whole side of the bar was enjoying MY fire without paying me anything. Enraged I went from person to person grabbing their cigarettes from their hands, throwing them to the ground, and stamping on them.
Strangely the door staff exhibited no respect for my property rights as they threw me out the door.
What lawyers call "intellectual property" is -- as every Latin student knows -- no more than theft from the public domain.
— Andy Mueller-Maguhn, after his election as European Director of ICANN.
I don't believe in sweeping social change being manifested by one person, unless he has an atomic weapon.
— Howard Chaykin
Lots of lefty-liberals tell me how proud they are to not have cable. Their refusal to watch the WWF and reruns of "The Beverly Hillbillies" is why the left will never attain true power in this country.
— Michael Moore, "Mike's Message" for 9/27/2000
I know it was weighing on your mind. You can now rest easy, I have taken care of it. The tuna melt I had in your proxy was very tasty. Smooth, warm and gooey. The resultant satisfaction should be reaching you shortly. If that wonderful feeling of gooey goodness does not reach you, please contact your network service provider, as you webtone link may be down. It is not a problem on this end.
— Jeff Obarski to Alan De Smet by email, after Alan's problems getting a tuna melt on Fridays.
Thank goodness...that they're making cracking illegal.
They made drugs illegal a few years back, and it's really helped! You never see drugs, or hear about drugs anymore
— "Hairy_Potter" in a post to Slashdot
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
— Benjamin Franklin, motto of his "Historical Review," 1759. (Common during United States' Revolutionary War. Occurs as early as Nov, 1755 in an answer by the Assembly of Pennsylvania to the Governor.)
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
— William Pitt to the House of Commons, 1783
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient . . . the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis.
The mushrooming of surveillance has been explained by the sense of panic and crisis felt throughout the government during this period of extremely vocal dissent, large demonstrations, political and campus violence, and what at the time seemed the inauguration of a period of widespread anarchy. While officials... suggested that these crises justified the surveillance, they failed to recognize that the rights guaranteed by the constitution are constant and unbending to the temper of the times...
— Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, 1973
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
— Paul Valery, 1895
Accepting the injustice as a compromise, expediant, or 'realistic' is the gateway across the road to hell.
— Tom Rutledge, in an email to the upl junkies mailing list
George Bush [jr] said he didn't reveal the drunk driving charge because of what his daughters might think of him. He had preferred that they think of him as a man with numerous failed business ventures who now executes people.
— Saturday Night Live, December, 2000
I read /. for the same reason I go to the zoo.
— Unknown
So monkeys can throw feces at you?
— "Spud the Ninja" in a post on Slashdot
[Bill Gates] should be thanked...
— Unknown
And the mafia should be thanked for their contributions to local communities. No thanks.
— "dattaway" in a post on Slashdot.
having more cash makes the holidays merrier.
— MBNA in junkmail to their credit card holders.
That's the sort of thing that requires a lot of experience making mistakes.... So I guess you're best qualified.
— David Carley to Alan De Smet, discussing developing test suites.
The patent bar has been lowered so far you can trip over it if you're not watching.
— Perry Leopold, on earning $10,000 busting a bad patent
Gov'r. Thomas was so pleas'd with the construction of this stove, as described in it, that he offered to give me a patent for the sole vending of them for a term of years; but I declin'd it from a principle which has ever weighed with me on such occasions, viz., That, as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.
— Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, chapter 10
Hey, some of us *specialize* in making stupidity a reality!
— Damian Conway, Perl hacker, on creating a Perl module to make Perl whitespace sensative like Python.
In a perfect world, we'd all lie blind and motionless in stacked coffins filled with pudding. It would be dark and warm and nobody would have to compete with anybody and also the government would pay for the pudding.
— Erik, "Black & White", 04/10/01, Old Man Murray
Monkeys aren't even worth the small amount of effort it takes to strap them to gurneys and test lip gloss on them by smearing it into their eyes.
— Marvin, "Why Scientists Are Stupid", 03/14/01, Old Man Murray
Several drinks, an apartment filled with Ikea furniture, a corporate job, and plans to obtain a "cookie-cutter Euro-copy" car have convinced me that I may well be my khakis after all. Fuck. At least I'm armed. And drunk.
— (Name removed) in an email to the UPL junkies mailing list
I got called by [the interviewer]. I told him that you'd fit in perfectly, because of your uncanny ability to waste time. I also told him that he'd find your fundamental hatred for authority a refreshing challenge after he hired you.
— Aaron Pavao, by email to Alan De Smet, describing a reference call.
I am so not the smartest tree in the ocean.
— Michael Zenke by email
If I were creating a world, I wouldn't mess about with butterflies and daffodils! I would've started with lasers, eight o'clock, day one!
— Evil, Time Bandits
There is a lot of controversy about how human-level machine intelligence will develop. Some scientists believe it will follow a path similar to the one followed in nature by evolution: there will be artificial one-celled animals, artificial insects, artificial lawyers, artificial monkeys, and so on up to artificial human-level machine minds.
— Douglas B. Lenat, "Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality"
"[Tolkien's writing appeals] to those with the mental age of a child, computer programmers, hippies and most Americans."
— Unknown, 1992 edition of Private Eye, quoted in the article "Lord of the Geeks"
"But look," said Ponder, "the graveyards are full of people who rushed in bravely but unwisely."
"Ook."
"What'd he say?" said the Bursar, passing briefly though reality on his way somewhere else.
"I think he said, 'Sooner or later the graveyards are full of everybody,'" said Ponder. "Oh, blast. Come on."
— Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
MP3s and porn are far and away the most popular uses for the Internet today, according to a study i just made up.
— Mike Schiraldi, a post to Slashdot
Of course everyone knows that vim is the best text editor in the world. Anyone who tells you differently is either wrong, lying, or criminally insane. (Or an emacs user, in which case they are wrong, lying _and_ criminally insane).
— CmdrTaco (Rob Malda) in the post "VIM 6.0 is Out" on Slashdot
Wisconsin beers are the best. You are not entitled to disagree.
— "Scrapdog" (a coworker from my days at Hypercosm) on his biography page.
Everyone is always trying to prove P=NP. If that turns out to be true then God comes down and gives you a dollar or something like that.
— Peter Keller in a post to the UPL junkies mailing list. (What is N and NP?)
Will the virus impact my Macintosh if I am using a non-Microsoft e-mail program, such as Eudora?
If you are using an Macintosh e-mail program that is not from Microsoft, we recommend checking with that particular company. But most likely other e-mail programs like Eudora are not designed to enable virus replication.
— Microsoft in a Virus Alert for a virus targetting Office 2001 for the Mac. Apparently Office 2001 is designed to enable virus replication...
To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
— Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States of America. 1858-1919
Last month a study commissioned by the Czech affiliate of Philip Morris International was released. The funding and public release of this study which, among other things, detailed purported cost savings to the Czech Republic due to premature deaths of smokers, exhibited terrible judgment as well as a complete and unacceptable disregard of basic human values.
— Philip Morris, in a press release on July 26, 2001.
For more on this topic, I recommend calling me on the phone when I'm drunk...
— Gus Hartmann, on the UPL junkies mailing list, discussing movies.
Insignificance is a nice vacation every once in a while.
— Nate Anderson, on the UPL junkies mailing list.
I know I'd trade my freedoms for an unlimited supply of bacon. crispy of course.. limp bacon is the scourge of the earth!
— Nate Anderson, on the UPL junkies mailing list.
Arrow keys are just wrong. If I'm reaching for the arrow keys I might as well be reaching for a one button mouse.
— Jeff Obarski, on why bash's vi editing mode is superior.
That would be evil, or bad, or even not good.
— Joe Bayer, during a D&D game.
I secretly knew all politicians were puppets. I suppose that idea is now so ingrained into the American public, they might as well actually *be* puppets.
— Peter Keller in a post to the UPL junkies mailing list, referring to this news photograph. (Sigh, the web sucks and the photo is gone. It was a photo of Kermit the Frog testifying before Congress.)
He showed the judge a diagram that depicted Windows as a system made up of dozens of oddly shaped, interconnected pieces. Madnick said the diagram showed how Windows was like a "house of cards" that could collapse if any of the pieces were removed.
— From the Reuter's article "Microsoft's MIT prof gets grilled by states". Professor Madnick was testifying for Microsoft.
Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming.
...I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom.
— Jamie Kellner, CEO of Turner Broadcasting System, in an interview with Cableworld.
Quote removed. It's a good quote, but Lincoln probably never said it.
I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.
— Jack Valenti, President of the Motion Picture Association of America at the House Hearing on Home Recording of Copyrighted Works.
Microsoft has therefore taken the position that their code is so bad that it must be kept secret to keep people from being killed by it. Windows -- the Pinto of the 21st century.
— A poster on Slashdot commenting on Microsoft's Vice President for Platforms testimony that some Microsoft code is so flawed it can not be safely disclosed.
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
— Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
(This message is intentionally written in French)
— Jean-Christophe Filliatre, in a 2002-07-01 post to comp.lang.scheme.
Thanks to the printing press, the deviant smart people managed to capture their genius and communicate it without having to pass it on genetically. Evolution was short-circuited. We got knowledge and technology before we got intelligence.
— Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle
Our products just aren't engineered for security.
— Brian Valentine, Microsoft Senior Vice-President in charge of Microsoft Windows Operating System development at a developer conference. From an article at ComputerWeekly 360.
The public will learn that patents are artificial stimuli to improvident exertions; that they cheat people by promising what they cannot perform; that they rarely give security to really good inventions, and elevate into importance a number of trifles...no possible good can ever come of a Patent Law, however admirably it may be framed.
— The Economist, in a 1851 article. (Cited in "Imitation v inspiration" in The Economist, September 2002
There ought to be but one large art warehouse in the world, to which the artist could carry his art-works, and from which he could carry away whatever he needed. As it is, one must be half a tradesman.
— Ludwig van Beethoven, January, 1801
Why then should we feed the corporations with gullible, naive people out to change the world?
— Jeppe Salvesen in a November 13, 2002 post to Slashdot
Money is like horse shit. If it is spread around, things grow. If it is left to pile up, it stinks.
— Tom Rutledge, in an email to the upl junkies mailing list
"RT [Real Time] is cool" - As defined by who? Don't believe the hype kiddies, and besides, as an avid RPGer, I know we have nothing to do with cool. While we're sitting in a basement rolling dice, swilling Mountain Dew and other snacks while pretending to be mighty warriors in an alternate universe, cool people are out doing lines off naked women because they can. It still puzzles me why certain RPG developers seem so intent on following trends, when their consumer base couldn't be trendy, even with a +10 Bag of Conforming to the Social Norm.
— Gareth Davies, "Treatise on Combat to Pink Floyd".
It's as if the judge ruled that Congress can ban the sale of printing presses, because the First Amendment right to publish speech was not attacked directly and quills and ink are still available.
— Cindy Cohn, Electronic Frontier Foundation Legal Director, quoted here
Ratio of the number of pardons George W. Bush has issued turkeys to those he has issued human beings : 2:1
— "Harper's Index", November 2002
Yes, it's generally frowned upon for network administrators to roam the streets carrying a concealed weapon in most places, but that kind of job is really dangerous and exciting in the world of Switch d20!
— Steven Marsh, "Random Thought Table: Adventuring Means Never Doing Paperwork," Pyramid Magazine
Locally grown cannabis has been Tennessees largest cash crop for the past ten years, surpassing even tobacco.
— U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, State Fact Sheet for Tennessee
As an STL container, there are really only two things wrong with vector<bool>. First, it's not an STL container. Second, it doesn't hold bools.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, all of them interesting. But few, in my opinion, can equal the convenience and immediacy of the cream pie.
— Noel Godin, famous for, amoung other things, hitting Bill Gates with a cream pie, as reported in The Observer
"Hold on, hold on," said the Bursar. "Yes, indeed, figuratively a word is made up of individual letters but they have only a —" he waved his long fingers gracefully "—theoretical existance, if I may put it that way. They are, as it were, words partis in potentia, and it is, I am afraid, unsophisticated in the extreme to imagine that they have any real existence unis et separato. Indeed, the very concept of letter having their own physical existence is, philosophically, extremely worrying. Indeed, it would be like noses and fingers running around the world all by themselves—"
A file is a pretty good place to store data.
It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.
— Paul Graham, "Why Nerds are Unpopular"
I still can't believe they named that thing the fuckin' USA PATRIOT ACT. Grown-ups did that. Never forget that.
— get your war on, page nineteen, strip 2, panel 2
If the human body's obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not me.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.
— Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The parties are advised to chill.
— Closing to Judge Alex Kozinski's ruling in Mattel v. MCA. (The ruling stood when the Supreme Court declined to hear it.)
We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great nation.
— George W. Bush, Jr., 43rd President of the United States, a man who proudly served in the military, did his business carefully by the books, is a pillar of sobriety, and has no secrets.
The Republican Party of Texas reaffirms the United States of America is a Christian nation...
The Party belives that the practice of sodomy tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God... The Party opposes the decriminalization of sodomy.
We support a character education cirriculum [in public schools] based upon biblical principles...
— Republican Party of Texas's 2002 Platform, protecting your rights to freedom of religion and sexuality.
However, because AIDS represents such a severe threat to both the health and economic well-being of our citizens, we insist that the epidemic be de-politicized and that as a society, we take all appropriate steps to protect out citizens from this epidemic. ... We oppose the needle exchange and bleach kit programs.
— Republican Party of Texas's 2002 Platform, on how nicely asking drug users to stop is "all appropriate steps" to combat AIDS.
Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable "alternative" lifestyle in our public education and policy...
We suppose individual teachers' right to teach creation science in Texas public school.
— Republican Party of Texas's 2002 Platform on what is too crazy to teach, and what is reasonable.
I won't bother recommending you dump Microsoft software and migrate to Linux or OS/2, because you've never listened to me before, and you've already convinced yourself that you can't. I won't bother recommending that you keep your antivirus software up-to-date, either, because with today's fast moving worms like Klez.H, you already have it before a fix is available.
I do recommend prayer. Don't bother praying that the worms won't come, because they will anyway - get down on your knees and pray that your competitors stay with Windows so their costs will be as high as yours.
— Andrew Grygus, "You've Got the Klez!"
A: No.
Q: Should I include quotations after my reply?
— Why you should never put quoted text after your new text when replying to an email message (or any other sort of message). From the Top-Post entry in The Jargon File.
Message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS is just an excercise in computer science masturbation. It may feel good, but you don't actually get anything DONE.
— Linus Torvalds in ""Re: Some very thought provoking ideas about OS architecture" to the linux-kernel mailing list.
A computer is a state machine.
Threads are for people who can't program state machines.
— Alan Cox in "Re: Interesting analysis of linux kernel threading by IBM" on January 11, 2000 to the to the linux-kernel mailing list.
The executive, Irving Wladawsky- Berger, an I.B.M. vice president, said, "If we thought this was a trap, we wouldn't be doing it, and as you know, we have a lot of lawyers."
— "Microsoft is Set to Be Top Foe of Free Code," by John Markoff in the New York Times
Why, of course, the people don't want war. ... Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ...voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
— Hermann Goering, Hitler's second in command, in personal conversation
The piracy rate was calculated by comparing the researchers' estimates on demand with data on actual software sales.
— The Business Software Alliance effectively takes wild guesses on piracy, then claims that the results are valid. Quoted from "Software Piracy Said to Decline in 2002" by Anick Jesdanun
But other strands of media use irony to assert their right to have no position whatsoever. So, you take a cover of FHM, with tits on the front - and it's ironic because it appears to be saying "women are objects", yet of course it isn't saying that, because we're in a postfeminist age. But nor is it saying "women aren't objects", because that would be dated, over-sincere, mawkish even. So, it's effectively saying "women are neither objects, nor non-objects - and here are some tits!"
— Zoe Williams in "The final irony," published in the Guardian Unlimited.
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.
Mr. Gates acknowledged today that the company's error reporting service indicated that 5 percent of all Windows-based computers now crash more than twice each day.
— "Microsoft Moves to Weather Time of Slow Growth", by John Markoff in the New York Times
I found the most convincing part to be the working stiffs, the guys who have a modest home and kids who go to public schools. They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on. I don't have to tell you that.
— Jack Valenti, President of the Motion Picture Association of America on the crippling poverty of his minions, as quoted in "Ben Shiller" by Joel Stein in Entertainment Weekly (around March or April, 2003).
But I'm not gonna stop working until people can find a job who are looking for work.
— George W. Bush, Jr., 43rd President of the United States, in a July 30, 2003 press conference, three days before taking a month long vacation.
Let me be clear tonight to Senator Lott and to Tom DeLay. One of the lessons that I learned in Vietnam -- a war they did not have to endure -- and one of the basic vows of commitment that I made to myself, was that if I ever reached a position of responsibility, I would never stop asking questions that make a democracy strong ... Those who try to stifle the vibrancy of our democracy and shield policies from scrutiny behind a false cloak of patriotism miss the real value of what our troops defend and how we best defend our troops.
— Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, at a Democratic dinner in New Hampshire, quoted in "Male cheerleaders and chicken hawks" by Joe Conason
Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
Roughly translated: I am sorry for the length of my letter, but I had not the time to write a short one.
— Blaise Pascal, Lettres provinciales, letter 16, 1657
I was typing at my keyboard, and then suddenly, I woke up 18 hours later in a used book store reeking of Absinthe and screaming obscenities at a C++ book written by Bjarne Strousoup....
— Peter Keller describing how he felt after spending a week debugging some strange compiler behavior.
So, is there a point to all of this? Well, there are two points
...
2. Have fun watching me foam red at the mouth, take pain killers until I think I'm Marcel Marceau and give impromptu performances where I'm behind invisible glass, and then pass out when the rum I used to wash down the pills finally kicks in.
— Peter Keller describing how he felt after spending a week debugging some strange compiler behavior.
Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.
All copy-protections can be hacked, but if [you] give people what they are asking for in terms of value, they won't go out and steal it. It's called trusting the consumer.
— Sony Music Chief Technology Officer Phil Wiser, quoted in the article "Sony Music sings new copy-protection tune"
i beat the internet
the end guy is hard
— "BombScare", as quoted at bash.org
Dang it, Jim, I'm an astronomer, not a doctor! I mean I am a doctor, but I'm not that kind of doctor! I have a doctorate, it's not the same thing! You can't help people with a doctorate! You just sit there and you're useless!
— Doctor Delbert Doppler in Treasure Planet.
...the Microsoft model of monopoly, where a broad presence pillows the muffled cries of an infant industry.
— Clinoti in a post to Slashdot
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
— Ed Howdershelt (Possible link)
When a woman asks if you want to go out for pie, say yes!
— Dylan Graham, in the notes to the 01/23/02 Pinky Suthers Show
Al Gore: "I'm Al Gore and these are my vice-presidential action rangers: a group of top nerds whose sole duty is to prevent disruptions in the space-time continuum."
Philip J. Fry: "I thought your sole duty was to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate."
Al Gore: "That, and protect the space-time continuum. Read the Constitution."
— Futurama, "Anthology of Interest 1"
That's the trouble with travel, see: It brings up more questions than it can answer, most of them idiotic.
— Patrick Smith in "Ask the Pilot" in Salon, March 12, 2004
Quit whatever you're doing, it's not important. Maybe you're performing a surgery. Put the scalpel down. Maybe you're holding a runaway car back from rolling over a carriage which contains an infant. There's no baby shortage, and even if there were, they're apparently a lot of fun to make.
— Tycho, in a news post on Penny Arcade.
Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone -- a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.
— The forward thinking and open minded Leon Kass, Chairman of Bush's Council on Bioethics, in his book The Hungry Soul (cited from here).
Thou shall not suffer bad engineering.
— Rudy Moore in an email to the UPL junkies mailing list
What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label "Liberal?" If by "Liberal" they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of "Liberal." But if by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people -- their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties -- someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."
— John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States of America, in a speech accepting the nomination of the New York Liberal Party.
There are two kinds of software in the world: that which is beautiful and that which works.
— Douglas Thain, at a Condor team meeting, when asked what he had learned as a PhD student.
It's all strung together with chicken wire and duct tape. Or rather Perl, but it's the same thing.
Why do I have to fly somewhere when I have ssh?
— Peter Keller, on why he had never been on an airplane.
When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.
Aaron's a Unitarian, he only eats Unicorns.
— Joe Rheaume, on the dietary requirements of Unitarians
...the Web is the sum of all human knowledge plus porn.
— Ron Gilbert, in the weblog entry "Monkey Iceland" from July 15, 2004.
Pirate Simon and Pirate Andrew were once, mere fishermen... But Pirate Jesus let them join his pirate crew. Now they have become fishers-of men. And booty, mostly fishers-of- booty.
— A. Joseph Rheaume, character descriptions for Pirates Simon and Andrew for the web comic Pirate Jesus.
Here is where I make my decree of "Pete's Law": All languages features will be expressed in an application with enough programmers.
— Peter Keller in an email to the UPL junkies mailing list
...linking with a third party library is like having sex with someone you don't know--you've just had sex with all of their friends too
— Peter Keller in an email to the UPL junkies mailing list
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ....'
— Issac Asimov, 1920-1992, author.
When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have someone strong and wrong than weak and right.
— Bill Clinton, 1946-, Forty-Second President of the United States of America, in "How Democrats Can Come Back"
Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience states that "users spend most of their time on other websites."
— Jakob Nielsen, in "Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design"
"Really Good Programming Standards" is just a different way of saying "One Programmer".
— Peter Bierman in an email to the UPL junkies mailing list
There's just one little request I have. If it's not too much trouble, of course. Call me profoundly misguided if you want. Call me immoral if you must. But could you please stop calling me arrogant and elitist?
I mean, look at it this way. (If you don't mind, that is.) It's true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose abortion and where gay relationships have full civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values -- as deplorable as I'm sure they are -- don't involve any direct imposition on you. We don't want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same gender, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?
We on my side of the great divide don't, for the most part, believe that our values are direct orders from God. We don't claim that they are immutable and beyond argument. We are, if anything, crippled by reason and open-mindedness, by a desire to persuade rather than insist. Which philosophy is more elitist? Which is more contemptuous of people who disagree?
— Michael Kinsley in the article "Am I Blue?" in The Washington Post
A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt.... If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.
— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in a 1798 letter to John Taylor after passage of the Sedition Act.
Bush might as well be proposing legislation that two plus two is five. And if that happened, there would be no shortage of Republicans prepared to endorse this view, experts on arithmetic to declare that it is a very difficult question, research to indicate that the answer may lie anywhere between 2.3 and 7.09, moderate Washington sages to urge caution, media to report both sides of the question, and media critics to accuse the media of a subtle bias in favor of two plus two is four.
— Michael Kinsley in "The Meathead Proposition" for the Washington Post.
Hmmm... an Alanocracy. I think living in a world ruled by Alan would be largely filled with sanity and ninja monkeys. I am willing to stand for this.
— "Kathleen", in a comment on the Random Dialogue blog.
I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don't like it
What's with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don't like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn't it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?
— Jonathan Coulton in his song "Skullcrusher Mountain". (Free, Legal MP3! Check out his other songs.)
...his usual course of action was to listen to everyone else's plans, nod at appropriate times, and then say something like, "I think a frontal assault would be the best plan; I think we can easily prevail." This same plan was offered with the same earnestness whether the enemy in question was a pack of brigands or France.
— Steven Marsh, "Random Thought Table: Lies, Dice, and Character Sheets," Pyramid Magazine
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.
— James D. Nicoll in a post to Usenet.
...If you get sloppy with the truth, then anyone who doesn't feel like dealing with those problems can happily devote himself to quibbling with your numbers instead. Does it really matter that much whether it's one women in four who will be raped, or one woman in 10? Or 20? It's still too many, and it needs to be stopped. Good luck getting that done while everyone's busy arguing about your stats.
— Laura Miller in "The passion of Andrea Dworkin" in Salon.
Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.
— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis in "Other People's Money" in Harper's Weekly, December 20, 1913
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then.
— Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) in a 1787 letter to Abigail Adams
XML is like violence. We should use more.
— Greg Thain, personal conversation with Alan De Smet, June 7, 2005
being the gm is the shit, and also bullshit. the shit because you get to toy with peoples' little lives, bullshit because it's like the goddamn sims, their little bladder meter goes all the way to the red and they can't figure out for them stupid selves to get off the stupid couch and go to the stupid bathroom. no, you gotta click on the little thing, and click on the other little thing, and they spend so long in there that they miss their carpool and get fired, and then they come crying to you, wah wah wah. feebs.
— Vincent Baker, kill puppies for satan
int zero(int x, int y, int z) { return 0; } // ha ha, screw you, x y and z!
— "restless_coder" in a LiveJournal post
If I ever start spouting Nietzsche, or Libertarian market-cult cant, I hope my friends will arrange an intervention.
— William S. Annis in blog post "Nietzschean Irruption" on his blog William Blathers
Pretty soon we will create the imaginary police, who will become extremely corrupt. Then we will need the imaginary national guard to instill martial law. In this heat I will become the first imaginary president and quickly become the imaginary dictator. By this time, all thing imaginary will be tradable for real.
— "Justin" in a comment on Schneier on Security
And if we object to any of this, the imaginary terrorists will win.
— Bruce Schneier, in a follow up.
Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders
— Alanna via IRC as quoted on bash.org
A woman has a close male friend. This means that he is probably interested in her, which is why he hangs around so much. She sees him strictly as a friend. This always starts out with, you're a great guy, but I don't like you in that way. This is roughly the equivalent for the guy of going to a job interview and the company saying, You have a great resume, you have all the qualifications we are looking for, but we're not going to hire you. We will, however, use your resume as the basis for comparison for all other applicants. But, we're going to hire somebody who is far less qualified and is probably an alcoholic. And if he doesn't work out, we'll hire somebody else, but still not you. In fact, we will never hire you. But we will call you from time to time to complain about the person that we hired.
— DragonflyBlade21 via IRC as quoted on bash.org
Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.
— Bruce Schneier in the post "Computer Crime Hype" on his blog.
Blogs are for people who don't matter. That's why I have one.
— Pete Keller, personal conversation with Alan De Smet, early December, 2005.
...if you never encounter anything in your community that offends you, you are not living in a free society.
— Former Canadian Prime Minister Avril "Kim" Campbell, on Real Time with Bill Maher.
Bill Gates made his fortune in a world without software patents - and if that's not big enough to act as an incentive, nothing is.
— Andrew Brown, "Owning ideas" in Guardian Unlimited
People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don't put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.
— Jamie Raskin, professor of constitutional law from Washington's American University, in a debate on a proposed anti-gay marriage amendment to Maryland's constitution.
I prefer to start each morning by querying my database of people I have grudges against.
— The red robot in the comic "The Day His Rage Made Sense" at Diesel Sweeties
To fully understand this point, you must first prove the existence of the Almighty God. ... Second, you must prove that the Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God.
— "Let Us Introduce ... Jesus Christ!" in The Trumpet.
If Bush said the earth is flat, of course Fox News would say "yes, the earth is flat, and anyone who says different is unpatriotic." And mainstream media would have stories with the headline: "Shape of Earth: Views Differ."...and would at most report that some Democrats say that it's round.
— Economist Paul Krugman, as quoted in "Op-Ed Jeremiah: The New York Times' Paul Krugman."
Why not connect the PCs into a network; write some software to schedule applications, share data, and handle security; and scrap the mainframe? Some installations did this, only to discover that at great time and expense, they had reinvented the mainframe.
— Gary DeWard Brown, System 390 JCL Fourth Edition, 1998
That and there is a certain segment of the roleplaying community that cannot differentiate absurdist humor from insanity and will insist on doing annoying things in the name of humor. And we hate those people.
— "K", "Tome of Fiends"
You can't get a leopard to change his spots. In fact, now that I come to think of it, you can't really get a leopard to appreciate the notion that it has spots. You can explain it carefully to the leopard, but it will just sit there looking at you, knowing that you are made of meat. After a while it will perhaps kill you.
— Geoffrey K. Pullum, "Less than three years: a policy revision", Language Log
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.
— Jamie Zawinski, in an August 12th, 1997 post to comp.emacs.xemacs and alt.religion.emacs.
Fun fact: adding "in a post-9/11 world" to any sentence makes it twice as effective.
Example: "In a post-9/11 world, why is it so hard for me to find a good philly cheesesteak sandwich?"
— "bulanjing" in comment on Schneier on Security.
Mac OS X. Because making UNIX user-friendly was easier than fixing Windows.
— Unknown. Earliest usage I can find: Jun 3, 2001
On one hand, it makes no sense for the monsters and encounter areas of the gameworld to come pre-stocked with loot. It also makes no sense for feral beasts and the shambling undead to walk around carrying fabulous cash prizes.
On the other hand, gold coins are shiny and make a fun jingling sound when you have lots of them.
— Shamus Young, DM of the Rings VI
The DM will do a lot of talking, but if he's not rolling the dice then what he's saying is probably not important.
— Shamus Young, DM of the Rings XI
It's great that you took the time to come up with "Count Devron Masuvius Beldamor the III, High Magester of the Realms of Greeenwood", but you need to realize that the players are just going to refer to him as "that wizard guy", or simply, "Mister fancy-pants".
— Shamus Young, DM of the Rings XII
D&D is a sort of simulation. A simulation of living in a fantasy world where fearless heroes and dreadful monsters clash daily in spectacular battles. A world where you are a great champion, and the creator of the universe is frequently disorganized, highly distractable, and alarmingly vague on the rules of the universe he's trying to run.
— Shamus Young, DM of the Rings XIV
Whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls.
— "Makali", as quoted by Jamie Zawinski in "linux usability."
Sometimes, when a door closes, others don't open.
— Pete Keller
EXERCISE THREE
Design and implement a full-size game. Submit it to testing, fix all the resulting bugs, help marketing design a package, ship the game, and sell at least 250,000 units.
Writing specifications is like writing a novel. Writing code is like writing poetry.
— Unidentified developer at Microsoft, as quoted by Raymond Chen in his post "Comparing writing specifications to writing code" on his blog, The Old New Thing.
Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.
— This section from the The National Defense Strategy of The United States of America, March 2005, Department of Defense.
Little Girl: But which cookie will you eat first?
Cookie Monster: Me thinks you have misconception of the cookie eating process.
— Unknown
Apart from being a fine game, Tetris is also a perfect mirror of the human condition. For a while the game is entertaining, and we seem to have mastered it and are having fun. Then, something goes wrong. A rash mistake, or an unfulfilled wish, and we're fighting to repair the damage, but we've been thrown off-balance, and the cancer is spreading. Blocks that were once orderly and harmonious are jumbled and filled with holes, and our cup is on the verge of running over. There's always a point at which we stop planning for the future, and realise that we don't have one - all we can do is cling to the present and concentrate, focus our minds on what it's like to be alive, to play the game, before it's all over and we can't think any more.
— From "Death, Tetris, and Spindizzy : The Eternal Black Shroud.", by Ashley Pomeroy
No matter how epic the battle, once begun, the thing sounds more or less like a bingo game: People shout out numbers and other people get excited about them.
— Shamus Young, DM of the Rings XXI
The invisible hand may be holding a bottle of cough syrup.
— Bob Harris, 2006-12-07, "Why I will never do well in the stock market" at the This Modern World blog.
I now understand the point of distributed open-source projects like this: it would be too much work for me to find everybody who contributed to it and punch each of them in the face.
— James Wallis, in his blog Cope.
When a bomb hits you, your ship blows up and another appears. When you are blown up three times, the game is over. If you got a high score, you are valuable as a person. If your score is low, you are not.
— Jeff Vogel, "Six ways to write more comprehensible code" at IBM's developerWorks.
I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
— Charles Antony Richard Hoare, 1981 "The Emperor's Old Clothes", Communications of the ACM
I think having multiple distros is an inevitable part of open source. And can it be confusing? Sure. Can it be inefficient? Yes. But I'd just like to compare it to politics: 'democracy' has all those confusing choices, and often none of the choices is necessarily what you 'really' want either, and sometimes you might feel like things would be smoother and more efficient if you didn't have to worry about the whole confusion of voting, different parties, coalitions, etc.
But in the end, choice may be inefficient, but it's also what keeps everybody involved at least 'somewhat' honest. We all probably wish our politicians were more honest than they are, and we all probably wish that the different distros sometimes made other choices than they do, but without that choice, we'd be worse off.
— Linus Torvalds, quoted in "Linus Torvalds: I Have Never Really Talked To Microsoft!" at EFYtimes.com
SQLite assumes that the operating system that it is running on works as advertised. If that is not quite the case, well then hopefully you will not lose power too often.
— "Atomic Commit In SQLite", November 28, 2007 (backup)
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
— Bertrand Russell
I really have a couple of things I need to get done, and this project reeks of procrastination. Which may well mean it is finished by midnight.
— Michael Phillips by personal email to Alan De Smet, April 19, 2008
Postgres is like a dog. It's a lot of fun. It's easy to get. And you need to give it attention every few hours or it will decide to do something you really don't want it to do. Oracle is like a cat. It doesn't really like you. It doesn't really need you. You can leave it alone for a week and it will be just fine.
— Erik Paulson, presentation at Condor/Paradyn Week 2007, May 1, 2007.
The Internet owes its success to two pillars of human activity: masturbation and procrastination.
— Chris Wilson, "Why Is the Internet So Infuriatingly Slow?" Slate, September 5, 2008
Steampunk takes something stereotypically feminine that most boys hate — Victorian lace and frills and tea and crumpets — and says, "Hey, how about some robots with that?"
— Stephen H. Segal, "Guest Column: Five Thoughts On The Popularity Of Steampunk," Fantasy Magazine
Having 120 gigabytes of information storage in solid-state flash memory is like having the entire knowledge of a hundred ancient libraries of Alexandria in your pocket. But who the hell wants to explore your pocket?
— Stephen H. Segal, "Guest Column: Five Thoughts On The Popularity Of Steampunk," Fantasy Magazine
College was one course. Upper middle class socialization. 128 credits.
— Dorothy Gambrell, "Lifestyles of the Nouveau Pauvre," Cat and Girl.
I'll end up writing a bunch of letters to the Blue Wives of the Blue soldiers, letting them know that their husbands perished in a heroic but utterly stupid way while attempting to secure a better, safer future for Blue-clothed people everywhere.
— Shamus Young, "Starcraft: Artificial Military Intelligence"
To me, a cafe is like a large desktop image that dispenses caffeinated beverages and scones.
— Lore Sjöberg, "Workin' at the Internet Cafe: Laptop Dilemma"
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.
There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
— Bjarne Stroustrup, noted here
A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
— Leslie Lamport, email entitled "distribution". (Backup link)
A man's troubles can be measured by the number of keys in his pocket.
— David Plankers, quoted at The Lone Sysadmin
The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; "You're gonna miss us when we're gone!" has never been much of a business model.
— Clay Shirky, "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable". (backup)
What I'm saying is that server-side solutions invariably lead to sinister necromantic cabals.
— "Jerry" "Tycho" Holkins, "Lunch"
...ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge....
— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.
— Alan J. Perlis, "Epigrams in Programming", SIGPLAN Notices 17 (9) September 1982, pp 7-13
As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero.
— Vaarsuvius, Order of the Stick #696, by Rich Burlew
...if you're seriously considering flashing [a Quick Time Event] up out of nowhere in the middle of a cutscene, and the only punishment for missing it is having to watch the cutscene from the beginning, then you deserve to have your hands removed by a specially-appointed government agency.
— Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw, "Extra Punctuation: A Study of Tim Schafer", 2009-11-03, backup copy
People who want a theocracy tend to think they're Theo.
— Rick Warren, November 28, 2009 post to Twitter
If you want me to treat your ideas with more respect, get some better ideas.
— John Scalzi, Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded
"Tsk, Tsk," said the Hatter, "what a mess you've made."
"It is perfectly fine," replied Alice calmly. "I will leave it for the garbage collection service to recover."
"Don't expect any garbage collection here. Furthermore, YOUR polymorphic variables won't ever be properly deleted, because you haven't declared your destructor to be virtual."
"My what to be what?" said Alice, starting to get worried.
"Declare your destructor. You must have a destructor. Everything that is constructed should be destroyed; it's only natural. Further more, if you are ever not quite what you seem, you should declare yourself to be virtual."
"A RULE TO REMEMBER!" roared the Red Queen. "NEVER MAKE A MESS WITHOUT CLEANING IT UP FIRST."
"You can ignore her," whispered the Dormouse, picking up the tea cake Alice had just set aside, "but you shouldn't cast away CONST so lightly."
Alice began to feel that this new world she found herself in was not quite the same as the cozy sitting room she had just left.
— Timothy Budd, C++ for Java Programmers
My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.
— Senator Carl Schurz, remarks in the Senate, February 29, 1872, The Congressional Globe, vol. 45, p. 1287
When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes, welcoming them to the supermarket and trying to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on sale today.
Then stand back and count how many people watch the mime, how many people get past the mime as quickly as possible, and how many people punch the mime out.
That should give you a good idea as to how well their splash page will be received. That's the crux of it.
— Jared Spool, Macromedia, as quoted in "Uproar over Anti-Flash Intro Survey Results" by Anne Holland, November 20, 2003.
1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
— Douglas Adams, "How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet" The Sunday Times, August 29th 1999.
There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kid's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs.
— John Rogers, "Ephemera 2009 (7)", Kung Fu Monkey, March 19, 2009
Do not circulate rumors about subversive activities, or draw conclusions from information you furnish the F.B.I. The data you possess might be incomplete or only partially accurate. By drawing conclusions based on insufficient evidence grave injustices might result to innocent persons.
— FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover quoted in Atomic Bombing: How to Protect Yourself, p157, 1950.
Garbage collection solves the obviously very difficult problem of managing resources and object live times, by substituting in the much easier problems of non-deterministic thread-safe object destruction and dangling circular references. Not to mention unpredictable performance spikes.
— "Thaddaeus Frogley", "Re: Software Architecture/Design," sweng-gamedev, July 10, 2010.
It's easy to code what you want. But you don't really know what you want until you've tried to explain it to a very, very stupid person. That was Socrates' thing, in fact: he acted like an idiot to make people explain themselves to him on the most basic level, which usually revealed they didn't truly understand their own beliefs. These days we have silicon hyperidiots to explain things to. They're able to be much more stupid, many more times a second, than Socrates ever was. Coding is the Socratic method as an extreme sport.
— Tom Francis, "Gunpoint: AI," James, September 19, 2010
All I know is that I like filling up bars. When the bars fill up, it makes me happy. When the bars do not fill up, it makes me sad.
— Harbinger of Doom, January 17, 2011, comment on "To End an Era of Exp, part 1", System sans Setting
I came here to kick ass and assign IPv4 addresses. And I'm all out of IPv4 addresses.
— Ryan "secretsquirrel", February 1, 2011 Twitter post
If your web application fails in browsers with scripting disabled, Jakob Nielsen's dog will come to your house and shit on your carpet.
— Mark Pilgrim, Dive Into HTML5
The lecture room was about two-thirds full when we arrived, with more empty seats towards the front than in the back. Richard had been prepared for this. Undergraduates, he told us on the way there, have a highly developed fear of fire and always want to be close to the exits, just in case.
— Owen O'Shea and Underwood Dudly, The Magic Numbers of the Professor, chapter 14, 2007.
Violence rarely fixes anything in real life, but works about a dozen times every level in D&D.
— Quinn "gamefiend" Murphy, "Why Making Hard Encounters is Hard," August 12, 2011, At-Will
Your users do not "love" your software. Your users are temporarily tolerating your software because it's the least horrible option they have....
— Jono, "Everybody hates Firefox updates", Evil Brain Jono's Natural Log
Opinions are like wishes, you get three, then you have to go back to adventuring.
— Tom Lommel as Bill Cavalier, Dungeon Bastard, "The 5 Commandments of GenCon".
Taxation is not theft. It's the cover charge to get into civilization.
— Bryan Lambert, "Your Occasional Reminder", You Are Dumb, October 10, 2013.
It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. No matter what the eavesdroppers and censors say, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.
— Bruce Schneier, "Technology Shouldn't Give Big Brother a Head Start", July 31, 2009
The nun asked: "How will I know when I have learned enough to use threads wisely?"
Banzen replied: "When you no longer wish to use them."
— "Where Angels Fear to Thread", The Codeless Code, Qi
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
— C. S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children", 1952
Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
— Peter Welch, "Programming Sucks", April 27, 2014
The bullshit asymmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
— Alberto Brandolini, January 10, 2013 post to Twiter
...security is a transitive verb: we secure something against something or someone. As you say, DRM is "securing" a device against the user.
— pjc50, June 12, 2014
I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
— Unknown paraphrase of Clarence Darrow's The Story of My Life
It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
— Franklin Roosevelt, Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act, June 16, 1933
Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.
Socialism is what they call public power.
Socialism is what they call social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they call the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
— President Harry S Truman, October 10, 1952, speech in Syracuse, New York
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
— President John F. Kennedy, remarks on the first anniversary of the Alliance for Progress, 13 March 1962
I think American must see that the riots did not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nation's winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention
— Martin Luther King Jr.'s The Other America speech
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
— Le Lys Rouge, (1894), ch. 7
We don't need our billionaire barons to do more good. We need them to do less harm.
— Anand Giridharadas, August 25, 2020
Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn't know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world.
— B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Critics who demand peaceful demonstrations are saying, whether they admit it or not, that the correct way to protest is to let a heavily militarized police force that has already demonstrated it's willing to murder people in full view of the public, beat them shitless.
They are not wishing for nonviolence; they are stating a preference for whom the vio;lence should happen to.
— Innuendo Studios, "CO-VIDS: the gandhi trap," June 22, 2020
INTERVIEW: What has this pandemic confirmed or reinforced about your view of society?
TOLENTINO: That capitalist individualism has turned into a death cult; that the internet is a weak substitute for physical presence; that this country criminally undervalues its most important people and its most important forms of labor; that we're incentivized through online mechanisms to value the representation of something (like justice) over the thing itself; that most of us hold more unknown potential, more negative capability, than we're accustomed to accessing; that the material conditions of life in America are constructed and maintained by those best set up to exploit them; and that the way we live is not inevitable at all.
— Christopher Bollen (Interviewer) and Jia Tolentino, "Ask a Sane Person: Jia Tolentino on Practicing the Discipline of Hope," Interview, July 8, 2020
Philanthropy is the table scraps of capitalism
— Since deleted post on Twitter.
Jesus was not brought down by atheism and anarchy. He was brought down by law and order allied with religion, which is always a deadly mix.
— Barbara Brown Taylor, "The Perfect Mirror", Christian Century, March 18-25, 1998, p283.
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
— Abraham Lincoln, December 3, 1861, First Annual Message
If you want to know the ideas, read the blog. If you want to know the culture, read the comments.
— @GwailoMD, Twitter, February 14, 2021.
But a government that runs like a corporation is a failed government.
— @absurdistwords, Twitter, February 17, 2021
Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.
— Anne Helen Petersen, "Other countries have social safety nets. The U.S. has women.", November 11, 2020.
...capitalism is a system where people see how close they can get to slavery before someone yells at them to stop.
— Bryan Lambert, "Happy Quaraversary", March 14, 2021
People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.
— William Gibson, October 1, 2013 Twitter post
you can't apply those brilliant insights you learned from SICP if you don't have the knowledge base and emotional fortitude to fight through pip install first
— Geoffrey Litt, September 13, 2020 post on Twitter
I can never remember who said it, but: Conservatism is the pursuit of excuses to be selfish.
— @BoenderCarol, March 28, 2021 post on Twitter
The Programmers' Credo: we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy
— @Pinboard, August 5, 2016 post to Twitter
Often we need complex solutions not because we have hard problems, but because we have lots of easy problems with simple solutions *that are all incompatible with each other.* Conflicting constraints are the biggest source of real-world complexity.
— Hillel, April 6, 2021 post to Twitter
Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable. Against folly we have no defence. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied; in fact, he can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make him aggressive. A fool must therefore be treated more cautiously than a scoundrel; we shall never against try to convince a fool by reason, for it is both useless and dangerous.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1942 letter, "After Ten Years", Letters & Papers From Prison, (page 8 in 1997 Touchstone edition)
The first step of any project is to grossly underestimate its complexity and difficulty.
— Nicoll Hunt, (nicollhunt) April 19, 2014 post to Twitter.
If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.
— Senator John Sherman (of the Sherman Antitrust Act), Senate debate, March 21, 1890
Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
— Aaron Swartz, "How to Get a Job Like Mine", (Talk, as prepared, for the Tathva 2007 computer conference at NIT Calicut)
The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere. The desirable things which the individuals of a people cannot do, or cannot well do, for themselves, fall into two classes: those which have relation to wrongs, and those which have not. Each of these branch off into an infinite variety of subdivisions.
The first — that in relation to wrongs — embraces all crimes, misdemeanors and non-performance of contracts. The other embraces all which, in its nature, and without wrong, requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.
From this it appears that if all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need of government.
— Fragment of writing by Abraham Lincoln, possibly July 1, 1854. As found in Abraham Lincoln, Complete Works, Volume One, 1894, page 180.
All the Property that is necessary to a Man for the Conservation of the Individual & the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who by their Laws have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire & live among Savages. — He can have no right to the Benefits of Society who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
— Benjamin Franklin in a 25 December 1783 letter to Robert Morris
To turn $100 into $110 is work. To turn $100 million into $110 million is inevitable.
— Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (Quoted in Nancy Folbre, "Field Guide to the U.S. Economy" (2011), p. 15.)
I'd go even further: nothing in your stack should be cool.
Build your own cool app atop the most boring, reliable, established tech stack you can.
If you can't find a massive site/service using a tool at full scale in a primary function, don't use it yourself.
— Marco Arment, in a October 13, 2021 post on Twitter.
One person's critical buffer is another person's idea of waste.
— Overheard by John Allspaw according to a September 19, 2017 post on Twitter.
a reminder that the NRO's economic model depends on smug liberal dunk-shares giving their fascist takes the veneer of discourse that deserves to be debated
y'all are absolutely keeping these cringingly middlebrow Nazis in business
A dunk is a boost.
— Saladin Ahmed in a pair of posts from July 21, 2021 on Twitter
You can break norms for a greater good, but that often comes with a price. Paying it is the only way to ensure the norms survive for the next time.
— John Gans, September 14, 2021 post on Twitter
When a flower doesn't bloom you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.
— Alexander den Heijer, Nothing You Don't Already Know, 2018
The Programmers' Credo: we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy
— Maciej Cegłowski (as Pinboard), in a August 5, 2016 post on Twitter
Nothing restrains our knowledge of how art and artists have engaged with and impacted broader histories than the absurd rights fees that most art museums, libraries, and other institutions charge to publish pictures of out-of-copyright art.
— Tyler Green, Emerson's Nature and the Artists, as quoted in "Emerson's 'Nature' and the commons"
"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.
Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.
— Dave Barnhart, in a June 25, 2018 post to Facebook
You are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!
— Bruce "Utah" Philips, The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, Righteous Babe Records (1996)
With the qualities that digital information has, you really need to treat it like toxic waste. When we say "Information wants to be free", it's not a rallying cry, it's a description of an (often dangerous) quality of digital data. It's like saying "U235 wants to be fissile."
— Danny O'Brien in a July 21, 2021 post to Twitter
The internet is a perpetually burning library of alexandria and it's almost always a corporation's fault
— "Shib", in a June 25, 2021 post to Twitter
If we want a society of makers and doers instead of owners and gamblers, we shouldn't penalize wages and reward rents.
— Cory Doctorow, in a June 15, 2021 post to Twitter
A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
— Often attributed to "Doug Linder"
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
— Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science, 1979
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part II, "On the Expence of Justice"
The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information — in the sense of raw data — is not knowledge; that knowledge is not wisdom; and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.
— Arthur C. Clarke in a 2003 interview for OneWorld South Asia.
The main contradiction of liberal democracy is that it has largely been shaped through a history of various forms of illegal civil disobedience against entrenched power structures. Such civil disobedience is (retrospectively) seen as justified, and the people committing it are (retrospectively) seen as heroes...but each successive generation is asked to believe that any further civil disobedience would be unreasonable.
— "quasi-normalcy" in a 2014 Tumblr post
A dangerous fallacy is that killer robots will take the appearance of monstrous, mechanical machines. Instead, killer robots have (among many other disguises) taken the appearance of web forms automatically determining if people are eligible for financial assistance.
— Per Axbom (@axbom) in an October 15, 2021 Tweet.
We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatable things, called by the same name—liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatable names—liberty and tyranny.
— Abraham Lincoln, — Thomas Jefferson to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval), July 12, 1816
...institutions become solid objects when they act on you but if you try to turn around and act back on them they dissolve into a dust cloud of particles and policies.
— Fred Scharmen, sevensixfive, Twitter, May 21, 2022 (Lightly reformatted)
anyone who thinks "profit" is *really* what drives business decisions--in a way that might, hypothetically, lead to some kind of efficient market--is simply admitting they've never actually interacted with business owners
— Jake Casella Brookins, @jakecasella, Twitter, April 21, 2022
And that's what is at the heart of so many of these "cancel culture" complaints; conservatives don't just want to be bigots, they want to be bigots with friends. They want to say terrible things and still get swiped right on; they want to support legislation that puts people's lives in danger and somehow still get invited to parties.
But here's the thing: Expressing unlikeable views often makes you unlikeable. That's not censorship, it's life.
What people call cancel culture is really just run-of-the-mill social and moral consequences—which have been around forever. A society decides what kind of values they find important, and which they find intolerable. You are more than welcome to be on the wrong side of history, but it certainly doesn't entitle you to friends.
— Jessica Valenti, No One is Entitled to Friends, All in Her Head by Jessica Valenti, March 7, 2022
Several monks of the Laughing Monkey Clan found their brother in a state of great anguish, typing frantically at his workstation.
"What vexes you so?" they asked.
Said the monk: "When new business rules are delivered next year, my code will need to be updated. Today the abbot told me who will be assigned this task, and my heart sank. He is an impatient fool who scorns documentation and breezes by comments, electing instead to guess the purpose of everything by name alone. Thus I must idiot-proof every class and method."
The monk pointed to his screen. "Here he will be tempted to modify this object's properties, so I must make it immutable to prevent disaster. Here he will surely mistake the purpose of this parameter, so now I must check for an illegal argument wherever it is used." The monk collapsed upon his keyboard. "Ten thousand curses upon that imbecile, Taw-Jieh!" he wailed. "That he of all people should be chosen to maintain my code!"
The other monks looked at each other uncomfortably.
"But you are Taw-Jieh," said one.
— "Qi", "Case 116: Trust No One", The Codeless Code, October 13, 2013
As soon as you think you're rational as a general state of being rather than as a rare temporary condition, you are not, in fact, being rational.
— John Rogers, jonrog1, Twitter, February 14, 2021
We love to buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them.
— Warren Zevon, paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer, 2002, VH1 Inside Out, approximately 33 minutes in
Our merchants frequently complain of the high wages of British labour as the cause of their manufactures being undersold in foreign markets, but they are silent about the high profits of stock. They complain of the extravagant gain of other people, but they say nothing of their own. The high profits of British stock, however, may contribute towards raising the price of British manufactures in many cases as much, and in some perhaps more, than the high wages of British labour.
— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Volume II, p 358
(Book IV, Chapter VII, Part III) quotesNever believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse, for by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
...
If then, as we have been able to observe, the anti-Semite is impervious to research and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, translated by George J. Becker, 1946, Chapter I.
"Blocking someone means you're just afraid of what they are saying."
Just because I put garbage in the dumpster doesn't mean I'm scared of garbage. It means it's rank and I don't want it in my house.
— bilarichfield, "Ben in LA", May 10, 2018 Twitter post
Money can't buy happiness, just autonomy, status, and the ability to protect loved ones. Buncha random shit.
— Hover/alt text for "Intrinsic", Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Games offer us *value clarity*. In real life, our goals are messy and complex. In games, the goals are often simple. Everything makes sense. We can know exactly what we're trying to do and exactly how well we've done. Games are a balm from the existential horror of the world.
— C Thi Nguyen (@add_hawk), July 1, 2020 Tweet
Success masks failure. The more a thing operates successfully, the more confidence we have in it. So we dismiss little failures as trivial annoyances rather than preludes to catastrophe.
— Henry Petroski, Success Through Failure, 2006 (As quoted in "An engineer who revels in success of failure", New York Times, May 3, 2006.)
Yet another evening I close my eyes, pinch the bridge of my nose, take two short sharp breaths and remind myself millions of people led satisfying, meaningful lives during the fall of the Roman Empire.
— John Rogers, June 1, 2022 on Twitter
If you convince those people climate change really is real, or if it just becomes so obvious that they can no longer deny it, they don't suddenly want to sign onto the Paris Agreement. What actually happens is they apply that intensely hierarchical supremacist worldview to the reality that what climate change means is that the space for people to live well on this planet is contracting. More and more of us are going to have to live on less and less land, even if we do everything right. It's already happening. So if you have that worldview, then you will apply it to people who are migrating to your country and to those who want to migrate to your country. We will harden the narratives that say those people deserve what they get because they're inferior and we deserve what we have because we're superior. In other words, the racism will get worse.
— Naomi Klein, quoted in "Naomi Klein On Looming Eco-Fascism: "We Are Literally And Politically Flammable"", HuffPost, January 5, 2020
If your paper doesn't include basic information to reproduce the work, it's not research it's advertising.
— Alex J. Champandard, April 6, 2022 on Twitter
Many security groups see security as a goal in itself, rather than it being their job to support the rest of the organisation. If you implement controls without regard for the needs of your colleagues, they'll start subverting them and you'll be in a worse place than you started.
— Matthew Garrett, January 20, 2022 on Twitter
we underestimate the value of feeling good when we write code. and the power we have individually to create that feeling for ourselves and other people via the work we leave behind
— rusiim shabazz, January 3, 2022 on Twitter
And this is why the future, be it NFTs or Memoji or the howling existential horror of the Metaverse, looks so ugly and boring: it reflects the stunted inner lives of the finance and technology professionals who produced it. As the visual manifestation of cryptocurrency, NFT art combines the nuanced social awareness of computer programmers with the soulful whimsy of hedge fund managers. It is art for people whose imaginations have been absolutely captured by a new kind of money you can do on the computer.
— Dan Brooks, The Future Is Not Only Useless, It's Expensive", December 20, 2021
People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. Most of our troubles come from the fact that we love things, and use people.
— A paraphrase of Martin Buber from John Heuss's Our Christian Vocation, 1955
...the best programs are the ones written when the programmer is supposed to be working on something else.
— Melinda Varian,"VM and the VM Community: Past, Present, and Future", April 1991
When people are atomised, a movement or a strongman arises and he offers a story or an ideology which claims to explain everything, why people are unhappy.
— Helen Nianias paraphrasing Robert Eaglestone who is himself summarizing Hannah Arendt, in "What Hannah Arendt can teach us about totalitarianism " from BBC Radio 4, probably around 2017 based on Wayback Machine archives
A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
— Unknown. Perhaps Doug Linder, who wrote it in quotes in an August 15, 1993 post to the Usenet group alt.quotations entitled "Obvious bugs".
The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.
— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Volume III, Book V, Chapter II (Of the Sources of the general or public Revenue of the Society), Part 2 (Of Taxes)