Quotes: s

The MiG-21 is the plane that goes nowhere, and does nothing, better than any fighter in the world.

Fun for the whole family, provided that the whole family hasn’t been put off by our use of vulgar language above.

If you’re searching for a short-term success, look for something that’s been failing for 20 years.

[in the future we] will assume things are active unless they’re obviously not–for example, if they’re running Windows.

Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion.

It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English – up to fifty words used in correct context – no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

Scepticism and re-evaluation are necessities, not luxuries.

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.

George, no matter how you try, the fact remains that I have a diagnosis of mental illness from the psychology department’s sysop and you do not. A warning of impending phenomenology from a connectionist research scientist pales in comparison.

No, I’m a middle-class white criminal. I got a slap on the wrist.

Zen sex - is that like the Koan about the sound of one hand clapping?

Usenet is a right, a left, a jab, and a sharp hit to the jaw. The postman hits! You have new mail.

For him that steals, or borrows and returns not, a book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw at his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not. And when at last he goes to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.

The bear refused to shake hands with the tree. The tree refused to shake hands with the bear. [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Neural nets are cool. I have one. I like to put alcohol on it.

That’s very nice. Now, take you’re mouse, and click at the beginning of his idea, drag to the end of his idea, hit command-c, open a new mail window, place your cursor in the body field, hit command-v, and then e-mail it to me!

Wow. I thought crime was against the law in Switzerland!

You do not lie, you understate to the point of criminal negligence.

I’m all for division of labor, but do we actually need to outsource the production of uninformed, half-assed thought experiments to opinion writers?

It’s compiling! I have so many Mickey Mouse Hands pointing at my crotch that I can barely see the screen!!

Every time a computer science student graduates, another free software project goes into ‘maintenance mode’.

This is no time to act like a gentleman. I am a cad and shall react like one.

It’s a choice that’s been offered to many men: Be a slave in Heaven or a star in Hell; and Hell does not always look like Hell - on a good day it can look a lot like L.A.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Karma is like justice without the satisfaction. And I don’t believe in justice.

The only thing you can assume about a broken-down old man is that he’s a survivor.

Competition brings out the worst in people and the best in products.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

Hell is… other people.

We are our choices.

We play the part of heroes because we’re cowards, the part of saints because we’re wicked: we play the killer’s role because we’re dying to murder our fellow: we play at being because we are liars from the moment we’re born.

Who Dares, Wins.

As the years went by, Apple management’s reaction to its steady decline was to insist that its products would win because they were better, and to continually charge more for them until, by 1994, it decided it would allow clones to be built after all. This was followed by the decision that it would not allow clones to be built after all, then by a decision that it would allow it, then it wouldn’t, and finally, no one cared.

A professor at the university of Wisconsin says he’s found a way to take the bitterness out of cheddar cheese. Now if only he could find a way to remove the arrogance from Wheat Thins.

In protest to France’s opposition to a US war on Iraq, the US Congress’s cafeteria has changed French fries and French toast to Freedom fries and Freedom toast. Afterwards, the congressmen were so pleased with themselves they all started Freedom kissing each other. In a related story, in France, American cheese is now referred to as Idiot cheese.

Oh, SURE us END USERs (those horrid people that buy your ordered bytes) are SO stupid that we can’t possibly conceive a benefit from having a more responsive machine that doesn’t get bogged by some miscrent wordprocessor. And, oh oh oh how I ADORE having that time to take a 10 mile run while StuffitLite decompresses and de-binhexes that 18 Meg file!!! YES YES YES!! I love computer tieups!

The real question here is “can the Cisco kid stop the skid?” The earnings release that came out last night was termed a `home run’ by one John Chambers. But if you drill down into it, what he didn’t tell you was that the book-to-bill ratio was below one and that they squeezed their suppliers to make the number, which is why the revenue line was flat and yet the gross margins were up and it was all pro forma. I’m 20 pounds lighter pro forma.

This panic about sexting is really just bobbysoxers and Elvis Presley’s hips, and hippies with long hair. It’s a generational paranoia because young people are doing something that old people didn’t, because they couldn’t, and now can’t, because no one wants to see them naked.

As a graduate student in computer science in 1970 (the age of free love and expensive computing), I was taught it was a sin to waste CPU hours (@ $1,000 each) through inefficient algorithms. Today, there are 100 million computers in the United States, each of which is idle an average of at least 10 hours per day, wasting 1 billion CPU hours. From a 1970 perspective we are pouring the gross national product down the drain every night, and it has become a sin not to use as many CPU hours as possible. I prefer the age of free computing to the age of free love for two reasons. First, the viruses aren’t fatal, and second, the love never turned out to be free.

When I started teaching OR/MS concepts with spreadsheets, I missed the significance of this, and simply kept doing what I had done before, only with spreadsheets. I quickly discovered that this approach was analogous to laying a wheel on its side, loading it with luggage, and dragging it across the ground behind a yak.

There are no OSF-1/AD customers. There are only OSF-1/AD victims.

As President Bush says, the crisis is now. I would amend this slightly to say the crisis is President Bush.

Dire Straits is a great band. Someone tells you they like “Brothers in Arms” and immediately you know they’re a stupid annoying git.

If you travel to the States… they have a lot of different words than like what we use. For instance: they say ‘elevator’, we say ‘lift’; they say ‘drapes’, we say ‘curtains’; they say ‘president’, we say ‘seriously deranged git’

Recently, my personal advisors have been telling me to go to America. Actually, people have been walking up to me in the street and telling me to sod off, but that’s the same thing, isn’t it?

Um…., this is comp.sys.plamtops.pilot. The “palmtop” part means we are all onanists here.

All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt.

It’s not so much that politics brings out the worst in people than it is that the worst in people goes looking for something to do, and that usually ends up being politics.

p.s. Just kidding about the small furry animals. I would’t kill them REALLY, I might just try to hurt their feelings a little though.

The US military is, in spite of the efforts of the past few years by a whole lot of self-serving politicians, a junkyard dog on a short leash. In most cases harmless, but if you piss its owners off enough for them to slip the leash, it’s time to bend over and smile.

A haiku is a a Japanese poem containing three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, containing a cutting, or pause, word, as well as spam, oelestra, or Spice Girls imagery.

All utterances of Joshua™ are guaranteed to contain Joshuaisms®, of which the phrase “punk” is one of. “Feel free at any time to bite me” is another Joshuaism®, and you should, infact, feel free to bite me at any time.

And remember – if you can’t be creative or interesting, you can be cute and naked.

Been there, done that, threw away the t-shirt.

beyond the humor event horizon is a universe bound entirely by lame forwards

Blah…I’m bored. Let’s go out and get new girlfriends.

Enlightenment guaranteed or double your Buddha nature back!

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. BACKSPACE IS DELETE.

he who controls the spice girls controls the universe!

Hey, there are some pretty good quotes in here. Although there are far too many of them. Delete three.

I AM A REAL PROGRAMMER. IF IT DOESN’T COME FROM A VENDING MACHINE, I DON’T EAT IT.

“I am the being that is collectively know in the current time frame as circumlocutus of the collective entity borg, commence preperations for you collective entity to be subsumed and assimilated with in ours”. alternatively: “i am circumlocutus of borg … this is going to take a while”.

I don’t actually have a clue… but that’s never stopped me before… although that’s never helped me succeed

I got the error message “Error in compound command component; compound command terminated.” Remind me next time I’m writing program to have the error messages rhyme.

i have de.ci.ded that we should just break all words at they’re sy.la.ble boun.dar.ies be.cause hey, it’s cool.

I never meta key I didn’t like.

i predict stale humor

i was going to, in fact, deliver an insult so horrible and mind blowing that your personality and psyche would have been utterly destroyed. however, i have decided that it would not be worth it to lose you as a person i’ll just mention that i could have done so.

i use sweet'n low in my coffee so a sugar rush doesn’t interfere with my caffeine rush

I’m depressed … It’s a cheap way to show yourself a bad time.

i’m running IE 6.0 on NT 2000. i’m so bleeding edge that i am sliced so thin it makes the average deli vendor green with envy.

I’ve been all over the pittsburgh area looking for a good cup of joe at 3 AM since before you were a prekie.

i’ve been running this seti@home thing all week and i haven’t detected any aliens yet

If you freak her out and she winds up in the hospital then YOU WIN.

in the future, when you feel you have things to share … well, you’d be wrong. don’t.

it turns out that it is not better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all. it’s better to not look like an idiot while doing so.

it’s hard to be shocked by zephyr… so i installed a parallel port tazer

java: write once, run away.

KORTAL WOMBAT!

Look. We’re talking about getting the computer store to sell Sparcs. Whether they can emulate your calclulator or whatever is pretty irrelevant.

No. *Cleveland* is not better than Pittsburgh.

“Oh, no!” shouts the computer scientist, “A special case!”

People tell me one thing one day and out the other.

quotesfile that. after you dump her.

Refenestration: reinstalling Windows

“Resistance is futile. You will be– awww, Token Ring?!?

Schachter’s Hypothesis: Given two unrelated technical terms, an internet search engine will retrieve only resumes.

scsi i kenobi, you’re our only hope!

so, kill me, or i’ll send the intel bunny people to do their thing on your ass.

Socializing, i don’t know anything about it… zephyr, that’s completely different.

That’s not loud enough. I want to be able to hang up the phone and still hear it.

The only problem with the game so far is that I haven’t figured out a good way to make money yet, so for ten bucks a month I get to roleplay a homeless person.

there are no X11 users. there are only X11 victims.

There’s too much blood in my caffeine system.

you forget that i’m jewish. so to me, the pope is an annoying public leader that i didn’t even vote for

you’ve raise some very interesting and important issues. i’ll spank you later

Your zen-fu sucks.

I gave up luck in high school. I prefer a little deadly force myself.

Life is a joke, and death is the ultimate punch line. Welcome to hell.

A non-vegetarian anti-abortionist is a contradiction in terms.

It gets worse, though, because Bethell was also a *fine-arts* student, which means that he had apparently been getting either too much Cindy Sherman or not enough Baroque 101.

does this mean we get to nuke pittsburgh from orbit? pretty, pretty, please? unhinged pgh: you now have 30 minutes to reach minimum safe distance before MIRV seperation.

i hope you all appreciate that i’m doing all my own stunts here

i seem to be canadian!

i’m seeing it because it has the Very Large Array in it - the same reason i saw ID4. two words: synthesized aperature. yummm

it isn’t really reasonable to ascribe the ability to break the laws of physics to the military - hundreds of billions of dollars is not enough to bribe god into granting exceptions

just to set the record straight: the roswell aliens, adolf hitler, JFK, elvis, lee harvey oswald and a short-order cook from missoula are all living on a sumptious estate owned by howard hughes just outside of buenos aires.

this is all well and good for Real Programmers, but what about the majority of programmers writing for Real World apps?

watch out for the volvo station wagons, too. actually, i think that the only station wagon it’s permissable to buy is a powder blue late model buick roadmaster with faux wood panelling, and the driver’s door has to be primer brown. no hub caps, neither. (of course, my personal dream car is a flat-black cadillac hearse with a chopped top, racing slicks, supercharger with enourmous hood scoop, and nitrous oxide - though the nitrous has to be plumbed into the vent system, not the engine:)

I recall composing that little speech one Friday afternoon while high on coffee and M&M’s. It appeared in this space on June 1. It included such deep thoughts as "Sing,” “Floss,” and “Don’t mess too much with your hair.” It was not art.

I’m a monopolist. I plan to be sued!

Moore’s law has not repealed the fundamental mission of college students. It’s still sex, drugs, and rock & roll.

Web people don’t care about your dumb design.

The airforce has spent 30 years and several billion dollars trying to make voice interaction work so why doesn’t it work? Because when you’re pulling 6Gs and you say “Fire” and it says “please repeat”, you’re not gonna use this thing ever again. Literally.

Security is a process, not a product.

to assume that because the contents of an ISO 14443 chip are safe from prying eyes because they are encrypted is as foolish as assuming that a house is able to withstand a stiff wind simply because it is built

If atheism is a religion, then bald is a hair color.

A pact between Microsoft and Barney. Sealed in purple blood.

erpf…uh…kill me now… better yet, kill him now.

Every 10 minutes I walk over to the library and press my face against the scanner, ftp the file over to my machine and serve it off a web server. I’m looking to automate the entire process though.

Genetic engineering is like legos, only with really small blocks.

Here’s a new idea I have for a process scheduler. It assigns priorities based on how close they are to the deadline. This is a pretty standard method. However, in addition, if none of the process deadlines are particularly close it will just idle and not work on anything. And if it gets to the point where there are at least 2 jobs which can not be adequately scheduled in the remaining time it will panic and start randomly browsing the web and sending email.

I’d like a large bowl of angst with a side order of frustration, no catsup.

if we have enough bored cmu cs graduates here we could start our own consulting service. We provide the skilled boredom and pass the savings on to you!

Man, I’ve been out of pittsburgh so long, I forgot that the weather was dithered there.

Not only can [Mosaic] suck more, it does.

say, josh, if I type in a death threat to the president, will you send it from your account for me?

That’s fine with me.. and by induction, I am most people.

They’re just whining about how it doesn’t let you make mistakes. This is UNIX, you’re not supposed to make mistakes.

Deloitte’s characterization of the case is simply wrong. Deloitte was not deceived. They didn’t just miss red flags, they pulled the flag over their head and then claimed they couldn’t see.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

To help you truly appreciate how we will verbally communicate with tomorrow’s computers, stop thinking of Star Trek and instead imagine in your mind’s ear the sociopathic musings of a digital Robert De Niro. You got a problem with that?!

I’ve always hated Sabbat, and now I hate their games too. Now I know how Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer felt.

They wouldn’t know subtlety if it painted itself purple and jumped up and down in front of them singing “Subtlety is here again”…

When The Going Gets Tough The Dice Get Hosey

cat > got_your_tongue?

The Pledge of Allegiance says ‘liberty and justice for all’. Which part of ‘all’ don’t you understand?

There is a style of design I call “wishful thinking engineering.” It starts with something like “pigs can fly if you feed them enough beans” and develops utopian plans such as like having everyone commute to work riding on personal pigs…

Stack is the new term for “I have no idea what I’m actually using”.

Try not to have a good time … This is supposed to be educational.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.

Nobody’s yet explained why it takes a raft of lawyers, eighty million dollars, and meetings all over the world to accomplish what Jon Postel did in his spare time on his office workstation.

Just as most issues are seldom black or white, so are most good solutions seldom black or white. Beware of the solution that requires one side to be totally the loser and the other side to be totally the winner. The reason there are two sides to begin with usually is because neither side has all the facts. Therefore, when the wise mediator effects a compromise, he is not acting from political motivation. Rather, he is acting from a deep sense of respect for the whole truth.

Josh, where you been? We figured you were out kicking McCcauley Culkin’s ass.

As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he as a soldier. Other than that, he’s a great military man, I want you to know that.

I believe that forgiving them is God’s function. Our job is simply to arrange the meeting.

Leadership is a combination of strategy and character. If you must be without one, be without the strategy.

I LOVE BUFFER OVERFLOWS. I THINK I’LL TAKE A LONG WALK OFF A SHORT ARRAY.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while the pessimist sees only the red stoplight. The truly wise person is colorblind.

All that is necessary for the defeat of evil is for good men to do something. Anything. Good things.

Mr. Lucas’s indifference to two fairly important aspects of moviemaking - acting and writing - is remarkable.

I used to say that when being CEO at Apple wasn’t fun anymore, I’d quit. But now I’ve changed my mind—when it isn’t fun any more, I’ll fire people until it’s fun again.

Be slow in choosing a friend, but slower in changing him.

I’ve suffered for my music, ladies and gentlemen. Now it’s your turn.

It is regrettable for the education of the young that war stories are always told by those who survived.

After the third free Bloody Mary, it doesn’t matter what the hell Richard Stallman says. Well, actually it does.

As a consumer of commercial broadcast programming, your direct influence is zero because that’s exactly what you pay.

The simple fact is that Apple always was Steve’s company, even when he wasn’t there. The force that allowed Apple to survive more than a decade of bad leadership, cluelessness and constant mistakes was the legacy of Steve’s original Art. That legacy was not just an OS that was 10 years ahead of the rest of the world, but a Cause that induced a righteousness of purpose centered around a will to innovate – to perpetuate the original artistic achievements.

If someone tells you that the fully armored man of the Middle Ages was so encumbered by his armor that he could not rise if he fell, you may well ask yourself, first, if it is reasonable to assume that professional soldiers would go on wearing armor that kept them from fighting…

We need the ribbon for evidence.

I’ve conquered your love with my hate.

Reddit is proof that lisp is really powerful. Paul Graham originally wrote reddit, in lisp, on the back of a napkin while he was waiting for a coffee. it was so powerful that it had to be rewritten in python just so that ordinary computers could understand it. Because it was written in lisp it was almost no effort to rewrite the entire thing, and the rewrite was completed in-between two processor cycles. Paul Graham himself was completely written in lisp, by an earlier version of himself, also written in lisp, by an earlier version of lisp. It’s lisp, paul graham, lisp, paul graham, all the way down.

They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist–

Seems to me the basic conflict between man and women, sexually, is that men are like firemen. To us, sex is an emergency, and no matter what we’re doing we can be ready in two minutes. Women, on the other hand, are like fire. They’re exciting, but the conditions have to be exactly right for it to occur.

As usual with true stories, I hate to say that someone’s life wasn’t quite as exciting as a flock of animated chickens, but it’s true.

This career is supposed to be really high paying. Oh well. At least I’m not out on the corner of Market and Van Ness with a cardboard sign saying “Will Animate For Food. God Bless”

Bush’s family values campaign: The major thrust of Hitler’s ascent to power was the return of traditional German family. The slogan was ‘Kinder, kuche, kirche;’ in English, “Children, kitchen, church.” The Third Reich believed the return to tradtional family values was threatened only by Jews, socialists, feminists, and homosexuals. Creepy, huh?

One form to rule them all, one form to find them, one form to bring them all and in the darkness rewrite the hell out of them.

There is no great genius free from some tincture of madness.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

Being second is to be the first of the ones who lose.

We are recommending that purchasers of Quicken 98 for Mac do not use the product.

The mass media is supported and sustained by commercial entities. And corn flakes and Shakespeare are simply not kissing cousins. Leonard Bernstein and living bras are incompatible. And you cannot sustain adult, probing, meaningful drama when the proceedings are interrupted every twelve minutes by a dozen dancing rabbits with toilet paper.

Adults are just obsolete chidren, and the hell with them.

I soon understood why Sharkey was such a convincing bad guy: He was an asshole.

The important thing to remember about Pete Burns is never, under *any* circumstances get him confused with Peter Murphy.

I did a little stand-up in college to prove that I couldn’t do that.

I was sitting on a curb one day feeling all dejected, and a little bird came along and said ‘cheer up, it could be worse’, so I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse.

When things start to make sense, check your premises!

Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don’t have the balls to live in the real world.

…when sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions.

Here’s a hot scoop for all the millions of viewers who watch the NBC lineup on Thursday nights: For the next few weeks the stupid sitcom “Suddenly Susan” will be replaced by the stupid sitcom “The Naked Truth.” Adjust viewing habits accordingly.

You are very foolish… the true sign of a hero

I made you, and I’m God. That’s all you need to know.

I’m just waiting for a voice over IP chat application on my cell phone. I think this will be the killer app for internet enabled cell phones. Imagine the convenience of being able to have a voice conversation on your internet enabled cell phone with another internet enabled cell phone user.

With the exception of Black which you can generally tell when it is black, Maroon is one of those colors that gets really devalued by the fact that a lot of us can’t tell it’s Maroon. If you go around wearing Violet and it looks good, everyone’s going to tell you how your purple dress looks nice. Most of us had small boxes of crayons as kids, ya know? In a lot of ways it reminds me of the first grade where I couldn’t find the Red in the BIG BOX of crayons, so I had to borrow red from someone else, except my red wasn’t red, it was *sugar red*, so when I finished my coloring project I turned it into the teacher, and she asked me to show her the crayon, and she was very angry with me for using *sugar red* instead of red. I had to redo the entire thing during recess. I’m still bitter about it. Ms. Shipley, where ever you are, i’m going to find you and destroy you.

The Internet *isn’t* *free*. It just has an economy that makes no sense to capitalism.

I will rule out PERL on grounds of total illegibility and insecurity. It is possible to write decent programs in Perl. I know both of the people who actually do it.

Each teabag is enveloped in a package that reads “A year-round valentine for everyone who really loves lemon.” Well, I happen to be an ardent enthusiast for that particular flavor, and I can assure you that this alleged tea tastes less like lemon than most electric home appliances. The only way this substance could be considered a “year-round valentine” is by taking the meaning of “valentine” as “a heart,” which, if left out in the open for a year, would be encrusted with congealed blood and covered with small, creeping insects. This tea breaks all previously-conceived boundaries of the concept bland. It invokes in the drinker a level of excitement usually associated with shoelace collections or counting one’s own armpit hairs.

One funny thing that happened: on my Q&A part, I was asked to recite as many of the Articles of Faith as I could. One of the ones I mentioned was, “Be discreet in killing.” I got a very strange look and was told that that one wasn’t used any more, and was replaced by “Always know the difference between good and evil.” Same difference.

One tea package depicts a small cat, playfully clawing a ball or mouse or small child, while your propagandistic legend assures us the paragon of beverages is contained within. What sort of baldfaced nonsequitor is this? The only thing a cat and tea have in common is that one dislikes being immersed in the other. Clearly, your marketing skills are equivalent to your prowess at teamaking, which is probably on level with the cat’s.

What sort of baldfaced nonsequitor is this? The only thing a cat and tea have in common is that one dislikes being immersed in the other. Clearly, your marketing skills are equivalent to your prowess at teamaking, which is probably on level with the cat’s.

“You overlook an important point,” said the man. “You are not just a boy, but an allegorical boy, and thus your actions have implications beyond this particular situation…”

If we’re not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?

A barbarian … [is one who] thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.

She had lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

Some men see things as they are and say “Why?” I dream things that never were and say, “Why not?”

The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

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.

The seven deadly sins … Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven milestones from man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the milestones are lifted.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

You daren’t handle high explosives; but you’re all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! What a world!

You want to be a master of electrical engineering without being able to write down the solution to a first-order differential equation with constant coefficients? There are engineers who get paid actual money to write these things down every day.

If a programmer tells you to use vim or emacs tell them no. These editors are for when you are a better programmer. All you need right now is an editor that lets you put text into a file.

The grain of salt I take with Joel’s writing could desiccate a water buffalo

Ah yes. Me, I often find that when I have an inadequate amount of extract of the Wild Vindaloo in my bloodstream, it induces a state similar to, but in many ways unlike, Louisiana.

Fame is a lot to deal with, but I was never suicidal. If I was gonna go out, I wouldn’t do it like [Kurt Cobain]. I wanna do something more dramatic. I’d do it driving a ‘67 Stingray off the Grand Canyon, on fire, dressed as Spider-Man, screaming 'MOM!’ at the top of my lungs and have somebody videotape it.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.

It certainly comes up from time to time in the context of, you know, testimony and other things… We do – the briefers – also, from time to time, get those questions as well. As to – you know, nothing has changed on that in terms of our position and, you know, I think it’s – you know, I can refer you to, you know, to probably to previous statements by officials on that. But I don’t have anything – you know, I mean, you know, our – I think – I don’t have – you know, I – we – usually we try to have, you know, a little bit of something on that. I’m not sure that it’s going to be, you know, specifically what you’re looking for. You know, generally speaking, our position that on settlements that it’s the Palestinians and the Israelis have agreed that the final status negotiations will cover these issues and, you know, that’s – that’s also our view.

Hell is a city much like London–A populous and smoky city.

The U.S. Constitution isn’t perfect – but it’s a hell of a lot better than what we have now.

I think our coffee machine is networked – I keep seeing these dropped sugar packets all around it.

The fastest way to get art out of your artists is to put programmer-art in and tell your artists you’re about to ship.

Why are there no cheese-flavored drinks?

First Afghan War"so, first my cat conducts a denial of service attack on my DSL modem and then he sniffs the line. Script kitty, you think?

Look, I don’t know what this looks like to you - I’ve lost my ability to tell the difference between what’s cute and what’s idiotic…

Well, I’ve created a new scale that shows which diseases I’d rather have than watch this movie.

And when you look too long into the Internet, the Internet also looks into you.

There comes a time when a man must face up to realities and confront them. Fortunately, this is not such a time.

Oracle. The original was designed by Greeks, who arguably went there looking for hidden knowledge that really was not there. The modern version improves this by hiding knowledge that really IS there.

A toast …to… umm.. whatever.

Actually, a psychic ESP thing is not required. If you just follow these simple rules, you’ll never over-forward things: (1) Never forward anything from rec.humor.funny. (2) Never forward anything that’s been forwarded to you. (3) Never forward anything.

All the cool things in life can be described with either yes! or heh.

As Shin pointed out, I neglected to mention the 7 inch penis extender.

Being off the Internet is like being dead.

Bruce’s little handy tips about cool: Cool: Having your gf on the net. Not Cool: Being dumped via email.

BTW, you didn’t meet him and start the end of the world, did you?

Commit drive-by shootings on the information super-highway.

Cool, I think. Do I care?

Deja Fu: The feeling that somehow, somewhere, you’ve been kicked in the head like this before.

Did I mention that it’s good experience? I’m experiencing being screwed.

Disclaimer: This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others and no responsibility for any unintended emotional stress these greetings may bring to those not caught up in the holiday spirit.

Do I detect the signs of an emotionally unstable female?

Give me X or give me death! … p.s. Or just give me death

He’s you! … ps. except he sucks.

Hey baby, what’s your medical history?

Hey, it’s rated the best Bruce in the area. And, it’s the only Bruce imported *into* Bethesda. One third less calories than the other leading Bruce.

I better say something funny soon, or Stellman will have more quotes in your quotes file than me.

I can see how this would make it a lot harder to apply oneself to work, especially at CMU, where work is so pointlessly and excruciatingly odious.

I didn’t make the rules; I just ignore them.

I don’t want better signal to noise; I want less traffic, dammit

I have delusions of adequacy.

I just sent a jpeg compressed image, in a uuencoded, gzipped, tar file, as a MIME attachment. Is that cool, or stupid?

I think someone installed HateDoubler onto my PC.

It’s still YES! And it’s still quotesfiled.

I’m starting to have a lot more respect for bands that I used to think sucked. I’m discovering now that they still suck, but that I suck even more, so hm.

Internet traffic has been increasing enormously, straining the infrastructure. Click here to download a 2.5MB Quicktime movie about it.

Oh, and I’ve been on the net since ‘88. I have a 13 inch penis, too.

If I can’t have quiet in here, *I* won’t be interested in living. Are you interested in dying? Now, shut up; or I’ll send you to a hell you’re not familiar with.

If we keep doing this, we’ll just be saying “YES!” at each other every day.

If you can’t beat 'em, make fun of 'em.

If you can’t trust me with a choice, how can you trust me with an imported, semi-automatic assault rifle?

Isn’t it beautiful how everthing that I post here is quoted from someone else?

It all sucks. Hardware sucks. I hate people asking me about hardware. My advice always: don’t buy anything.

It’s not the web; they’ve always been stupid.

It’s very important to spend lots of $$ on more computer hardware, just in case one of those creative bursts happens. You wouldn’t want to be caught thinking, “I could have been the next Mozart if it wasn’t for that lame sound card that I have.” … Come to think of it, I should go out and buy a soundblaster 32au right now.

Linux: Thousands of people from all over the world help you to shoot yourself in the foot, for free.

… MAKE.SHAME.FAST. Just go out, sleep with the five people on the list, add your name to the bottom, and then pass the list on to a bunch of your friends…

Memepool is so cool, now we don’t have to talk to each other.

no more net surfing for me any longer, now I web spelunk.

Our newsserver unsubscribed from alt.binaries.* yesterday, claiming that they’re out of disk space. I might have to break down and actually buy porn now.

Pass the cute chicks more or less all over me, would you please?

Sex and drugs? They’re nothing compared with a good proof!

So many women, so little nerve.

So this link takes you to my real live current up-to-the-minute hotlist. Pretend you’re me! Go to my hotlist, avoid doing real work, and cause net traffic.

Some of your quotes are without context, and void, (and darkness was upon the face of the readers…).

Style, style is important, since there’s really no content.

Thanks. Now I’m Master Bruce. All I need is a butler named Alfred. And Uma Thurman.

That’s not passion in my eyes. It’s arson.

The smile didn’t do anything more than flay the skin off my body, sandblast every nerve and ligament, osterize a few major organs, and fry my eyeballs in their own grease; I made no visible sign that could possibly have been detected by anyone except the people present in the room. I’m over her completely.

…the proper way to read netnews now is to grep /usr/spool/news for names of people you know, and read only that…

There are two ways to tell a sexy male. The first is that he has a bad memory. I forget the second.

Translation: write a web crawler in Perl. Yeah, I’ll get right on that….

Uh, I dunno, Beavis, but I think this sucks. Is this the stupidest penis contest yet?

Well, I usually claim all the unattributed quotes in my collection as mine (hey, I went through the work of collecting and maintaining them, right?) but in this case I’ll just tell you: I don’t know.

Well, it has Mosaic and Mac in the title. I think that means it sucks.

When my .newsrc gets munged, I feel like I’ve gone back in time.

Whenever my developer studio finishes a compile, it plays a gun-cocking sound. It’s very satisfying; I’m all ready to shoot myself in the foot.

Yeah, kind of like that, except Jeff Hutzleman was obnoxious and in my face, whereas David Siegal is obnoxious on some web site that I’ll just ignore.

Yeah; after all, we all know that a man is just a walking life support system for a penis. Actually, that’s not true. There’s also money.

You’re breaking the golden rule of alt.gothic: never post. Ever.

Your web fu is very good. Let’s fight.

!%!*@#@* I’m playing netrek again. I should never have helped Hugh to work here.

Lap times give you an objective measure of how close you are to your car’s ultimate capabilities. That is the meaning of “at speed”; it means that the complete system of car and driver are operating in harmony. It means that everything is being exercised to a significant fraction of its capabilities. Driving at 90 mph in a straight line is just wanking. Complaining that you were caught wanking is just whining. Shut up and learn to drive.

Nobody ever learns a God Damn thing.

I have won and you have lost. The question is, why?

I like having a machine called 'elvis’ on the network because that way, I can say ‘ping elvis’ and have it come back with ‘elvis is alive’.

Imagine a sector of the economy that moved a significant proportion of its compensation off the books in the form of options. If options had real value as you suggest, this would have the effect of artificially inflating earnings, which in turn would create a cumulatively false picture of positive growth, which would lead to a share bubble, where shares are overbid because they seem more valuable than they are, relative to those parts of the market that do not use options as a way of hiding costs. However, since we know the market always prices things correctly, we know that this cannot happen, therefore options must have zero real value til excercised. QED.

New York is 45 stars and 7 million extras, but it’s a different 45 every day.

The hello world of Web services is stock quote.

The thing I keep reminding myself is that people don’t kill people, men kill people.

Viral marketing is not going to save mediocre businesses from extinction. It is the scourge of the stupid and the slow, because it only rewards companies that offer great service and have the strength to allow and even encourage their customers to publicly pass judgment on that service every single day.

We hear there’s a party at port 80 and everyone’s invited.

What’s not to love? Abject failure was not to love, as it turned out.

XML is not a lingua fraca, because it’s not even a lingua.

Computability theory and lexical scoping are fine things to know about, but they just don’t cut the mustard when somebody from the Psych department opens up on you with an Ingram set to full auto.

Do you have to be a god-damned tenured professor to get teflon rounds at this place?

It was a beautiful, almost poetic way to cap what had been a textbook career of brilliant, original mathematical insights punctuated with outbursts of random, deeply unhinged violence.

When I was 12, I found a box containing a bunch of old issues of Hustler in a lot behing the local 7-11. I began to feel sensations I’d never felt before. Being a scientifically minded young fellow, I immediately ran home and examined one of the low angle money shots through my microscope. That’s when I made the horiffying discovery that women are composed of red, yellow and blue dots. I’ve been trying to live with the implications of that discovery for years now, and I haven’t been able to care much about code quality.

I’m not intending to imply insult or judgement here but I am curious to know in order to be able to respond to your posts in an appropiate manner, so please forgive what appears to be, but in fact is not intended as, an insulting question: Are you stupid?

I’m all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.

Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed?

We have a date with destiny, and it seems like she ordered the lobster.

All in all, things where easier to fix when the people running the network were the ones with the nukes.

Hitler wrote C using vi in BSD style under System V! Wanna fight?

If memory serves (and if not, Rob and Sam will probably flame me)…

Romero bashing is like shooting fish in a barrel. Well, dead fish. With a shotgun. The barrel is laced with explosives. And you’re in a harbor with a 20-inch battleship-mounted cannon, just in case. But if something should go wrong, there’s a fish market so you’ve got some convenient, prepackaged dead fish just in case.

The flamewar would have been nice, but I was really just trying to get quotefiled.

The IETF has a reputation as a standards body, but it’s really just a bunch of people pretending. It has no force behind it, no way of binding people, they don’t sue or whine when someone violates a standard. If you’re very lucky, someone will stand up and call someone else an asshole, then they all go to the bar.

The Unicode Standard is a large, painful book, suitable for use as a blunt object, possibly as a seventh weapon in the game of Clue. It could play a telephone book in a movie if it were painted yellow and made more exciting. It could hold up a table if one leg were several inches short and in need of the sort of support that only a standard can provide.

A weapon that makes a fashion statement! I like it.

There is a beaker in the back of the fridge labeled “BIO-HAZARD” which I would appreciate your leaving alone.

Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up a statue in honor of a critic.

Bill Gates says bandwidth should be free. We think software should be free. But it’s not.

I could eat you.

It’s not okay to call unless you have a big web site you want designed, you want to sponsor one of my pages, or you want to introduce me to a single Swiss woman.

Read this if you are a site designer. Do not read it if you are prone to sending long flaming e-mail messages.

I am a finite state machine that uses Macs to turn caffeine into bugs.

This is truly a breakthrough in text-editing technology. People have said that text editors are boring, but thanks to the amazing speed offered by the TACK board, you’ll have so much fun that you’ll need to be sedated.

He coded PHP, which is like training wheels without the bike.

I used to think that world peace could be attained if people would agree to settle all military disputes through video games - all the excitement and trash talk of war, without the unpleasant bits. The downside of this plan was that the world would be ruled by 9-year-olds - assuming that would be, in fact, a downside, or even a change.

X windows. It could be worse, but it’ll take time.

discontextualized quote. reference to chomsky, falwell and bush sr. broad, ambiguous statement. smug repetition of arguments heard in a million other threads. nitpicking at somebody else’s spelling. ad hominem attack. setting up straw man. blowing down straw man. reference to thread 9622. smiley.

Certain options and features of a program may be used rarely. For instance, the routines on U.S. government computers which balance the budget have not been used in years.

Not every woman brings you lasagna at work. Most of them just cheat on you.

…and I am not going to do the proof because the proof for this is stupid.

I’m not very pro-pundit, I have to say. If pundits were on the ballot against, like, I don’t know, Ebola, I might vote Ebola, or third party.

If it sounds like Jindal is targeting his speech to a room full of fourth graders, that’s because he is. They might be the next people to actually vote for Republicans again.

Minnesota’s recount is a long way from over. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to predict the winner, I would tell you to shoot me.

You know that thing under the sink that catches all the dreck and keep it in one place? Now imagine it as an online service.

I have a firm grip on reality. Now I can strangle it.

How many of these abstruse internecine struggles between evolutionists must we endure? Perhaps the consolation is that, whatever the outome of the debate between Wright and Gould, the rest of us really can’t lose: if the evolutionists win the battle for the minds of young Kansans, then of course we all win; if the creationists come out on top, it proves that Gould is right and evolution can proceed backward as well as forward.

Childbirth is not a miracle. Life is not sacred. When you have twenty thousand nomads huddled between two rivers in the Middle East and that’s it for Homo sapiens, when one in five children is a live birth, one in ten living past the age of ten, then childbirth is a miracle and life is sacred. When the average age of a grandmother in Philadelphia’s housing projects is twenty-five, to call childbirth a miracle is at least a tasteless joke and at worst a true obscenity.

I beseech John Byrne that when The Star Brand obliterates Pittsburgh, that he spare the Captain’s Table in the Pittsburgh airport, which serves a steak on toasted garlic bread with bearnaise sauce that is second to none…

C: A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more like assembly except that it isn’t very much like either one, or anything else. It is either the best language available to the art today, or it isn’t.

If cats were scientists-biologists, say-they’d be very patient scientists. They’d keep a clean bench-cleanliness is next to felis, after all-and they’d be very careful as they filled beakers and centrifuged things and ran blots and cared for their cell cultures and everything. They’d be great scientists, I think. Until they knocked everything to the floor and chased it and bit it.

Much is made of Postel’s Law – that you should be strict in what you create and liberal in what you accept. The law is correct. But there always has to be limits in the implementation. If you’re expecting an XML document, you can’t handle a cow.

RSS has been around 15 years or so. Pundits used to be excited about it ushering in a brave new world of airborne unicorns. The unicorns stayed home, where it’s nicer.

When I was a boy, we used to have walk ten miles through the snow before we could retain an object. If we wanted to use autorelease we had to go without lunch.

Whenever I hear the phrase “delicious generation” used as a badge of honor, I think about developing for Linux.

alt.vampyres has the worst signal to noise ratio on the net, but the noise is *so* amusing.

Birthdays are good for you. Studies have shown that those who have the most birthdays live the longest.

Doh! Wile-E-Coyote… sooper stupid…

I don’t need to see the rules - I can lose as I play.

I feel so inspired… I feel like I could fly… I think I’ll go jump off that building…

I’m not in marketting - Nobuko’s in marketting. I’m a peon engineer whose printer code doesn’t work…

I want to be a lifeguard for the gene pool. You! Out of the pool!

If you were being paranoid, you were being paranoid on the wrong level.

If you were really hardcore, you’d have a the full bottle.

If you have the freedom to do what you want, you have to pay a price. And that price is almost always stability. Except for SML, in which the price is your sanity.

It’s over. You’re done. You’re finished. You can stick a fork in it. You’re but a miserable bug, crushed on the windshield of Klackon imperialism.

Look at those dwarves! They’re big! They’re small! They’ve got big shields and small axes!

Look…! A letter with distinct lack of weaseling! No weaseling content! That’s so cool!

People like that I generally have the urge to deal with by thrusting reality in their face as bluntly as possible, and then beating them about the head with it.

Real men put quiche in their pipe and smoke it.

Scotty, we need shields in the next three seconds, or we all die.

That car’s sun-roof looks like a toupee, flapping in the wind…

That’s [his] philosophy. [My] philosophy is that every so often you go out and buy more cards for your collectible card game or life becomes boring.

The best netrek client was the Ultrix client. Actually, it was the same client, it just didn’t crash on Ultrix.

We’re the Beavis and Butthead of the STA coding world. “Hey Butthead, look at this class.” “Uh, huh, huh-huh, uh, huh-huh, this sssucks. Let’s change it.”

Yearbooks are poor excuses for people who don’t have sketchbooks.

You must be this cool in order to enter

Wand of Xagyg: In case of Armageddon, break glass

BIOS = Bugs Inherited from Older Systems

In the beginning was the word. But by the time the second word was added to it, there was trouble. For with it came syntax…

People who are funny and smart and return phone calls get much better press than people who are just funny and smart.

Lisa, if you don’t like your job, you don’t strike: you just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.

[Dean Martin] is an absolute, unqualified drunk. And if we ever develop an Olympic drinking team, he’s gonna be the coach … Dean Martin has been stoned more often than the United States embassies.

I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.

The Marshall Plan .. the Truman Policy .. all pumped billions upon billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now, newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent war-mongering Americans. I’d like to see one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplanes.

You know, I’m going to have a migraine tonight because I didn’t beat you.

And so continues one of the biggest constants in software development: the unerring sense among developers that the level of abstraction they’re current working at is exactly the right one for the task at hand.

It might be scary if my life were to become a farce from which there were no escape, but not so scary as, say, a ten-foot spider with big googly eyes and fangs.

[Jupiter’s] satellites are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on the Earth and therefore would be useless and therefore do not exist.

Rental cars these days also have buttons all over the steering wheel, which makes me very happy. This is because like all rational, mature adults, I want to be Speed Racer. All I need is a child and his chimp in the trunk and I’m ready to rock. It’s not precisely totally 100 percent the same, though, because Speed’s buttons transformed the car into a boat and launched a robot homing pigeon, while my buttons engage cruise control. In all honesty, I’m about 400 times more likely to use cruise control as I am to need a robot pigeon, but it would be nice to have both.

I speak spanish and french, enough to find a hotel room and someone to sleep with. Really. I used to speak both fairly well, but I’m out of practice.

A power plant with a contract is really just a gigantic short position for natural gas.

Never underestimate the power of a fight between Jesus and Santa

The SSH client is pretty good, it is free, and it is illegal in the US! A winner all around!

Our problems are mostly behind us. What we have to do now is fight the solutions.

All software sucks. ALL software sucks.

don’t they just have bboards around here instead of sending stupid mail i don’t care about to everyone?

flush twice. it’s a long way to redmond.

Forget ZEN, I need to get LAID!

i used to look at people when i first met them and think, “i bet i won’t like you.” now, i look at them and think, “i bet i won’t like your web page.”

Just shut up and get on with the killing.

man, trying to do code control with a mac is like killing yourself. oh, wait, killing yourself would be good. doing code control with a mac is bad. make that “like licking a cat’s inner ear canal.”

reading camille paglia. sure, she’s erudite, but what i really need to know is, IS SHE ANY FUN IN BED?

see mci net suck. suck, mci net, suck!

user interfaces usually have one or more of the followin properties: 1) they suck to use 2) they suck to use 3) they suck to use

I… HATE this place… this… zoo, this prison, this… reality, whatever you want to call it.

I… hate… this internet, this world-wide-web, whatever you want to call it… It’s the porn pop-ups! I feel… saturated by them. And every time I surf the web I fear that I have somehow become an S&M fanatic.

Well, well, Mister Anderson. We meet at last. You’ll notice that I’m wearing my sunglasses indoors. In the normal world, this would make me look stupid. But because this *is* after all a sci-fi action thriller, they serve to make me appear menacing.

Sure, it trivializes human suffering and death… but look it’s George Bush with bongos!

C is like a huge V8 engine, attached directly to wheels with no gearing, no brake and must be steered by hand. Perl is a car with an autopilot designed by insane aliens.

I know its more glamorous to come up the perfect idea, but unfortunately almost all your ideas are horribly bad. That’s just the nature of ideas. Nothing personal.

Please join the rest of us in the 21st century by eliminating your stupid browser checks, which are preventing me from viewing some of the content on your website. According to your FAQ I need to upgrade my browser, but I am using Firefox 2 on Linux, which happens to be just as good as Firefox on Windows and Mac OS X. If your snazzy site maintainers and web application developers inform you otherwise, you should probably fire them and hire a team of monkeys because if you’re going to have unskilled staff, you might as well pay them in bananas.

The best thing about information at your fingertips is that you can pick your nose with it.

“Beta” is well known to be a synonym for “my cat wrote the floppy disk driver”

I’ve always planned to be a failure anyway, that’s why I plan to marry an extremely wealthy woman.

Rick Von Slonecker is tall, rich, good looking, stupid, dishonest, conceited, a bully, liar, drunk and thief, an egomaniac, and probably psychotic. In short, highly attractive to women.

There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

After all, we weren’t saying these people were innocent, but we were saying you shouldn’t sodomise them.

The last thing you want to do is spell an elder gods name out correctly.

Live long and multi-task.

I see your point. And raise you a line

Right Wing Politicians, Right Wing Think Tanks, Right Wing Talk Show Hosts, Right Wing Talking Heads, the “Religious” Right and Right Wing Media All Agree There is no “Vast Conservative Conspiracy”

Some young women actually anticipate the wedding night ordeal with curiosity and pleasure! Beware of such an attitude! A selfish and sensual husband can easily take advantage of such a bride. One cardinal rule of marriage should never be forgotten: GIVE LITTLE, GIVE SELDOM AND ABOVE ALL, GIVE GRUDGINGLY. Otherwise, what could have been a proper marriage could become an orgy of sexual lust.

Whether you’re illustrating documentation for your corporate intranet, or leaking confidential pictures of developmental software to rumors sites on the web, Snapz Pro is the time-saver that all PowerUsers must have in their arsenal.

XML sounds scary. Stuff that begins with the letter X usually does – there’s a reason they didn’t call it “The C Files.”

Look, I’ll kill you.

Should have talked to the babe you mentioned earlier. Heck what’s the worst that would have happened? She would have killed you? Heh. That’d be lucky.

Yoda spoke to Keith in a dream one day. He said, “Follow you must dream you have. Good is snoot for to be others view.” Keith didn’t understand much of this but he knew that Yoda was probably just a puppet with someone’s hand up his ass. He then wondered what sort of person would shove a hand up Yoda’s ass.

Relationships based on boredom. Hmmm. That’s a step up from relationships based on insanity…

Actresses in porn - unlike in Hollywood - far outearn the actors, choose their co-stars, and decide what they will do on-screen. (People in the industry like to interpret this as having power, but it’s the power to choose whom you’ll have anal sex with, a perk all of us can presumably take for granted.)

If you’re doing something “clever,” you’re probably doing it wrong.

…there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, elminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.

Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.

As long as America’s educational system remains woefully inadequate, I rule!

And finally, there was the English degree. They probably had more than a few concerns about the employment prospects of someone who’d spent the last four years writing essays on “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained,” not to mention “Paradise Missing in Action” and “If We Pretend We Don’t Miss Paradise, It’ll Return on Its Own.”

Free Clue for the Clueless: Usenet is not the real world.

Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but at least I keep it out of my papers.

And a worthy bunch of candidates they are! And what a tough decision this will be! And what a string of uncalled-for exclamation points this is!

I’m not sure about this, but I think if Saint Francis ever met Fred Phelps, the gentle spirit from Assisi would make an exception and beat him up.

Last semester the teacher had exams at 7:30 in the morning. I can’t get up at 7:30 in the morning.

10:30 is a popular time for class, so we can’t get another room to take our tests in. That means we all have to be in here, so it will be very crowded, but if I catch any of you cheating I’ll personally break your kneecaps.

People fear to offend or hurt others, not because they are kind but because they do not care for the truth.

‘Personality’ is simply the result of being off balance. We have ‘characters’ because we have not found our center of gravity. We do not accept ourselves for what we are, we retreat form our real selves, and then we erect a personality to bridge the gap.

The appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one’s life.

The only interesting answers are those which destroy the question.

If you’re viewing this page then you’re already a winner! … * The tern “winner” means many things to many people and we use it in it’s the most tenuous way possible.

This server has encountered an internal error which prevents it from fulfilling your request and there’s not a darn thing you can do about it. The most likely cause is a misconfiguration, or the fact that this is all a plot by the government to drive you insane. Please ask the administrator to look for messages in the server’s error log. His name is Mel. You can find his home phone number is listed in the code for this page. If a woman named Mabel answers for the love of God hang up!

Behind every successful man is his woman. Behind the fall of a successful man is usually another woman.

The difference between a man and a child is the price of their precious toys.

Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they see what you’ve done, then they know exactly what they want, but it’s not what you did.

There’s never money to do things right, but there’s always money to do things twice.

USENET: Post to exotic, distant machines. Meet exciting, unusual people. And flame them.

My father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that. But I remember seeing it as a kid and thinking, Jesus Christ, at least half of this is bullshit. I mean, you know the reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him. It has nothing to do with reason. He literally goes into a spasm, and it’s this early warning sigh.

The number one reason UNIX is better than VMS is it has the world’s worst Fortran compiler, so you know no one’s running Chaos studies while you’re playing UMoria.

Well, C is like BASIC with Pascal laid over it.

just face it. you can never escape delimiters. they’re everywhere.

Soulseek Serverwide Message: Please refrain from sharing any Sapphirecut tracks! The artist is convinced that the five of you doing so will bankrupt her label. Thanks!

No trees were killed in the sending of this message. However, a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

all these post-punk kids with their pale white skin and their black clothing… and their friggin’ moist music…

Win? No, but if we think fast, we might live long enough to lie about it.

Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!

How can you shoot the devil in the back? What if you miss?

Well, whoever Keyzer Soze is, I can tell you he’s going to get gloriously drunk tonight.

The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards – and even then I have my doubts.

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.

However, we must keep in mind the “fundamental law of cosmology” when quoting numbers in astronomy: 10 = 1

The ideal technical writer […] realizes that tech pubs will always be a service organization with relatively low status in the corporation.

A man who is willing to commit suicide has the initiative.

That was back in the day when i was married and could never leave the house. I mean… somebody had to be home to post bail.

Two’s company, three’s crossfire.

If you lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge.

The average pointer points somewhere in X.

Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it – badly.

We’re thinking about upgrading from SunOS 4.1.1 to SunOS 3.5.

…those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded …Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena– care not to understand the architecture of the heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!

I’m insane. What’s his excuse?

Warning: contains explicit language, violence, and 53M of data.

Computers make excellent and efficient servants, but I have no wish to serve under them. Captain, a starship also runs on loyalty to one man. And nothing can replace it or him.

As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.

Attention, NeXT and BeOS bigots: I don’t need any flak about your poxy operating systems, OK? Write your own column.

Even if you think (as the Netscape 6.0 engineers clearly do) that Alt+Left is not a good shortcut key for “Back”, there are literally millions of people out there who will try to use Alt+Left to go back, and if you refuse to do it on some general religious principle that Bill Gates is the evil Smurf Gargamel, then you are just gratuitously ruining your program so that you can feel smug and self-satisfied, and your users will not thank you for it.

I would like to announce that the familiar dot (.) symbol from Internet addresses shall be used on this website to denote the end of a sentence.

In 1960, almost 40 years before the Internet came along, Barbra Streisand drops the “a” from her first name. Of course, with the unusual spelling, it’s much easier to find her in search engines, on Amazon, etc. That woman has incredible foresight.

Mediocre programmers are, frankly, defensive about this, and they don’t want to admit that they’re not able to write this super-complicated code, so they let the bullies on their team plow away with some godforsaken template architecture in C++ because otherwise they’d have to admit that they just don’t feel smart enough to use what would otherwise be a perfectly good programming technique FOR SPOCK.

Nothing surprises the ground crew at CDG more than the arrival of the daily, scheduled flight from Kennedy.

The Unix world loves to take sides. I don’t have to blog about this; Freud already did, in 1930. He called it “the narcissism of minor differences”.

They scrape bits and pieces of legitimate blogs and repost them, as if they were just another link blog. It is very hard to tell the difference between a fake blog and a real blog until you read it for a while and realize there’s no human brain behind it, like one of those Jack Format radio stations that fired all their DJs, or maybe FEMA.

What web browser he uses doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s not a single bean. It’s not even the memory of last week’s huevos rancheros.

When Transmeta unveiled their new CPU, it was the first time in a long time that a company that was not Intel finally admitted that if you’re a CPU, and you want a zillion people to buy you, you gotta run x86 code. This after Hitachi, Motorola, IBM, MIPS, National Semiconductor, and who knows how many other companies deceived themselves into thinking that they had the right to invent a new instruction set. The Transmeta architecture assumes from day one that any business plan that calls for making a computer that doesn’t run Excel is just not going anywhere.

If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people; if you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.

The dead horse was going to move. I swear!

The opinions expressed in this letter do, in fact, represent the opinions of UCSD, its employees, faculty, and students, as well as the entire University of California system and its precious Regents, because, let’s face it, I have that kind of power at my disposal.

Science cannot stop while ethics catches up – and nobody should expect scientists to do all the thinking for the country.

So the dangers of neuroscience include the advent of “drugs to combat sleepiness”? I nearly spilled my morning coffee.

Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results.

I don’t like the idea of having security within a shared computer system at all.

Instead of worrying about what somebody else is going to do, which is not under your control, the important thing is, what are you going to decide about what is under your control?

Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnaping and murdering the people on them.

We’re past the point where I can recommend my mom use the Internet. It’s not possible to transact on a day-to-day basis with the level of trust you have in doing it in the physical world. … Most people are not prepared to make technological decisions necessary to use the Internet. … It’s time for us to stop asking users to make decisions they’re not qualified to make. ‘Want to trust this SSL certificate?’ There’s absolutely no way 99 percent of people on this planet are qualified to make that decision. It’s time for us to get past giving people choices. Choices are done. … Software should work securely. If it’s not, it should stop. Stop letting people do dumb things.

If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to get a “fix” of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine.

Hell, I remember when Alex and his Droogs in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE were SCIENCE FICTION characters – UNTHINKABLY VIOLENT and DEVOID OF VALUES. Well, good old Tony Burgess turns out to have been a SIMPERING OPTIMIST.

I BREAK HABITS WHILE THE NUNS ARE STILL IN THEM.

And? The Pentagon is the largest office building in the world, and that and a buck and a half will get you a (short) latte at Starbucks.

Too bad men aren’t like computers. Predictable, compliant, full of answers but no questions…yet able to deliver an occasional delightful surprise.

This is an Uzi. This is an Uzi on full auto. Any questions?

The zip file fits on a single 1.44 mb floppy. Not because it’s a rinky dink game – but because it has code as brilliant and righteous as a sliver of pure sunlight burning through the foul mist that hangs over the shareware swamp of PROTO GAMING WORLD!

Don’t hate the player, hate the game theory

An efficient organization is one in which the accounting department knows the exact cost of every useless administrative procedure which they themselves have initiated.

It’s retro. In a bad way.

I’m the BIRTHDAY GIRL! I want the BIG GUN!

Luge strategy? Lie flat and try not to die.

Have you ever been in love? Only then you can photograph.

Simplicity, of all things, is the hardest to be copied.

The people who get things done get more things to do.

QNX is also Posix compliant, so there is lots of software that almost works under it.

It was not a fine river at all, but it was the only one we had and so we boasted about it—how dangerous it was in a wet winter and how dry in a dry summer. You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.

Personal machines still crash too often, are subject to too many insecurities, and force users to figure out such inanities as what an F7 key does. You kind of know why the letter “F” was chosen for all those undefined keys at the top of your keyboard.

In the force if Yoda’s so strong, construct a sentence with words in the proper order then why can’t he?

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

actually, this is Freebasin’ Freddie’s diet plan, too. coke for breakfast, coke for lunch, sensible dinner. it really works!

Apparently, the Guardian felt that my “conspiracy theory” had some merit, because they ran an article verifying it. … The source was the same foreign Pakistani foreign minister Naiz Naik. Apparently the Pakistani government turned that information over to the Taliban, who had bin Laden launch the preemptive strike against my office in retaliation. Presumably, the strategic loss of my lava lamp has dealt a crushing blow to the U.S.

Are you becoming a net.personality? shame on you!

at any rate, from what i understand, this radical new technology that wired describes above has actually been in production since the early 1980s, although it’s been kept secret by the media gestapo who want to keep the public’s awareness of new media minimized. sony developed the first prototyped, codenamed the “Walkman” – it featured a miniaturized, portable Frequency Modulation radio transceiver – but desipte its perceived market viability, it never made it out to the general public.

Being soft-spoken is a much more attractive quality for a geek… A soft-spoken geek is endearing, an underdog. A loud, obnoxious geek is just grating. Look at Vince DelVecchio – he’s soft-spoken, yet geekly. He gets laid.

Can we assume that person is a complete idiot, or just a partial idiot.

dan doesn’t need to be a girl, all he needs to do is find a dress that fits and accessorize to his heart’s content.

does cindy crawford come out of a bathroom holding a copy of the camel book in one hand and a large sausage in the other? yeah, i have that dream too.

drugs. crack. a jedi knight wants not these things. but smoking it scott probably is. get some where can i?

Every single message on alt.religion.computers has Subject: Re: Macs Suck.. , with the exception of a few that have Subject: <something else> (was Re: Macs Suck..)

Everyone and his bisexual brother writes erotica.

Finally! Not only that, but tcsh(1) has replaced csh(1) and less(1) has replaced more(1). Woo-hoo! Yay for progress!

for instance, i was born and raised in the U.S.A., but i was raised by feral wolves, and i didn’t learn to speak english until i was captured by behavioral scientists when i was twelve. the electroshock therapy is among my fondest childhood memories.

i didn’t have a CD, so i tried it on my cat. it doesn’t work nearly as well, and makes the cat very grumpy.

i don’t think i can do the other stuff you wanted, but what i can do is obtain a false passport and travel to equador where i will live for six months under the pseudoname Julio Garcia, at which point i’ll infiltrate the Garzone family that controls the local government and RISE UP AND GUN DOWN THE CAPITALIST DOGS LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION!!! i also make a good cup of earl grey.

I had to use FORTRAN on many occasions to help my parents out. Most courts would consider that child abuse.

I hope I’ll be able to adapt back to a regular social structure after four/five years of CMU.

I never really figured than anyone would quote anything of mine that had any content, since i’m careful about how i dole out my content, and … i make sure to sprinkle liberally with snideness any actual content that manages to slip out.

I really wish the people who are in charge of the jewish conspiracy to control the world would let me in on it.

i take refuge in the fact that what i lack in perversity i make up for in obscurity.

“i’m not racist because all the reasons i have for hating all the niggers and spics are absolutely true. repeal welfare and affirmative action now!”

“i’ve seen much weirder in new york” is a good generalization, true in practically all cases.

in my experience, MS Exchange does little more than prevent your computer from being able to send mail. never make the mistake of installing it on your system.

in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is not allowed to be the banker in Monopoly.

It also occurs to me that sometimes it’s enough to recognize my own hypocrisy without fixing it. For instance, I wear leather boots and clothes, which contradicts my views on animal rights. I wish I had a dollar for every person who pointed that out to me, thinking they just blew a huge hole in my entire belief system that would send me into a downward spiral of inner turmoil. Man, I’d have, like, twelve dollars.

It took a little research, but it seems that for once I’m not talking out of my ass.

It’s cool - when your company pays for a free compuserve account, it still sucks.

It’s just weird, I never thought I’d ever be carnally connected with a majority of KGB.

it’s more than that – it’s the James Dean factor. the bottom line is that, if smoked correctly, a cigarette really, truly does make you look cooler. it gives you emphysema, but you look cool.

It’s no use turning zaway on when zaway is better conversation than you are.

It’s New-and-Improved York, with the optional Guiliani™ brand Quality-Of-Life-o-matic lifestytle sanitizer. Now with fewer Latinos!

like diapers, politicians should be changed regularly. for the same reasons.

no, it’s true. that’s why they named it after an Egyptian city. if you delete your files, the hand of god comes down and touches it and it goes to hell. if you call up Microsoft to complain, they send locusts, boils and frogs, hire some guy to kill your the main sparcstation in your office (i.e. killing your first-born Sun), and eventually the red sea parts to let Bill Gates come to your city’s Egyptian embassy and start kicking butt left and right, muttering something about some pharoh or other.

not me. i like the “hand of god” approach, where a file that is deleted is immediately obliterated as an act of divine retribution, and if you have the wherewithal to question god’s destructive power (i.e. you want your file undeleted), god smites you and you go straight to hell. i believe this is an option in the latest Windows 97 beta.

Oh well, it’s nothing that a few thousand dollars worth of therapy can’t fix.

Personally, I think BASIC is superior because it has a longer name than C or LISP, Pascal and Scheme have lower-case letters, and FORTRAN just basically sucks.

personally, i think “otis” is the perfect name for any program, no matter what it does.

phil’s a pretty cool guy. i was in a bunch of classes (including discrete math) with him sophomore year. he was friends with my fundamentalist christian roommate junior year. he wouldn’t appreciate fellatio humor, so out of respect for him, the last three lines haven’t contained any.

She might not be sixteen. She might be fifteen. Only one way to find out… Sleep with her, then check in a few days to see if you’ve contracted a lawsuit.

silly martin! *nothing* could possibly make dan more desirable. he’s perfect the way he is, provided he starts wearing flowered sundresses.

so this is what happens when Steve Jobs hooks up with Tito Fuentes. incidentally, tuning castanets generally requires a router. and a chisel.

someone just taught him how to jerk off. “i can’t believe it’s been there all this time and nobody ever said anything about it!!!!” rob was quoted as saying. “now i’ll NEVER leave the house.”

sometimes i think that if john lennon hadn’t been shot already, i’d do it myself.

stupid yuppies and computer nerds who make too much money are willing to pay a lot of money to live someplace where the espresso bars outnumber the poor people.

Technically, Ozzy is the guy your parents’ parents warned them about.

that’s right, contestant number one. you’re walking away with the washer-dryer set,a case of Turtle Wax, and an authentic ancient Roman cross to crucify your loved ones. and we’ll see our returning champion next week, when we look at Bram, Pierce and Maya. thanks for playing “Geek / Not a Geek!!!” some members of our studio audience received copies of Propaganda, the magazine that features young boys without their shirts; “Kindred: The Embraced” the home game; the Ian Curtis “Oh-So-Depressed” home suicide kit; and Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat.

the only problem with kittens is that eventually they get cooped up in little boxes with unstable particles

the two best tools for writing code are competent subordinates and a cattle prod.

Think about how many good 3D films have been made. (Hint: you can count all of them on the fingers of your ear.) Blindly applying technology without paying attention to any content yields bad, sterile art. See also: practically ever web site ever created.

this looks like a wonderful account of mismanagement and incompetence on every level. on the other hand, it’s netscape, so we already knew that.

to put it another way, i think we were both surprised that it didn’t end with the phrase, “UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.”

we are *not* going to have the Rob Wants To Return To The Gold Standard conversation, dammit.

well, if those Real World apps need to write year-2000 compliant software, it looks like they’re going to have to make the supreme sacrifice and actually use a different class to get the date. i expect that this will be a big blow to the industry. expect Sun’s stock to plummet.

well, it’s probably my shining personality, combined with my pleasant breath and body odor.

When colleen said, “what the hell have you done to your face?” and pointed out the fine points of subtlety, i realized that subtlety is just not a part of my personality.

Yeah, Black and Decker came out with a toaster oven and a microwave that run under X. Also, Samsung has a dishwasher, refridgerator and vacuum cleaner, but the larger appliances really eat up resources.

you are NOT about to tell me it’s a year 2000 problem.

you don’t bank a $20 million business on a system that isn’t fully specified. at least, i don’t, and since i’m the chief architect of this system, i’m making that call.

You know what my talent is? My talent is that I can take a mailing list of 100 people I don’t know and make them totally hate me.

you know, you’re not the first person to ask me about my world domination plans, and to be perfectly honest, i don’t have any. i mean, it’s hard enough for me to manage my own projects, much less the world. really, just try to imagine the amount of paperwork involved in running the world. i’m happy enough to leave that to the lawyers and the accountants, thank you very much.

You, madam, have never dealt with the government in your life. That is the only reason I can come up with to explain the statement, “We don’t make mistakes”.

You might think that, but I don’t think you’re considering the fact that I already called, “No backsies” and my cootie booster is up to date.

Garrett, do you know why I’ve done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe’s books without really reading them. You took other people’s advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you’d have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.

Computers this powerful are supposed to shut themselves down, after you’ve asked them to. Turning one off with the hard switch is like lulling someone to sleep by severing their spinal column.

During this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

Technology makes it possible to have our appendices out when they get infected, so that we are able to live long enough to get our heads out of our asses and learn about the world.

The most hackerish of all the hackers, the Ur-hacker as it were, was and is Richard Stallman, who became so annoyed with the evil practice of selling software that, in 1984 (the same year that the Macintosh went on sale) he went off and founded something called the Free Software Foundation, which commenced work on something called GNU. Gnu is an acronym for Gnu’s Not Unix, but this is a joke in more ways than one, because GNU most certainly IS Unix.

To create an entirely new OS from scratch, just because none of the existing ones was exactly right, struck me as an act of such colossal nerve that I felt compelled to support it.

I hope I’m not being all depressing, but that is kind of my point here.

In a way, staring into a computer screen is like staring into an eclipse. It’s brilliant and you don’t realize the damage until its too late.

In 1914, the lamps went out all over Europe. Life during the rest of the twentieth century was like crouching under a rock.

It isn’t written on tablets of gold that we pampered Yankee mall rats are destined to rule the universe. There are times in life when people are required to measure up and show some mettle. It’s alarming when our Congress does dumb things and our institutions look like they’re caught all flat-footed, but you know, we don’t have some extra, better Congress stashed away in an attic; this is Washington, and this is it. We don’t have an extra American population, either; dumb, pampered, red-white-and-blue, whatever, we are them. Adversity has its uses. We’re learning a lot about ourselves by going through this. If we can just manage to make some fresh mistakes, we may end up in some place really interesting, better than we had, not all damp, crooked, and muddled, but clearer and more sensible. We should hope for that, and work for that.

The twentieth century featured any number of -isms. They were fatally based on the delusion that philosophy trumps engineering. It doesn’t. In a world fully competent to command its material basis, ideology is inherently flimsy. “Technology” in its broad sense: the ability to transform resources, the speed at which new possibilities can be opened and exploited, the multiple and various forms of command-and-control – technology, not ideology, is the twentieth century’s lasting legacy. Technology broke the gridlock of the five-decade Cold War. It made a new era thinkable. And, finally, technology made a new era obvious.

These law-abiding hackers have the power, ability, and willingness to influence other people’s lives quite unpredictably. They have means, motive, and opportunity to meddle drastically with the American social order.

Contrary to the beliefs of some, I don’t have a drinking problem, I have a drinking solution.

I don’t like us to piss off students. Then they use Java.

You know you need sleep when you get into an elevator going down and it feels like you’re going up.

Distributed file systems are a cruel hoax.

If you can’t explain it, you damn well shouldn’t have written the code.

The problem with the cutting edge is that someone has to bleed.

The world is full of bozos. Some of them have Phd’s in Computer Science.

When faced with a problem, some people say ‘Let’s use AWK.’ Now they have two problems.

Just think of it–Cosmic Wimpout, the game of the Information Highway.

While today’s digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina’s real time performance goes unchallenged. Actually to simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times each second.

Man cannot live by words alone, though he is sometimes forced to eat them.

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.

And so, at 11 o'clock AM on Tuesday, a prominent politician talked to Americans about race… as if they were adults.

Finally, a guy who says what people who aren’t thinking are thinking.

Our show is obviously at a disadvantage with any of the other news shows we’re competing against, For one thing, we are fake. They are not. So in terms of credibility, we are … well, oddly enough we’re about even.

Thou shall not kill. Thou shall not commit adultery. Don’t eat pork. I’m sorry, what was that last one?? Don’t eat pork. God has spoken. Is that the word of God or is that pigs trying to outsmart everybody?

We know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light we have to work together. And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land. Sometimes it’s just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together.

Wow, if I’d only followed CNBC’s advice, I’d have a million dollars today. Provided I started with 100 million dollars.

If you’re watching this and you’re still in the closet, you’re lucky – because I don’t understand how you can get cable in there.

Once-in-a-hundred-years events occur every 10 years.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand - the idea that free markets lead to efficiency as if guided by unseen forces - is invisible, at least in part, because it is not there.

The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.

As required by law, I’ve taken vanity screenshots of emulation.net’s main page within Virtual PC to show the Internet functionality. Enjoy.

You have some intriguing ideas. Have you considered naming yourself after a radioactive element?

BUY RAM NOW! Its like candy! You can do ram for less money then you can do CRACK! You’ll be telling people, “You’re on RAM!”

I love this job. Nothing like paranoia and neurosis. Who needs a Coke habit? I’ve got journalism!!

He kept talking about Gene Krantz. He kept saying “Failure is not an option.” He said, Gene Krantz said they put their mind to it and they made it happen. I said “They didn’t have as many third party vendors as we do.”

i think Rob was smoking Alex’s cat, Steve

yea, the VC are a bit edgy… they have lots of $$ sitting in their pants, but getting into their pants has been proving a harder task than usual

You’re stapling wings to a pig and hoping it will fly. It’s hard to see how you get from there to an F-16.

Is there not more to life than getting stuff? And getting more of it, Bigger of it, Faster of it, and then stuffing what you can’t use now somewhere so you can use it later. If this is so… what a sad routine. How really very very sad. ON THE OTHER HAND… .know for sure that you are rich, when your hunt for alternatives becomes sincere.

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

If builders built buildings the way that programmers write programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Note - many people from engineering mgt will be at the SF Sales Meeting on Wednesday. What can I say? They offered free drinks.

It’s almost mind-boggling how complex the awfulness is.

Now I need to explain that I don’t think that all movies should be the same, or conform to the same kind of structure, but it works well in certain kind of movies. So unless you’re the Coen brothers, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Lars von Trier, David Cronenberg, Gus Van Sant, Quentin Tarantino, John Waters, Wes Anderson, Sam Peckinpah, Terry Gilliam, Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, or Jim Jarmusch, you really shouldn’t stray away too far from this kind of formula, especially if you’re making a movie that’s aimed at children, that has a cartoon rabbit in it that steps in the poopy.

I have been listening to this for a decade–about this phenomenal revolution that is going to influence my life so deeply and change everything. Well, my life has not been deeply influenced by it. If you want to know what’s revolutionized my life, it’s the birth of my two children.

Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don’t let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music… and of aviation.

Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.

We’re more of the love, blood and rhetoric school… We can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can’t give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory.

Don’t get suckered in by the comments – they can be terribly misleading. Debug only code.

We presume the Apple legal staff is all primed and ready to descend in wrath upon the honeymoon cottage immediately if the happy groom even attempts to ‘look and feel’.

Never knock on Death’s door: ring the bell and run away! Death really hates that!

No matter what their cultural underpinnings, though, most simulation games have one thing in common: they’re dull as all heck. Whether you’re methodically building a fortress to keep barbarians from pillaging your delicate sprout of a city, or a white picket fence to keep your livestock from wandering to a neighboring farm (another tip from Nintendo: “You need to buy only one chicken to start building your poultry empire”), disemboweling a Shaolin boss is a lot more fun, not to mention less time consuming. And, especially here in New York, it’s just as valid a survival skill as growing vegetables.

Harpists spend ninety percent of their lives tuning their harps and ten percent playing out of tune

I know you’re supposed to take life one day at a time – but lately several days have attacked me at once.

Damn, it hurts. It’s a good pain. But it’s painful.

I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven’t got the guts to bite people themselves.

Rewrite and revise. Do not be afraid to seize what you have and cut it to ribbons … Good writing means good revising.

Those who set out nobly to be their brother’s keeper sometimes end up by becoming his jailer. Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.

But the good thing about doing it with linux is that since linux has such a hack-assed developement methodology, I get to maintain my kernel by hand, rolling in five to ten of these unsupported patches just to make it usable. Yay, go linux!

The survival value of human intelligence has yet to be satisfactorily demonstrated.

Of course moving sucks. Last time I moved (about 3 years ago) it took me 3 days just to move down 2 flights of stairs. It should have only taken about a day and a half, but my parents helped.

Next up is Into the Blue, which earned the widest release this weekend at 2,789 theatres. On the other hand, it also earned the weakest reviews at just 23% positive. Normally the quality of the film has very little to do with the box office, but the fact that the film has a very summer like feel but was moved from a midsummer release to now is a really bad sign. Like the previous two films, this one has a shot at top spot, but will likely come up short with $13 million over the weekend and $35 million overall. One last thing: Jessica Alba in a Bikini. I mention that only because it seems like every other analyst and critic is doing the same and I’m frightened about what the studio might do to me if I fail to play along.

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg.

I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.

I am no longer living in my prime. I won’t be again until I’m 107.

Just because they built a spaceship, it doesn’t mean they know about technology. It might have been blind luck.

Dead computers make excellent boat anchors. If you don’t own a boat, maybe you should buy one just in case.

As usual you exagerrate. Last time I looked there were less than a Billion Java books!

I need to exercise. I’m not like you with your slim, lean alcohol and nicotine soaked organs.

If you’re going to walk on thin ice, you may as well dance.

I don’t think I can call anyone who looks at my chest that much a friend.

By tradition, my wife and I wait for this first day of real warmth, and walk from our offices at at CMU into Oakland for dinner. Our destination is Dave and Andy’s, because adults are allowed to have ice cream for dinner.

I like using the phrase “transitive closure” because it makes me feel that computer science graduate school really was the best 10 years of my life.

“Bandits on the Information Superhighway”, one such entry-level manual, is different from your average O'Reilly book insofar as reading it cover-to-cover is unlikely to bump your salary up another $10K.

Beware of geeks bearing gift economies.

If an expert marketing staff was all that was necessary to successfully bring a product to market, we’d all be eating McRibs, watching Chevy Chase, dressing Hasidic chic, and listening to Hootie and the Blowfish.

If you had any doubts about what the fate of over five years of largely worthless Director content would be, make no mistake: it’s coming to the Web in its full Grandma Bear On Quaaludes, Around-the-World in 80 Miserable Minutes, Mix-Your-Own David Bowie Digizine glory.

In a move that will leave future generations either snorting in disgust or doubled-over with laughter, Navigator 6 actually requires the skins, completely ignoring the look-and-feel of the operating system it’s running on. For Nagivator users, skins have become more than amusing little graphical diversions: They’ve become the death of the standard interface. We have seen the future, and it is damned hard to use.

“Most men experience impotence at some time in their lives as a result of stress, fatigue, or excessive alcohol consumption.” Um, good thing no one here is getting any (sex, that is). But if we were and tended to fall short of the task at hand, we’d look to the On-Line Guide to Impotence for help. We might probe into the FAQ section for more answers: “I’ve read that impotence is often ‘just in a man’s head.’ Is that true?” Yes - thanks to the miracle of modern science, importance AND impotence have been traced directly to a man’s “head.” But how does the impotent man rise to the challenge? You guessed it - the key is a patented potion brought to you by those philanthropists at Upjohn. Caverject: It’s name alone will turn you on. “Clinical studies prove that when used correctly, it causes an erection firm enough for sexual intercourse in approximately 80% of men, regardless of cause.” But not firm enough to, say, prop open a door or smack a kid in the head with. Regardless of cause. Seriously, though - we are grappling with a real pickle, and the upshot is: “[I]f the situation persists or interferes with normal sexual activity, consult a physician.” And if you’re impotent and claim that it doesn’t interfere with normal sexual activity, then run, don’t walk, to the nearest, uh, shrink.

Pity the poor slob who just wants to get something done. Set adrift in a sea of functionality he can neither comprehend nor control – buried in toolbars, insulted by assistants – he can only look at the state of the average application’s user interface and think that things can’t possibly get any worse. Inevitably, he’s wrong.

“Skins” are a recent product of the hyper-democratization of code. The computer equivalent of back-ally chin tucks, skins allow a growing number of applications to change their looks in a growing number of ways, almost all of them bad.

“The only guide to stylish post-feminist modem grrrl culture.” If the word “stylish” doesn’t make you shudder, that clever ploy of tacking on a “post-” to one-up an entire ideology should whisper “bull caca” in your ear.

Unfortunately, most bitter people don’t have an editor.

Weaned on nighttime soaps and The Bonfire of the Vanities, it makes sense that new media youngsters would try to squeeze a novel or a book out of what they do for a living. But any book that relies solely on an employment milieu for mass appeal had better be set in a brothel, because despite all our talk of reach-arounds and prostituting ourselves, there is nothing inherently sexy about going to work.

Who tackles all the big issues even more efficiently and succinctly than the Bible does? The band Yes, of course.

Donut cross the memes!

THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around.

Well, the sun is out and the power is on today, that’s the best we can hope for here in California

…rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.

you don’t like techno!… you don’t listen to *techno* (sequenced music made with computers and electronic instrumentation)… its bad for you…it all sounds exactly the same… and scary people you don’t like listen to it… they all dress the same and listen to the same music…and for god’s sake they’re happy!… don’t forget you’re a “rivethead” you’re INDUSTRIAL! you’re *better* than them, *you* go to INDUSTRIAL clubs and listen to INDUSTRIAL music (sequenced music made with computers and electronic instrumentation)… you’re an individual… you’re angry… you take yourself way to seriously for that silly fluffy stuff! Right!?!

If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed… Oh wait! He does!

C is a poster child for why it’s essential to keep those people who know a thing can’t be done from bothering the people who are doing it. (And keep them out of the way while the same inventors, being anything but lazy and always in search of new problems to conquer, go on to use the world’s first portable and efficient programming language to build the world’s first portable operating system, not knowing that was impossible too.)

A technique succeeds in mathematical physics, not by a clever trick, or a happy accident, but because it expresses some aspect of a physical truth.

Yes, while all the other networks were trying to track down two people who somehow slid past security to shake hands with the president, CNN was proofreading the menu — except CNN misspelled Gelées. CNN, where Americans turn to when they want a menu proofread or an SNL skit fact-checked.

A hard drill makes an easy battle.

When you fully understand the frog, then you have attained enlightenment.

A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person.

Afterwards, we go over the dos and don'ts of campus life. You know: smoke your pot over by the lake, keep your vomit from binge drinking off the floor, and never, ever share files over the Internet.

Everyone has write access to your mind.

I suppose the point is that if you want the real story, you don’t go through the official channels. You talk to the mate who has a mate who works in Cupertino. And that’s actually the way the “fact” side of the game is played (as Joe, I assume, knows from experience), as opposed to the “hack” side, which is conducted through “the official channels”, and through junkets and launches and lunches, and pretty PR girls with degrees from Wellesley.

[Linus Torvalds] may be a god to you, but to us, he’s another chubby engineer who needs to practice his plasma gun skills.

Brisk talkers are usually slow thinkers. There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate. If you are civil to the voluble, they will abuse your patience; if brusque, your character.

I’d like to find whoever said suffering was good for the soul and nail his eyes to a board.

I’m just like Hamlet! Except, well, i’m not a prince. And my uncle didn’t kill my father and marry my mother. Oh, and my girlfriend didn’t drown herself in a river because I pretended like I never loved her. And I haven’t died of poison. well at least, not yet. But the moody depression thing, I got that down COLD, jack.

leave me alone or i’ll be fabulous at you

The problem with being in the top 10 percent of the human population is the other 90 percent.

You lead the most annoyingly pedestrian existance. Shouldn’t you be watching Friends or something?

There is no such thing at this date of the world’s history in America as an independent press. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write his honest opinion, and if you did, you know beforehand it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things. and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allow my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before 24 hours, my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it, and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and the vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks. They pull the strings, and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

WRITE ONCE, DEBUG EVERYWHERE.

To do two things at once is to do neither.

Those who have never tried electronic communication may not be aware of what a “social skill” really is. One social skill that must be learned, is that other people have points of view that are not only different, but *threatening*, to your own. In turn, your opinions may be threatening to others. There is nothing wrong with this. Your beliefs need not be hidden behind a facade, as happens with face-to-face conversation. Not everybody in the world is a bosom buddy, but you can still have a meaningful conversation with them. The person who cannot do this lacks in social skills.

The self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates.

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

The brain is not an organ of thinking but an organ of survival, like claws and fangs. It is made in such a way as to make us accept as truth that which is only advantage. It is an exceptional, almost pathological constitution one has, if one follows thoughts logically through, regardless of consequences. Such people make martyrs, apostles, or scientists, and mostly end on the stake, or in a chair, electric or academic.