Quotes: j

The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.

When I came here, I put my hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. I didn’t put my hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.

The appeal, however, that we declare the existence of inherent powers ex necessitate to meet an emergency asks us to do what many think would be wise, although it is something the forefathers omitted. They knew what emergencies were, knew the pressures they engender for authoritative action, knew, too, how they afford a ready pretext for usurpation. We may also suspect that they suspected that emergency powers would tend to kindle emergencies. Aside from suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in time of rebellion or invasion, when the public safety may require it, they made no express provision for exercise of extraordinary authority because of crisis. I do not think we rightfully may so amend their work…

This is a great book. You should buy it immediately unless you have absolutely no interest in computers, in which case you should get a life first and THEN buy the book.

There is no greater prude than a reformed prostitute.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.

when asked how you will choose to kick it, the proper reply (according to Ms. Manners) is that you will be kicking it root down.

But, as Big Brother said: “Ignorance is Truth.”

Know evil. Be good.

I think perhaps there should be a special subclass of anti-terrorist legislation banning any organization that calls itself the X Liberation Front.

any sufficiently advanced personal technology is indistinguishable from pornography.

At this point it becomes necessary to decide what kind of wish fulfillment or magical thinking you want to engage in.

This illustrates a problem in creative conceptualization that I think is very Japanese, and possibly results from an educational system that places an emphasis on the assimilation of facts and deference to authority, rather than the American model which encourages drug and alcohol abuse and rutting like dogs.

So what do you do if you have an idea? Well, you’re part way there. In fact, you’re exactly 1% there.

If I was one of Microsoft’s competitors, I might not be quivering in my boots quite yet, but I’d be thinking, “my god, I am wearing boots!”

The road to hell is paved?

We’re getting to that part of the project where, if you hold your silence on any bug, you’ll have to live with the shame of seeing it live in [the final release].

I’ll concede that some e-mail massages are pretty useless. But what if Uma Thurman wants you to come to her house for midnight drinks and just happens to start the message with “thought you’d be interested”?

Only a fool expects rational behavior from his fellow humans. Why do you expect it from a machine that humans have constructed?

The principal difference between a toy and a game is that the latter has some clearly defined goal or purpose; therefore life is not a game, but a toy.

a great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Increasing vision is increasingly expensive.

If you believe everything you read, better not read.

What goes must not be followed and what comes must not be avoided?

My email went to Urbana, but all I got was this stupid router!

That we are going to be the hugest Internet company in the world. Rah rah. And that is his plan. He is the Napoleon of the Internet! He’s delusional.

How psycho? Psycho interesting or psycho hide the knives?

The weather here is more interesting than the people.

for the record, i had the same problem (zephyrd core dumps on startup. i’m on aix4.1.4/powerpc). of course i found the best solution to be deleting all the source and binaries, but i’d be interested to know how you fix it if you do.

having multiple mailing lists is like being able to choose your own local phone company. or even electric company. it’s more choice than you can fit your hand around.

…i don’t ask her anything about her music. probably so i’m never able to name it. if i don’t know what it is, it’s somehow less annoying.

I used to think my family was wierd… I don’t know what I was on.

I was thinking of her in terms of a toy, like a firetruck. When the firetruck breaks, you cry a bit then forget about it and play with the police cruiser.

i’m probably not going to die anytime soon. too much paperwork.

If I have to work for a large company, i’ll go postal. Actually, it will be called “going corporate” when i do it, thank you very much. And you know where you can shove your fast food chain…

if it helps, treat this as the ramblings of a raging cynic.

It’s never too late to be obnoxious.

Your ego’s reaching critical mass.

your mind is driving down the road, and everything is fine, until you realize you haven’t been paying attention for the last few miles, and you must have taken a wrong turn because the bridge ahead is out, and you’re 20 feet away from a long drop, and you slam on your brakes and a sharp pain grasps your neck, and you decide not to do anything even remotely strenuous for a while so you can backtrack and find the fork you should have taken back a few miles. so that’s academic whiplash.

This bag will self-destruct in mother earth.

Above all else, hire the best people. If you choose to ignore this advice, I will give it to you again in six months for twice the price.

Also note that, as with most bleeding edge technologies with very high up front infrastructure costs, the Iridium sales plan calls for selling to the highly lucrative “high strung sales executive” market rather than the highly unprofitable “wanker graduate student” market.

Artists are like economists: put 5 of them in a room together, get 10 opinions.

Attention Benchmark Capital shoppers: please bring your stock options to the register before your company goes public. If you need help with your purchases, please talk to Mary Meeker in Customer Service. Thank you.

B2 Hamerschlag: We’re the best freshman floor this year, and at the rate we’re going, we’ll be the best freshman floor next year, too.

Business is about making money. Anybody who tells you different is selling something. Probably securities.

but the TRANSITION to RISC TECHNOLOGY and the use of 100% PURE JAVA CODE as well as advanced OBJECT ORIENTED TECHNOLOGY and SYMMETRIC MULTIPROCESSING means that this sentence has NO REAL POINT other than to look like macos rumors crossed with rob mcelwaine. who i miss.

Check here if you thought that the other dimension the Event Horizon went to was one where SML was the defacto standard programming language

CMU isn’t socially tolerant, it’s just full of people who really want to be wierder than they are.

Customers care that you give them what they want. Analysts care that you give the customers what they want. Nobody cares what you want to give your customers unless it’s not what the customer wants, in which case, hey, nobody cares.

DELPHI, in cooperation with the Microsoft Corporation, The Bavarian Illuminati, and the Annenberg CPB project, has secretly replaced this newsgroup with Dark, Sparkling, LSD crystals. We’ve been feeding them to the posters. Let’s see if you can tell the difference.

don’t give up religion for lent. it could cause a race condition.

dot-com companies. Stock options for everyone. The workers own the means of production. dot-communists! Workers of the world, unite! The only thing you have to lose are your itemized deductions! Bloody bourgeoise Alternative Minimum Tax.

English grammar is for foreigners.

Execution is not about strategy, it’s about going and getting things done. This is why you don’t see firing squads hiring management consultants and performing strategic vision evaluations and going bankrupt and blaming Microsoft. Firing squads know exactly what to do about Steve Ballmer.

For another, you can hit people with it. This is one of the key qualities for a good web product, and the paper weight here really delivers.

For security reasons, the mailing list, all archives, the computers it is maintained on, and the members who post to it, have been shredded.

god do i hate csh based shells. but not as much as bash, because, hey, *we fear the unknown*

Hey, I’ve been wearing Eddie Bauer pants ever since discovering that they have a 50% longer half-life than other pants when exposed to my exciting regimen of pants death. Plus they’re really cheap.

Hey, you’re right, my bad driving record justifies your total lack of personal responsibility.

I am one with the Gorton’s Fisherman. He is one seriously kung-fu harpoon using ‘mo-fo’. He is up before dawn, and lo, does he answer the question “Honey, what’s for dinner?” with no remorse for the weak. His heart is pure. His aim is true. His harpoon is sharp. His fish is light and flavorfull. No one shall stand in his way, least of all the Betties of Crocker. Give thanks to the microwave of peace, for it is just and fast.

I care far too much about a lot of things I don’t really care that much about. Duality: it’s not just for breakfast, lunch, and dinner any more.

I don’t have an ego problem, I AM an ego problem.

I don’t know whether to be afraid … or very afraid.

I don’t want to experience, empower or compell. I don’t want to experience anything empowering or compelling, empower any compelling experiences, or compell any empowering experiences. And most of all, pretty please, with sugar on top, can I please god damn avoid being empowered to experience compelling content?

I get the feeling that there’s a lot of context in your parents decisions that you’re just not privy to. Like the fact that they’re space aliens.

I have found that most of the witty “oh you broke your car” commentary comes from people who drive wussy pissant cars like saturns. why is that? Whereas my porsche owning friends are more like “ha ha that’s nothing, you should have seen the time i had to replace, not only my engine, but my LEFT LEG!”

I keep wanting to start keeping a journal, but first I’d have to write an autobiography to explain the first twenty years. Context is everything.

I survived Operation Infinite Construction, renamed Operation Not So Enduring Gas Tank after people from the East Coast argued that only DC and New York can have infinite construction.

I USED TO HEART MY DUMB FRIENDS UNTIL I DECIDED TO CLUB THEM ALL WITH A SPADE AND SELL THEIR DIAMONDS TO BUY MORE RAM.

I used to get high on life but lately I’ve built up a resistance.

I’ll believe it when I see it. Would it help if I were drunk when I see it?

i’m a non-conformist too!

I’m far and away the most attactive, most lusted after woman on every list I’m on. It isn’t a problem here, but on comp.risks it’s just wierd.

I’ve got a bottle of wine with your name on it. No, it’s John Chambers’ name.

If you go back in time and track down Christopher Columbus you’ll find he had a set of friends who kept babbling on about how the trip to the new world was being done wrong and he should wait until ship designs were much better. They led much happier, more uneventful lives than he did, but there’s a reason I didn’t tell you their names: no one remembers, and no one cares.

In cyberspace everybody knows you’re a pervert.

In order to reset my password for Virgin, they ask me a security question. The security question is: what is my phone number. Because apparently criminals cannot use THE GOOGLE. … I’d think they could pick a better security measure than being able to look something up in a book that gets dropped on everyone’s doorstep every 6 months.

In regards to the production measurement study I mentioned above, the project in question was the Manhattan Project. Please don’t go whining to me about how those numbers don’t reflect what happens if you have smart dedicated people or a real sense of urgency, unless your engineering team has several Nobel Laureates working to develop the capacity to eliminate all life on this planet.

In unix there are no morals, only determinism.

Information Superhigway: day care ahead.

It could be worse. It could be C++.

it has gotten to the point where i can construct quotesfilable sentences at will. it’s like i start to say something and part of the function call of saying something is that i can set a flag for “quotefiles”. what do you want to do today? [] work at tower records [] route for uunet [] hunt vampires [] say something quotable. CHOOSE WISELY. translation: i’m living in an episode of friends. vijay == jennifer aniston. FROM THE DARK SIDE.

It may be nifty, but replacing their 2d rendering system with a graphic system designed for a product that was never completed by a company that no longer exists would be almost as brain damaged as Apple creating their next generation OS by doing a half-baked port of MacOS onto a ten year old version of UNIX based on a non-standard version of C. Oh, wait…

It’s around this point that I start thinking about parables involving an infinite number of monkeys and Steve Jobs.

It’s Sun. “We overengineer a solution to a nonexistent problem and pass the savings on to an object which doesn’t handle savings and throws an exception.”

look, the only people who don’t write terrible poetry are ezra pound and my sister. my sister because she doesn’t write poetry and ezra pound because he’s DEAD.

Managers manage four things: goals, risk, crises and time. When you manage goals you are helping decide what to do. When you manage risk you are helping avoid what not to do. When you manage a crisis you are helping dig out of a hole. When you manage time you are helping nothing: you either hired badly or are making work for yourself, cut it out.

My friend Sarah has a ‘Faisal test’ wherein she runs all her boyfriends by me. In your case I might offer to just send you a bunch of sheets with blanks for ‘Name:’ and ‘Grade:’ with big red circled ‘F’s in all the 'Grade:’ boxes, and you can just fill in the names.

Never eat there. Under no circumstances eat at that McDonalds. If it’s the last food left on earth, die.

Nonchalantly, always nonchalantly. If you’re going to chicken out, do it with style.

Real milestones are all or nothing. Anything else is an excuse for weaseling. “Almost done” is a euphamism for “Not done”. “Half done” is a euphamism for “Half-assed.”

Remember kids: at Carnegie Mellon, it’s *always* a cold day in hell.

She doesn’t have email. Therefore, she doesn’t exist.

she suffers for her art, and now we can too.

Silicon Valley is getting ridiculous. I just got $4 million in venture funding with a Happy Meal at McDonald’s (ahem, McDonald’s Family Restaurants Venture Partners, LLP). No Bob Kagle, though. It’s GENERIC money. Anyone want to go see a movie? You get a Yankee Group report free if you buy a medium drink and large popcorn.

Son, you live in a world that has internets, and those internets have to be guarded by half-baked encryption schemes with obvious flaws. Who’s gonna fix it? You? You, Lieutenant Collins? I have a greater tolerance for stupid design than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Netscape and you curse Microsoft. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that SSL’s failures, while tragic, probably saved at least $3.50. And its existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saved another $2.35. You don’t want SSL because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want porn on the internet. You NEED porn on the internet. You use words like “public key”, “code”, “oops”. We use those words as the backbone to a life spent defending the backbone. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain human factors research to a man who rises and sleeps under the delusion of minimal safety that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you start over. Either way, I don’t give a damn what your entitlement scheme claims is a valid certificate.

The first step to solving a problem is to be a bastard…

the house went on recess without passing the senate bill. it appears that by applying sufficient vacation, congress can get a spine.

The mythical 1Ghz PowerPC which is so much faster because they’ve moved from silicon to crack cocaine. Sure, [the] engineers don’t think it’s possible, but what do they know?

The next mid-level manager who complains about high IT staffing costs around here dies. I’m not threatening, I’m just saying that the survival rate for companies that decide to hire five incompetent programmers for the price of 4 competent ones isn’t real great. This should be obvious, but, well, no, it is obvious.

The nxttime somdiot macuser tells mthat coopersking is more responsvethan pre-ptive multitasking, I’m goinostrangle them to death with their own mouse cable.

The Quotes Files. Two CMU dropout FBI agents investigate bizarre incidents and cool sayings. USA Network. The cure for the common cold.

The phone I was thinking of getting not only has a flat rate unlimited data plan, it has an IMAP client and an RSS reader. The next time I say I want to change the world, I should just watch “The Terminator” instead.

The reason we have more efficient technologies is that we learned from doing it wrong the first time. Progress is continual refinement. It’s not about the goal, it’s about the process. The point is not to do it “the right way”. The point is to do it.

The “solve the time crunch in the software project by adding lots of programmers” technique is often referred to as “masses of asses”, but I think that’s a bit misleading. We’ve got 50 years of evidence that throwing more bodies at a software project only slows things down. The only asses in a situation like that are the ones doing the throwing.

There is no justification for art, and no excuse for the lack of it.

…there’s some new industry standard definition of “exactly” (as in, “a user using Microsoft Internet Explorer sees exactly the same thing as a user using Netscape Navigator” which does not mean the traditional “precisely”, but rather means “hey, buy our stuff”.

Time to stop writing specification documents and start executing. We will execute until everyone is dead. Thank you, drive through.

Vampire: The Masquerade. That’s gothic for ‘bail, now’

We’re going to have a “Come to Jesus” meeting. Well, more of a “Come to Beavis” meeting, really.

We’re here at the Folger’s factory, where we’re secretly replacing Dark, Sparkling Folger’s Crystals with Dark, Sparkling Folger’s Crystals. Let’s see if you can tell the point of this ad.

Welcome to the bigger pond.

When you can finish your paper in the middle of a good base ogg, you will be ready to leave the temple.

Windows gives you a house. It’s an ugly but functional house, built the way Bill Gates wanted it. The Mac gives you a pretty house, built the way Steve wanted it. UNIX doesn’t give you a house. Instead it gives you everything you need to build your own house. It gives you a platform. You build on it with lots of little commands which are letter combinations you have to guess at. Everything is text, which is the rope that ties things together. What *else* involves a platform, rope, and guessing at random letters?

With all due respect, if I were trying to get your business, I would have started out a little more subtly than ‘I saw your World Wide Web site, and I had some comments. It really sucks.’

Woohoo! Sign me up for the angst bus!

You *are* fabulous. You’re also one of the guys.

you! with the powerful multimedia toolkit! knock it off! your content sucks or i would have bought it at the bookstore!

Your brilliant idea may be combined with a small number of coins to facilitate the procurement of a hot caffeinated beverage. Show me the management team.

Well this week has been another long month.

as i was packing up my books, i noticed that i had atlas shrugged shoved in between to kill a mockingbird and the communist manifesto. i cant say it didnt give me a tiny little twinge of happiness.

but in reality this won’t have too much direct effect on either one of you since you ran from maryland like one runs from a burning building or angry bears, or even a burning building full of angry bears.

dear women, stop being evil. love, may

finals are a heterosexist tool of the patriarchal establishment running this school, designed to weaken our ties to one another (by creating neurotic, high-strung women, lessening our time together, and promoting an unhealthy, false spirit of competition among each other), a divide and conquer method if you will, so that we can no longer unite in the face of rising tuition costs and increased program cuts. hey, i still haven’t lost my touch! this is why i love my major–everything is a conspiracy to feed capitalism. it’s like one big x-files, and i, my friend, am fox mulder in platforms.

Great. As if my self esteem wasn’t bad enough, now I have to participate in organized sports.

I AM A COLLEGE STUDENT AND I DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO CALL PEOPLE WHO DRIVE CARS THAT COST MORE THAN I DO.

i can’t believe people like that are allowed to vote in this country. or operate heavy machinery. like paper clips.

i can’t get my minesweeper score below 15 seconds. i’m a has-been. my glory days are over. in 10 years, vh1 will do a special on me and my rags-to-riches story of how i rose to fame and then sank back into obscurity, a pathetic, broken shell of my former self.

i have now officially read every single quote in your quote file. i now officially have no life.

i was thinking more along the lines of my dating life than major political trends. although it may be argued that the two are one and the same.

irc wont ruin my grades. nothing can ruin my grades. that would entail my grades getting worse, which is physically impossible unless the registrars office starts using letters of the cyrilic alphabet.

It’s [112] miles to [Provincetown], we’ve got a full tank of gas, a [backpack] of [CD]s, it’s [almost] dark and we’re [not] wearing sunglasses [because it’s March in Massachusetts]. Hit it!

must…make…self-aggrandizing…cinematic tripe…to…reveal truth!!!

Oh stop it with the biscuit politics already. Eat the bisquit!

ok, so im trapped in the computer lab doing work, and i have this stack of cds next to me, and *none* of them are conducive to any sort of productivity: listening to kd lang and dave matthews makes me want to get laid, listening to dar williams reminds me that im not getting laid, listening to irish drinking songs makes me want to get drunk and then get laid, and listening to enya is just plain weird.

ok, stop deconstructing; start advising me on fashion

ok, you have to understand that there is indeed a reason why i didnt call you yesterday. the reason is that i am a rotten horrible terrible person and a bad sister. i will call you tonight.

polyamory: multiple lovers. not to be confused with cleveland amory: multiple cats.

rugby makes you sweaty and gay. sometimes the two are more related than you might think.

sometimes, the best medicine is not laughter, or love, or friendship. sometimes, the best medicine is actually gin.

“the devil’s advocate”. intended moral: lawyers are bad. real moral: keanu is bad. do not rent movies with him in them.

there’s no reason for me to keep being so fabulously witty if it doesn’t lead to international fame and admiration. work with me here.

This movie… how should I put it… is ruled over by the gods of suck.

um. welcome to this week’s edition of “good idea, bad idea”.

When was the last time you updated the quotes file? When was the last time you added something cool that I said?

You are not anal. You are so far from anal. The light from anal takes 40 million years to get to you.

You’re like the porn fairy. Delivering porn to all the good little boys and girls. Or rather, all the *bad* little boys and girls.

Ayn Rand? Any encyclopedia that devotes noticable amounts of space to the works of Ayn Rand as philosophy is not an encyclopedia worth buying.

Where are we? What if they held a war and Nameer drew all the maps?

You would not have liked Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.

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.

I hold that a little rebellion is a good thing.

If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise, in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour? That one hundred and fifty lawyers should do business together, ought not to be expected.

In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is easier to acquire wealth and power by this combination than by deserving them, and to effect this, they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purposes.

In every country where man is free to think and to speak, differences of opinion will arise from difference of perception, and the imperfection of reason; but these differences when permitted, as in this happy country, to purify themselves by free discussion, are but as passing clouds overspreading our land transiently and leaving our horizon more bright and serene.

Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations.

No [free] man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.

…the successful experiment made under the prevalence of that delusion on the clause of the constitution, which, while it secured the freedom of the press, covered also the freedom of religion, had given to the clergy a very favorite hope of obtaining an establishment of a particular form of Christianity thro’ the U.S.; and as every sect believes its own form the true one, every one perhaps hoped for his own, but especially the Episcopalians & Congregationalists. The returning good sense of our country threatens abortion to their hopes, & they believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

Were it left for me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate amoment to prefer the latter.

what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

They all laughed at Albert Einstein. They all laughed at Columbus. Unfortunately, they also all laughed at Bozo the Clown.

The great thing about finding someone to hook up with at Tracks is that if you don’t, there’s always next week. You can pick up where you left off.

If I see one more JFK movie, I will dig him up and kill him again.

I think that’s how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York said, “Gee, I’m enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn’t cold enough. Let’s go west.”

You’re basically killing each other to see who’s got the better imaginary friend.

The talking moose is the ultimate system extension for your Mac: From time to time, one of two selectable mooses will pop up on your screen and say something, stupid, witty or utterly useless. It will keep you company if you have to spend another night in front of your Mac, and it will annoy you so much that you’ll throw it away again after six weeks or so. But it’s so sympathetic that you will drag it out every winter because it’s just so nerdy.

Half of the corners you want to cut today will come back to haunt you. Engineering is the art of determining which half to cut.

I felt stupid the other week when I couldn’t remember how to convert between number systems; it was something I did every single day when I was 15 and now I’m nearly 25 and am so far away from the hardware that when somebody mentions endian-ness, I think Tandoori.

I don’t like the New New Economy. I’ve dubbed it ‘Dude, Where’s My Job?’.

Really, I’m not a toddler. Please don’t be confused. Now stop and think; If Steve were under the age of 1 would have a blog? Or a job? Or a fine collection of alcohol and junk mail? Would he be able to speak of himself in the third person? No, not unless he was a really spectacular pre-1 year old.

It is always the best policy to speak the truth–unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.

Luck is probability taken personally

The bottleneck is not in technology, it’s in art.

It was only after their population of fifty mysteriously shrank to eight, that the other seven dwarfs began to suspect Hungry.

The key point of Bruce’s that I take issue with is the idea that the Internet is somehow antithetical to the market. This has Bruce really excited. I have a somewhat detailed refutation of this notion, but if you’re pressed for time, here’s the abridged version: oh, come on now.

You managed to hit one of them, bounced off. They lift up their rifles and return fire. Your struck 38 times in the back and legs and as you hit the ground you roll over and manage to look up at the building just as you die. It reads: ‘Arasaka Securities’. [ pause ] ‘Have another character ready?’

And then there’s the question ‘How’s it goin’?‘ I usually follow this by 'Do you want me to lie, do you want the Reader’s Digest Condensed Truth, or do you want the whole truth?’ Then they say ‘lie’ and I say fine and move on.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

HAL is the perfect spokesperson to address the Y2K issues because he lives in the year 2001 and speaks from experience. Plus HAL is the foremost expert on things that can go wrong with computers.

If you look at the artists, if they get really good, it always occurs to them at some point that they can do this one thing for the rest of their lives, and they can be really successful to the outside world but not really be successful to themselves. That’s the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure, they’re still artists.

It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.

Like many things in life, you can do exactly what you were going to do in the first place and change the names.

No one wants to die – even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.

Nobody’s tried to swallow us since I’ve been here–I think they’re afraid of how we’d taste.

Remembering you are going to die is the best way to avoid the fear that you have something to lose.

So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’

Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you’re doing. I mean Picasso had a saying, he said good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

When I started in this business, one of the biggest challenges was that people couldn’t type. And one day we realized that death would eventually take care of this.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

It’s not a company, it’s a cult, and frankly I can appreciate that because we’re a cult too and the fact is that cults are easier to run than companies. But you’re running a cult of children. And not just any children. You’ve got children of the corn type children.

People must not attempt to impose their own ‘truth’ on others. The right to profess the truth must always be upheld, but not in a way that involves contempt for those who may think differently.

Nonetheless, that old-time religion has gotten a taste of way new journalism and the spirit has descended upon the people and moved them to action, which in 1996 is spelled B-B-E-d-i-t.

Women are soft, and fun to touch, but that does not stop them from being incarnations of pure evil.

Unfortunately, most of the programmers I’ve been around are immature and not well managed, so you end up with these massive schedule and quality problems. I claim it’s immaturity, because if we are still stuck in low gear trying to impress our friends with our tricky code, that’s high school behavior. That’s mostly what I saw. “Ooh, I can save 12 bytes if I write this in a stupid way. Aren’t I clever?” Too bad no one can read it. Or, “Ooh, I can make this faster if I write it obscurely. I’m so cool.” Never mind that it never gets used. That sort of lack of professionalism is what put me over the edge.

I get your point: You think it’s better to give up your civil liberties than die for them. Funny, we’re going to war because someone hates our way of life so much they want it ended. Kill enough adherents to the American philosophy, and they think that the rest turn will around and give it up. They killed a few adherents. You’re giving up.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

On the business front, UNIX has been under attack from a variety of sources, primarily by the nonexistant Windows NT. Luckily, the UNIX vendors have their own nonexistant products with which to answer the threat.

I don’t want to kill it for the kids, but Santa Claus is not going to bring us the playoffs. We got to go there and snatch it. We got to go out there, put the mask on and go rob.

It’s not a beauty contest, ain’t no bikini on that one. A win is a win.

We’re a funded Linux company now, and we’ll be able to do some things that we couldn’t do before, like buy beer.

I’m not bitter, I’m evil.

My heart goes out to you. You should probably go buy some consumer electronics. That always helps me.

People who love to drink out of straws are not old enough to drink alcohol. For those people, Miss Manners believes it’s quite enough excitement for them to drive their parents crazy by blowing bubbles in their milk.

Women schwomen. You need to interact with your computer a little more deeply.

I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm’s way.

When PETA starts trying to toss red paint on motorcycle riders wearing leather jackets, things will get more interesting (and I hope someone’s there with a camera).

None other than a Gentleman, as well as a seaman, both in theory and practice is qualified to support the character of a Commissioned Officer in the Navy, nor is any man fit to command a Ship of War who is not also capable of communicating his Ideas on Paper in Language that becomes his Rank.

the Credit of the Service depends not only on dealing fairly with the men Employed in it, but on their belief that they are and will be fairly dealt with.

to be well obeyed it is necessary to be esteemed

I’m not sure what the future holds, but I’m absolutely sure who holds the future.

There is always an Archalean Battle Cruiser, or a Carillean Death Ray or a galactic plague about ready to wipe out life on this miserable little plant. The only way, these *people* can get on with their happy lives is they do. not. *know-about-it*.

Cinnamint (with Myrrh) is most excellent and I absolutely recommend it. Then again, I have also been known to absolutely recommend assassinations. But only one per person.

I know you are super busy, though, so if you cannot respond, I will remain your friend, but I will be forced to poison you with Sweet Tart concentrate.

I think I need to make a faisalfaq.com page, where the most frequently said reply is heh.

Mykl. Kangal. Faisal…sounds like a spell being cast or something……

putting the mental in sentimental… one drama at a time.

We’d call Dave Foley (the star of A Bug’s Life) a poor man’s Woody Allen, but it’d probably be less insulting to poor people if we just went back to setting them on fire.

Honestly, in 2000, we couldn’t pick one crappy Mars movie to be marginally better than the other crappy Mars movie, so we just went and saw Gladiator for the sixth time.

It is better to debate a question without settling it, than to settle a question without debating it.

Just about every computer on the market today runs Unix, except the Mac (and nobody cares about it).

Most people are bad programmers. The honest truth is that having a lot of people staring at the code does not find the really nasty bugs. The really nasty bugs are found by a couple of really smart people who just kill themselves. Most people looking at the code won’t see anything … You can’t have thousands of people contributing and achieve a high standard.

Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks.

Either your head will explode or you would be nice and serene or your head would explode AND you would be nice and serene.

Debating the merits of one platform with the acolyte of another platform is like trying to make love to a cat… It doesn’t do anything for you, and it pisses the cat off…

chuck was sharing an honestly funny story about a d&d game he hads been in when ten years ago and this other girl decided to talk about the time that she had run a d&d game and she talked about the time a character had met the Seven Deadly Sins ™ and my question was “um, why do the Seven Deadly Sins speak in lame rennfest cockney accents?”

Um, we could all go for a walk into the spirit world (or actually just that place gumby goes would be fine) and we could bring back a jabberwocky and we could break into MAE-East and we could leave the jabberwocky there.

Yes, if one third of the people buying this book would die on the ice with a mammoth tusk shearing their upper body from their lower like PROPER cavemen then it might actually be beneficial.

You see, I recently discovered that my soul mate had been very close to me all along. Attatched to my right wrist, as a matter of fact.

All great powers are arrogant – it just so happens that America is the only one around.

Republican publicists have done a good job of getting that ‘big tent party’ meme to stick. Whenever I see it, to avoid gagging, I always think of a big circus tent full of animals that, in nature, would eat each other. And clowns. Scary, scary clowns.

In the event of an earthquake: Duck.