karl's fortune cookie file - part 5 of 6
Karl Lehenbauer
actions, military, political, commercial and of every other kind, are
daily undertaken on hearsay evidence. There is no religion in the world
that has any other basis than hearsay evidence. Revelation is hearsay
evidence; that the Scriptures are the word of God we have only the
testimony of men long dead whose identy is not clearly established and
who are not known to have been sworn in any sense. Under the rules of
evidence as they now exist in this country, no single assertion in the
Bible has in its support any evidence admissible in a court of law...
But as records of courts of justice are admissible, it can easily be proved
that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to
mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women
were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still
unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and
in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than
the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death.
If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike
destitute of value. --Ambrose Bierce
%%
"Today's robots are very primitive, capable of understanding only a few
simple instructions such as 'go left', 'go right', and 'build car'."
--John Sladek
%%
"In the fight between you and the world, back the world."
--Frank Zappa
%%
Here is an Appalachian version of management's answer to those who are
concerned with the fate of the project:
"Don't worry about the mule. Just load the wagon."
-- Mike Dennison's hillbilly uncle
%%
Ill-chosen abstraction is particularly evident in the design of the ADA
runtime system. The interface to the ADA runtime system is so opaque that
it is impossible to model or predict its performance, making it effectively
useless for real-time systems. -- Marc D. Donner and David H. Jameson.
%%
"Being against torture ought to be sort of a bipartisan thing."
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%%
"Here comes Mr. Bill's dog."
-- Narrator, Saturday Night Live
%%
Sex is like air. It's only a big deal if you can't get any.
%%
"Maintain an awareness for contribution -- to your schedule, your project,
our company."
-- A Group of Employees
%%
"Ask not what A Group of Employees can do for you. But ask what can
All Employees do for A Group of Employees."
-- Mike Dennison
%%
One evening Mr. Rudolph Block, of New York, found himself seated at dinner
alongside Mr. Percival Pollard, the distinguished critic.
"Mr. Pollard," said he, "my book, _The Biography of a Dead Cow_, is
published anonymously, but you can hardly be ignorant of its authorship.
Yet in reviewing it you speak of it as the work of the Idiot of the Century.
Do you think that fair criticism?"
"I am very sorry, sir," replied the critic, amiably, "but it did not
occur to me that you really might not wish the public to know who wrote it."
-- Ambrose Bierce
%%
Many aligators will be slain,
but the swamp will remain.
%%
What the gods would destroy they first submit to an IEEE standards committee.
%%
This is now. Later is later.
%%
"I will make no bargains with terrorist hardware."
-- Peter da Silva
%%
"If I do not return to the pulpit this weekend, millions of people will go
to hell."
-- Jimmy Swaggart, 5/20/88
%%
"Dump the condiments. If we are to be eaten, we don't need to taste good."
-- "Visionaries" cartoon
%%
"Aww, if you make me cry anymore, you'll fog up my helmet."
-- "Visionaries" cartoon
%%
I don't want to be young again, I just don't want to get any older.
%%
Marriage Ceremony: An incredible metaphysical sham of watching God and the
law being dragged into the affairs of your family.
-- O. C. Ogilvie
%%
"Emergency!" Sgiggs screamed, ejecting himself from the tub like it was
a burning car. "Dial 'one'! Get room service! Code red!" Stiggs was on
the phone immediately, ordering more rose blossoms, because, according to
him, the ones floating in the tub had suddenly lost their smell. "I demand
smell," he shrilled. "I expecting total uninterrupted smell from these
f*cking roses."
Unfortunately, the service captain didn't realize that the Stiggs situation
involved fifty roses. "What am I going to do with this?" Stiggs sneered at
the weaseling hotel goon when he appeared at our door holding a single flower
floating in a brandy glass. Stiggs's tirade was great. "Do you see this
bathtub? Do you notice any difference between the size of the tub and the
size of that spindly wad of petals in your hand? I need total bath coverage.
I need a completely solid layer of roses all around me like puffing factories
of smell, attacking me with their smell and power-ramming big stinking
concentrations of rose odor up my nostrils until I'm wasted with pleasure."
It wasn't long before we got so dissatisfied with this incompetence that we
bolted.
-- The Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs,
National Lampoon, October 1982
%%
When it is incorrect, it is, at least *authoritatively* incorrect.
-- Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy
%%
We decided it was night again, so we camped for twenty minutes and drank
another six beers at a Young Life campsite. O.C. got into the supervisory
adult's sleeping bag and ran around in it. "This is the judgment day and I'm
a terrifying apparition," he screamed. Then the heat made O.C. ralph in the
bag.
-- The Utterly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs,
National Lampoon, October 1982
%%
Voodoo Programming: Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but
they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling
everything.
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%%
This is, of course, totally uninformed specualation that I engage in to help
support my bias against such meddling... but there you have it.
-- Peter da Silva, speculating about why a computer program that had been
changed to do something he didn't approve of, didn't work
%%
"This knowledge I pursure is the finest pleasure I have ever known. I could
no sooner give it up that I could the very air that I breath."
-- Paolo Uccello, Renaissance artist, discoverer of the laws of perspective
%%
"I got everybody to pay up front...then I blew up their planet."
"Now why didn't I think of that?"
-- Post Bros. Comics
%%
"Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed."
-- Robin, The Boy Wonder
%%
The F-15 Eagle:
If it's up, we'll shoot it down. If it's down, we'll blow it up.
-- A McDonnel-Douglas ad from a few years ago
%%
"The Amiga is the only personal computer where you can run a multitasking
operating system and get realtime performance, out of the box."
-- Peter da Silva
%%
"It's my cookie file and if I come up with something that's lame and I like it,
it goes in."
-- karl
%%
In recognizing AT&T Bell Laboratories for corporate innovation, for its
invention of cellular mobile communications, IEEE President Russell C. Drew
referred to the cellular telephone as a "basic necessity." How times have
changed, one observer remarked: many in the room recalled the advent of
direct dialing.
-- The Institute, July 1988, pg. 11
%%
...the Soviets have the capability to try big projects. If there is a goal,
such as when Gorbachev states that they are going to have nuclear-powered
aircraft carriers, the case is closed -- that is it. They will concentrate
on the problem, do a bad job, and later pay the price. They really don't
care what the price is.
-- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976
"Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 100
%%
There is something you must understand about the Soviet system. They have the
ability to concentrate all their efforts on a given design, and develop all
components simulateously, but sometimes without proper testing. Then they end
up with a technological disaster like the Tu-144. In a technology race at
the time, that aircraft was two months ahead of the Concorde. Four Tu-144s
were built; two have crashed, and two are in museums. The Concorde has been
flying safely for over 10 years.
-- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976
"Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 100
%%
DE: The Soviets seem to have difficulty implementing modern technology.
Would you comment on that?
Belenko: Well, let's talk about aircraft engine lifetime. When I flew the
MiG-25, its engines had a total lifetime of 250 hours.
DE: Is that mean-time-between-failure?
Belenko: No, the engine is finished; it is scrapped.
DE: You mean they pull it out and throw it away, not even overhauling it?
Belenko: That is correct. Overhaul is too expensive.
DE: That is absurdly low by free world standards.
Belenko: I know.
-- an interview with Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976
"Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 102
%%
"I have a friend who just got back from the Soviet Union, and told me the people
there are hungry for information about the West. He was asked about many
things, but I will give you two examples that are very revealing about life in
the Soviet Union. The first question he was asked was if we had exploding
television sets. You see, they have a problem with the picture tubes on color
television sets, and many are exploding. They assumed we must be having
problems with them too. The other question he was asked often was why the
CIA had killed Samantha Smith, the little girl who visited the Soviet Union a
few years ago; their propaganda is very effective.
-- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976
"Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 100
%%
"...I could accept this openness, glasnost, perestroika, or whatever you want
to call it if they did these things: abolish the one party system; open the
Soviet frontier and allow Soviet people to travel freely; allow the Soviet
people to have real free enterprise; allow Western businessmen to do business
there, and permit freedom of speech and of the press. But so far, the whole
country is like a concentration camp. The barbed wire on the fence around
the Soviet Union is to keep people inside, in the dark. This openness that
you are seeing, all these changes, are cosmetic and they have been designed
to impress shortsighted, naive, sometimes stupid Western leaders. These
leaders gush over Gorbachev, hoping to do business with the Soviet Union or
appease it. He will say: "Yes, we can do business!" This while his
military machine in Afghanistan has killed over a million people out of a
population of 17 million. Can you imagine that?
-- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976
"Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 110
%%
"Remember Kruschev: he tried to do too many things too fast, and he was
removed in disgrace. If Gorbachev tries to destroy the system or make too
many fundamental changes to it, I believe the system will get rid of him.
I am not a political scientist, but I understand the system very well.
I believe he will have a "heart attack" or retire or be removed. He is
up against a brick wall. If you think they will change everything and
become a free, open society, forget it!"
-- Victor Belenko, MiG-25 fighter pilot who defected in 1976
"Defense Electronics", Vol 20, No. 6, pg. 110
%%
FORTRAN? The syntactically incorrect statement "DO 10 I = 1.10" will parse and
generate code creating a variable, DO10I, as follows: "DO10I = 1.10" If that
doesn't terrify you, it should.
%%
"I knew then (in 1970) that a 4-kbyte minicomputer would cost as much as
a house. So I reasoned that after college, I'd have to live cheaply in
an apartment and put all my money into owning a computer."
-- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, EE Times, June 6, 1988, pg 45
%%
HP had a unique policy of allowing its engineers to take parts from stock as
long as they built something. "They figured that with every design, they were
getting a better engineer. It's a policy I urge all companies to adopt."
-- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, "Will Wozniak's class give Apple to teacher?"
EE Times, June 6, 1988, pg 45
%%
"I just want to be a good engineer."
-- Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, concluding his keynote speech
at the 1988 AppleFest
%%
"There's always been Tower of Babel sort of bickering inside Unix, but this
is the most extreme form ever. This means at least several years of confusion."
-- Bill Gates, founder and chairman of Microsoft,
about the Open Systems Foundation
%%
"When in doubt, print 'em out."
-- Karl's Programming Proverb 0x7
%%
"If you want the best things to happen in corporate life you have to find ways
to be hospitable to the unusual person. You don't get innovation as a
democratic process. You almost get it as an anti-democratic process.
Certainly you get it as an anthitetical process, so you have to have an
environment where the body of people are really amenable to change and can
deal with the conflicts that arise out of change an innovation."
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc.,
"Herman Miller's Secrets of Corporate Creativity",
The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988
%%
"In corporate life, I think there are three important areas which contracts
can't deal with, the area of conflict, the area of change and area of reaching
potential. To me a covenant is a relationship that is based on such things
as shared ideals and shared value systems and shared ideas and shared
agreement as to the processes we are going to use for working together. In
many cases they develop into real love relationships."
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's
Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988
%%
Another goal is to establish a relationship "in which it is OK for everybody
to do their best. There are an awful lot of people in management who really
don't want subordinates to do their best, because it gets to be very
threatening. But we have found that both internally and with outside
designers if we are willing to have this kind of relationship and if we're
willing to be vulnerable to what will come out of it, we get really good
work."
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's
Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988
%%
In his book, Mr. DePree tells the story of how designer George Nelson urged
that the company also take on Charles Eames in the late 1940s. Max's father,
J. DePree, co-founder of the company with herman Miller in 1923, asked Mr.
Nelson if he really wanted to share the limited opportunities of a then-small
company with another designer. "George's response was something like this:
'Charles Eames is an unusual talent. He is very different from me. The
company needs us both. I want very much to have Charles Eames share in
whatever potential there is.'"
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's
Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988
%%
Mr. DePree believes participative capitalism is the wave of the future. The
U.S. work force, he believes, "more and more demands to be included in the
capitalist system and if we don't find ways to get the capitalist system
to be an inclusive system rather than the exclusive system it has been, we're
all in deep trouble. If we don't find ways to begin to understand that
capitalism's highest potential lies in the common good, not in the individual
good, then we're risking the system itself."
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's
Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988
%%
Mr. DePree also expects a "tremendous social change" in all workplaces. "When
I first started working 40 years ago, a factory supervisor was focused on the
product. Today it is drastically different, because of the social milieu.
It isn't unusual for a worker to arrive on his shift and have some family
problem that he doesn't know how to resolve. The example I like to use is a
guy who comes in and says 'this isn't going to be a good day for me, my son
is in jail on a drunk-driving charge and I don't know how to raise bail.'
What that means is that if the supervisor wants productivity, he has to know
how to raise bail."
-- Max DePree, chairman and CEO of Herman Miller Inc., "Herman Miller's
Secrets of Corporate Creativity", The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1988
%%
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it.
Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
-- Perlis's Programming Proverb #58, SIGPLAN Notices, Sept. 1982
%%
"What if" is a trademark of Hewlett Packard, so stop using it in your
sentences without permission, or risk being sued.
%%
Now, if the leaders of the world -- people who are leaders by virtue of
political, military or financial power, and not necessarily wisdom or
consideration for mankind -- if these leaders manage not to pull us
over the brink into planetary suicide, despite their occasional pompous
suggestions that they may feel obliged to do so, we may survive beyond
1988.
-- George Rostky, EE Times, June 20, 1988 p. 45
%%
The essential ideas of Algol 68 were that the whole language should be
precisely defined and that all the pieces should fit together smoothly.
The basic idea behind Pascal was that it didn't matter how vague the
language specification was (it took *years* to clarify) or how many rough
edges there were, as long as the CDC Pascal compiler was fast.
-- Richard A. O'Keefe
%%
"We came. We saw. We kicked its ass."
-- Bill Murray, _Ghostbusters_
%%
"The stars are made of the same atoms as the earth." I usually pick one small
topic like this to give a lecture on. Poets say science takes away from the
beauty of the stars -- mere gobs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can
see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel
my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which
I am a part -- perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one
is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all
apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together.
What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the *why?* It does not do harm to the
mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than
any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak
of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but
if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
-- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)
%%
If you permit yourself to read meanings into (rather than drawing meanings out
of) the evidence, you can draw any conclusion you like.
-- Michael Keith, "The Bar-Code Beast", The Skeptical Enquirer Vol 12 No 4 p 416
%%
"Pseudocode can be used to some extent to aid the maintenance
process. However, pseudocode that is highly detailed -
approaching the level of detail of the code itself - is not of
much use as maintenance documentation. Such detailed
documentation has to be maintained almost as much as the code,
thus doubling the maintenance burden. Furthermore, since such
voluminous pseudocode is too distracting to be kept in the
listing itself, it must be kept in a separate folder. The
result: Since pseudocode - unlike real code - doesn't have to be
maintained, no one will maintain it. It will soon become out of
date and everyone will ignore it. (Once, I did an informal
survey of 42 shops that used pseudocode. Of those 42, 0 [zero!],
found that it had any value as maintenance documentation."
--Meilir Page-Jones, "The Practical Guide to Structured
Design", Yourdon Press (c) 1988
%%
"Only a brain-damaged operating system would support task switching and not
make the simple next step of supporting multitasking."
-- George McFry
%%
Sigmund Freud is alleged to have said that in the last analysis the entire field
of psychology may reduce to biological electrochemistry.
%%
The magician is seated in his high chair and looks upon the world with favor.
He is at the height of his powers. If he closes his eyes, he causes the world
to disappear. If he opens his eyes, he causes the world to come back. If
there is harmony within him, the world is harmonious. If rage shatters his
inner harmony, the unity of the world is shattered. If desire arises within
him, he utters the magic syllables that causes the desired object to appear.
His wishes, his thoughts, his gestures, his noises command the universe.
-- Selma Fraiberg, _The Magic Years_, pg. 107
%%
An Animal that knows who it is, one that has a sense of his own identity, is
a discontented creature, doomed to create new problems for himself for the
duration of his stay on this planet. Since neither the mouse nor the chip
knows what is, he is spared all the vexing problems that follow this
discovery. But as soon as the human animal who asked himself this question
emerged, he plunged himself and his descendants into an eternity of doubt
and brooding, speculation and truth-seeking that has goaded him through the
centures as reelentlessly as hunger or sexual longing. The chimp that does
not know that he exists is not driven to discover his origins and is spared
the tragic necessity of contemplating his own end. And even if the animal
experimenters succeed in teaching a chimp to count one hundred bananas or
to play chess, the chimp will develop no science and he will exhibit no
appreciation of beauty, for the greatest part of man's wisdom may be traced
back to the eternal questions of beginnings and endings, the quest to give
meaning to his existence, to life itself.
-- Selma Fraiberg, _The Magic Years_, pg. 193
%%
A comment on schedules:
Ok, how long will it take?
For each manager involved in initial meetings add one month.
For each manager who says "data flow analysis" add another month.
For each unique end-user type add one month.
For each unknown software package to be employed add two months.
For each unknown hardware device add two months.
For each 100 miles between developer and installation add one month.
For each type of communication channel add one month.
If an IBM mainframe shop is involved and you are working on a non-IBM
system add 6 months.
If an IBM mainframe shop is involved and you are working on an IBM
system add 9 months.
Round up to the nearest half-year.
--Brad Sherman
By the way, ALL software projects are done by iterative prototyping.
Some companies call their prototypes "releases", that's all.
%%
UNIX Shell is the Best Fourth Generation Programming Language
It is the UNIX shell that makes it possible to do applications in a small
fraction of the code and time it takes in third generation languages. In
the shell you process whole files at a time, instead of only a line at a
time. And, a line of code in the UNIX shell is one or more programs,
which do more than pages of instructions in a 3GL. Applications can be
developed in hours and days, rather than months and years with traditional
systems. Most of the other 4GLs available today look more like COBOL or
RPG, the most tedious of the third generation lanaguages.
"UNIX Relational Database Management: Application Development in the UNIX
Environment" by Rod Manis, Evan Schaffer, and Robert Jorgensen. Prentice
Hall Software Series. Brian Kerrighan, Advisor. 1988.
%%
"Laugh while you can, monkey-boy."
-- Dr. Emilio Lizardo
%%
"Floggings will continue until morale improves."
-- anonymous flyer being distributed at Exxon USA
%%
"Hey Ivan, check your six."
-- Sidewinder missile jacket patch, showing a Sidewinder driving up the tail
of a Russian Su-27
%%
"Free markets select for winning solutions."
-- Eric S. Raymond
%%
"I dislike companies that have a we-are-the-high-priests-of-hardware-so-you'll-
like-what-we-give-you attitude. I like commodity markets in which iron-and-
silicon hawkers know that they exist to provide fast toys for software types
like me to play with..."
-- Eric S. Raymond
%%
"The urge to destroy is also a creative urge."
-- Bakunin
[ed. note - I would say: The urge to destroy may sometimes be a creative urge.]
%%
"A commercial, and in some respects a social, doubt has been started within the
last year or two, whether or not it is right to discuss so openly the security
or insecurity of locks. Many well-meaning persons suppose that the discus-
sion respecting the means for baffling the supposed safety of locks offers a
premium for dishonesty, by showing others how to be dishonest. This is a fal-
lacy. Rogues are very keen in their profession, and already know much more
than we can teach them respecting their several kinds of roguery. Rogues knew
a good deal about lockpicking long before locksmiths discussed it among them-
selves, as they have lately done. If a lock -- let it have been made in what-
ever country, or by whatever maker -- is not so inviolable as it has hitherto
been deemed to be, surely it is in the interest of *honest* persons to know
this fact, because the *dishonest* are tolerably certain to be the first to
apply the knowledge practically; and the spread of knowledge is necessary to
give fair play to those who might suffer by ignorance. It cannot be too ear-
nestly urged, that an acquaintance with real facts will, in the end, be better
for all parties."
-- Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks,
published around 1850
%%
In respect to lock-making, there can scarcely be such a thing as dishonesty
of intention: the inventor produces a lock which he honestly thinks will
possess such and such qualities; and he declares his belief to the world.
If others differ from him in opinion concerning those qualities, it is open
to them to say so; and the discussion, truthfully conducted, must lead to
public advantage: the discussion stimulates curiosity, and curiosity stimu-
lates invention. Nothing but a partial and limited view of the question
could lead to the opinion that harm can result: if there be harm, it will be
much more than counterbalanced by good."
-- Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks,
published around 1850.
%%
"Wish not to seem, but to be, the best."
-- Aeschylus
%%
"Survey says..."
-- Richard Dawson, weenie, on "Family Feud"
%%
"Paul Lynde to block..."
-- a contestant on "Hollywood Squares"
%%
"Little else matters than to write good code."
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%%
To write good code is a worthy challenge, and a source of civilized delight.
-- stolen and paraphrased from William Safire
%%
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward"
-- William E. Davidsen
%%
"If a computer can't directly address all the RAM you can use, it's just a toy."
-- anonymous comp.sys.amiga posting, non-sequitir
%%
"Never laugh at live dragons, Bilbo you fool!" he said to himself, and it became
a favourite saying of his later, and passed into a proverb. "You aren't nearly
through this adventure yet," he added, and that was pretty true as well.
-- Bilbo Baggins, "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien, Chapter XII
%%
"A dirty mind is a joy forever."
-- Randy Kunkee
%%
"You can't teach seven foot."
-- Frank Layton, Utah Jazz basketball coach, when asked why he had recruited
a seven-foot tall auto mechanic
%%
"A car is just a big purse on wheels."
-- Johanna Reynolds
%%
"History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions."
-- Ted Koppel
%%
"Gozer the Gozerian: As the duly appointed representative of the city,
county and state of New York, I hereby order you to cease all supernatural
activities at once and proceed immediately to your place of origin or
the nearest parallel dimension, whichever is nearest."
-- Ray (Dan Akyroyd, _Ghostbusters_
%%
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more
doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a
new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by
the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in
those who would gain by the new ones.
-- Machiavelli
%%
God grant me the senility to accept the things I cannot change,
The frustration to try to change things I cannot affect,
and the wisdom to tell the difference.
%%
First as to speech. That privilege rests upon the premise that
there is no proposition so uniformly acknowledged that it may not be
lawfully challenged, questioned, and debated. It need not rest upon
the further premise that there are no propositions that are not
open to doubt; it is enough, even if there are, that in the end it is
worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy. Hence it
has been again and again unconditionally proclaimed that there are
no limits to the privilege so far as words seek to affect only the hearers'
beliefs and not their conduct. The trouble is that conduct is almost
always based upon some belief, and that to change the hearer's belief
will generally to some extent change his conduct, and may even evoke
conduct that the law forbids.
[cf. Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty, University of Chicago Press, 1952;
The Art and Craft of Judging: The Decisions of Judge Learned Hand,
edited and annotated by Hershel Shanks, The MacMillian Company, 1968.]
%%
The late rebellion in Massachusetts has given more alarm than I think it
should have done. Calculate that one rebellion in 13 states in the course
of 11 years, is but one for each state in a century and a half. No country
should be so long without one.
-- Thomas Jefferson in letter to James Madison, 20 December 1787
%%
"Nine years of ballet, asshole."
-- Shelly Long, to the bad guy after making a jump over a gorge that he
couldn't quite, in "Outrageous Fortune"
%%
You are in a maze of UUCP connections, all alike.
%%
"If that man in the PTL is such a healer, why can't he make his wife's
hairdo go down?"
-- Robin Williams
%%
8) Use common sense in routing cable. Avoid wrapping coax around sources of
strong electric or magnetic fields. Do not wrap the cable around
flourescent light ballasts or cyclotrons, for example.
-- Ethernet Headstart Product, Information and Installation Guide,
Bell Technologies, pg. 11
%%
"What a wonder is USENET; such wholesale production of conjecture from
such a trifling investment in fact."
-- Carl S. Gutekunst
%%
VMS must die!
%%
MS-DOS must die!
%%
OS/2 must die!
%%
Pournelle must die!
%%
Garbage In, Gospel Out
%%
"Being against torture ought to be sort of a multipartisan thing."
-- Karl Lehenbauer, as amended by Jeff Daiell, a Libertarian
%%
"Facts are stupid things."
-- President Ronald Reagan
(a blooper from his speeach at the '88 GOP convention)
%%
"The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science
collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke
miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into
the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to
abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all
fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion,
misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the
ideas of their opponents."
-- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism",
The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 87/88, pg. 186
%%
"An ounce of prevention is worth a ton of code."
-- an anonymous programmer
%%
"To IBM, 'open' means there is a modicum of interoperability among some of their
equipment."
-- Harv Masterson
%%
"Just think of a computer as hardware you can program."
-- Nigel de la Tierre
%%
"If you own a machine, you are in turn owned by it, and spend your time
serving it..."
-- Marion Zimmer Bradley, _The Forbidden Tower_
%%
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
-- Albert Einstein
%%
"Card readers? We don't need no stinking card readers."
-- Peter da Silva (at the National Academy of Sciencies, 1965, in a
particularly vivid fantasy)
%%
Your good nature will bring unbounded happiness.
%%
Semper Fi, dude.
%%
Excitement and danger await your induction to tracer duty! As a tracer,
you must rid the computer networks of slimy, criminal data thieves.
They are tricky and the action gets tough, so watch out! Utilizing all
your skills, you'll either get your man or you'll get burned!
-- advertising for the computer game "Tracers"
%%
"An entire fraternity of strapping Wall-Street-bound youth. Hell - this
is going to be a blood bath!"
-- Post Bros. Comics
%%
"Neighbors!! We got neighbors! We ain't supposed to have any neighbors, and
I just had to shoot one."
-- Post Bros. Comics
%%
"Gotcha, you snot-necked weenies!"
-- Post Bros. Comics
%%
interlard - vt., to intersperse; diversify
-- Webster's New World Dictionary Of The American Language
%%
"Everybody is talking about the weather but nobody does anything about it."
-- Mark Twain
%%
"How many teamsters does it take to screw in a light bulb?"
"FIFTEEN!! YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT?"
%%
"If you weren't my teacher, I'd think you just deleted all my files."
-- an anonymous UCB CS student, to an instructor who had typed "rm -i *" to
get rid of a file named "-f" on a Unix system.
%%
"The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral
crisis, preserved their neutrality."
-- Dante
%%
"The medium is the message."
-- Marshall McLuhan
%%
"The medium is the massage."
-- Crazy Nigel
%%
"Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser."
-- Vince Lombardi, football coach
%%
"It might help if we ran the MBA's out of Washington."
-- Admiral Grace Hopper
%%
Refreshed by a brief blackout, I got to my feet and went next door.
-- Martin Amis, _Money_
%%
The sprung doors parted and I staggered out into the lobby's teak and flicker.
Uniformed men stood by impassively like sentries in their trench. I slapped
my key on the desk and nodded gravely. I was loaded enough to be unable to
tell whether they could tell I was loaded. Would they mind? I was certainly
too loaded to care. I moved to the door with boxy, schlep-shouldered strides.
-- Martin Amis, _Money_
%%
I ask only one thing. I'm understanding. I'm mature. And it isn't much to
ask. I want to get back to London, and track her down, and be alone with my
Selina -- or not even alone, damn it, merely close to her, close enough to
smell her skin, to see the flecked webbing of her lemony eyes, the moulding
of her artful lips. Just for a few precious seconds. Just long enough to
put in one good, clean punch. That's all I ask.
-- Martin Amis, _Money_
%%
"Love may fail, but courtesy will previal."
-- A Kurt Vonnegut fan
%%
New York is a jungle, they tell you. You could go further, and say that
New York is a jungle. New York *is a jungle.* Beneath the columns of
the old rain forest, made of melting macadam, the mean Limpopo of swamped
Ninth Avenue bears an angry argosy of crocs and dragons, tiger fish, noise
machines, sweating rainmakers. On the corners stand witchdoctors and
headhunters, babbling voodoo-men -- the natives, the jungle-smart natives.
And at night, under the equatorial overgrowth and heat-holding cloud
cover, you hear the ragged parrot-hoot and monkeysqueak of the sirens,
and then fires flower to ward off monsters. Careful: the streets are
sprung with pits and nets and traps. Hire a guide. Pack your snakebite
gook and your blowdart serum. Take it seriously. You have to get a
bit jungle-wise.
-- Martin Amis, _Money_
%%
Now I was heading, in my hot cage, down towards meat-market country on the
tip of the West Village. Here the redbrick warehouses double as carcass
galleries and rat hives, the Manhattan fauna seeking its necessary
level, living or dead. Here too you find the heavy faggot hangouts,
The Spike, the Water Closet, the Mother Load. Nobody knows what goes on
in these places. Only the heavy faggots know. Even Fielding seems somewhat
vague on the question. You get zapped and flogged and dumped on -- by
almost anybody's standards, you have a really terrible time. The average
patron arrives at the Spike in one taxi but needs to go back to his sock
in two. And then the next night he shows up for more. They shackle
themselves to racks, they bask in urinals. Their folks have a lot of
explaining to do, if you want my opinion, particularly the mums. Sorry
to single you ladies out like this but the story must start somewhere.
A craving for hourly murder -- it can't be willed. In the meantime,
Fielding tells me, Mother Nature looks on and taps her foot and clicks
her tongue. Always a champion of monogamy, she is cooking up some fancy
new diseases. She just isn't going to stand for it.
-- Martin Amis, _Money_
%%
"You tried it just for once, found it alright for kicks,
but now you find out you have a habit that sticks,
you're an orgasm addict,
you're always at it,
and you're an orgasm addict."
-- The Buzzcocks
%%
"There is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress."
-- Mark Twain
%%
"You'll pay to know what you really think."
-- J.R. "Bob" Dobbs
%%
"We live, in a very kooky time."
-- Herb Blashtfalt
%%
"Pull the wool over your own eyes!"
-- J.R. "Bob" Dobbs
%%
"Okay," Bobby said, getting the hang of it, "then what's the matrix? If
she's a deck, and Danbala's a program, what's cyberspace?"
"The world," Lucas said.
-- William Gibson, _Count Zero_
%%
"Our reruns are better than theirs."
-- Nick at Nite
%%
Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.
-- Ted Turner
%%
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
-- The Wizard Of Oz
%%
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
-- Karl, as he stepped behind the computer to reboot it, during a FAT
%%
"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the
things we know that ain't so."
-- Artemus Ward aka Charles Farrar Brown
%%
"Don't discount flying pigs before you have good air defense."
-- j...@clinet.FI
%%
"In the long run, every program becomes rococo, and then rubble."
-- Alan Perlis
%%
"Pok pok pok, P'kok!"
-- Superchicken
%%
Live Free or Live in Massachusettes.
%%
"You can't get very far in this world without your dossier being there first."
-- Arthur Miller
%%
"Flight Reservation systems decide whether or not you exist. If your information
isn't in their database, then you simply don't get to go anywhere."
-- Arthur Miller
%%
"What people have been reduced to are mere 3-D representations of their own
data."
-- Arthur Miller
%%
"The Avis WIZARD decides if you get to drive a car. Your head won't touch the
pillow of a Sheraton unless their computer says it's okay."
-- Arthur Miller
%%
"They know your name, address, telephone number, credit card numbers, who ELSE
is driving the car "for insurance", ... your driver's license number. In the
state of Massachusetts, this is the same number as that used for Social
Security, unless you object to such use. In THAT case, you are ASSIGNED a
number and you reside forever more on the list of "weird people who don't give
out their Social Security Number in Massachusetts."
-- Arthur Miller
%%
"Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data,
divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed."
-- Arthur Miller
%%
"People should have access to the data which you have about them. There should
be a process for them to challenge any inaccuracies."
-- Arthur Miller
%%
"Although Poles suffer official censorship, a pervasive secret
police and laws similar to those in the USSR, there are
thousands of underground publications, a legal independent
Church, private agriculture, and the East bloc's first and only
independent trade union federation, NSZZ Solidarnosc, which is
an affiliate of both the International Confederation of Free
Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labor. There is
literally a world of difference between Poland - even in its
present state of collapse - and Soviet society at the peak of
its "glasnost." This difference has been maintained at great
cost by the Poles since 1944.
-- David Phillips, SUNY at Buffalo, about establishing a
gateway from EARN (Eurpoean Academic Research Network)
to Poland
%%
"There is also a thriving independent student movement in
Poland, and thus there is a strong possibility (though no
guarantee) of making an EARN-Poland link, should it ever come
about, a genuine link - not a vacuum cleaner attachment for a
Bloc information gathering apparatus rationed to trusted
apparatchiks."
-- David Phillips, SUNY at Buffalo, about establishing a
gateway from EARN (Eurpoean Academic Research Network)
to Poland
%%
"Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture,
an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited roads."
-- John Galt, in Ayn Rand's _Atlas Shrugged_
%%
Don't panic.
%%
The bug stops here.
%%
The bug starts here.
%%
"Why waste negative entropy on comments, when you could use the same
entropy to create bugs instead?"
-- Steve Elias
%%
"The pathology is to want control, not that you ever get it, because of
course you never do."
-- Gregory Bateson
%%
"Your butt is mine."
-- Michael Jackson, Bad
%%
Ship it.
%%
"Once they go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department."
-- Werner von Braun
%%
"When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if
it were a nail."
-- Abraham Maslow
%%
"Imitation is the sincerest form of television."
-- The New Mighty Mouse
%%
"The lesser of two evils -- is evil."
-- Seymour (Sy) Leon
%%
"It's no sweat, Henry. Russ made it back to Bugtown before he died. So he'll
regenerate in a couple of days. It's just awful sloppy of him to get killed in
the first place. Humph!"
-- Ron Post, Post Brothers Comics
%%
"An honest god is the noblest work of man. ... God has always resembled his
creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved and he was invariably
found on the side of those in power. ... Most of the gods were pleased with
sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine
perfume."
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
%%
"We are not endeavoring to chain the future but to free the present. ... We are
the advocates of inquiry, investigation, and thought. ... It is grander to think
and investigate for yourself than to repeat a creed. ... I look for the day
when *reason*, throned upon the world's brains, shall be the King of Kings and
the God of Gods.
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
%%
"I honestly believe that the doctrine of hell was born in the glittering eyes
of snakes that run in frightful coils watching for their prey. I believe
it was born with the yelping, howling, growling and snarling of wild beasts...
I despise it, I defy it, and I hate it."
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
%%
"Is this foreplay?"
"No, this is Nuke Strike. Foreplay has lousy graphics. Beat me again."
-- Duckert, in "Bad Rubber," Albedo #0 (comics)
%%
egrep patterns are full regular expressions; it uses a fast deterministic
algorithm that sometimes needs exponential space.
-- unix manuals
%%
"A mind is a terrible thing to have leaking out your ears."
-- The League of Sadistic Telepaths
%%
"Life sucks, but it's better than the alternative."
-- Peter da Silva
%%
If this is a service economy, why is the service so bad?
%%
"I shall expect a chemical cure for psychopathic behavior by 10 A.M. tomorrow,
or I'll have your guts for spaghetti."
-- a comic panel by Cotham
%%
"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
-- Will Rogers
%%
"An open mind has but one disadvantage: it collects dirt."
-- a saying at RPI
%%
"The geeks shall inherit the earth."
-- Karl Lehenbauer
%%
"Beware of programmers carrying screwdrivers."
-- Chip Salzenberg
%%
"Elvis is my copilot."
-- Cal Keegan
%%
"The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the
sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment."
-- Richard P. Feynman
%%
How many Unix hacks does it take to change a light bulb?
Let's see, can you use a shell script for that or does it need a C program?
%%
"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. Hate me because I'm beautiful, smart
and rich."
-- Calvin Keegan
%%
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
-- Bertrand Russell
%%
Always look over your shoulder because everyone is watching and plotting
against you.
%%
"Let us condemn to hellfire all those who disagree with us."
-- militant religionists everywhere
%%
Baby On Board.
%%
"The net result is a system that is not only binary compatible with 4.3 BSD,
but is even bug for bug compatible in almost all features."
-- Avadit Tevanian, Jr., "Architecture-Independent Virtual Memory Management
for Parallel and Distributed Environments: The Mach Approach"
%%
"The number of Unix installations has grown to 10, with more expected."
-- The Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June, 1972
%%
"Engineering without management is art."
-- Jeff Johnson
%%
"I'm not a god, I was misquoted."
-- Lister, Red Dwarf
%%
Brain off-line, please wait.
%%
--
-- uunet!sugar!karl | "We've been following your progress with considerable
-- ka...@sugar.uu.net | interest, not to say contempt." -- Zaphod Beeblebrox IV
-- Usenet BBS (713) 438-5018