Quotes: g

Time will tell how the vote breaks for these shameless weasels and I wish them a lot of luck: all of it bad.

If something goes wrong, it is more important to talk about who is going to fix it, than who is to blame.

BUSINESS ANSWER: I’m not being paid, so you can’t complain. REAL ANSWER: I’m sorry it had to be that way, but I do have a life; there’s more to life than PONG, man! There’s also DOOM.

There are people you do not want to upset in the world – the politically disenfranchized who feel they have nothing to lose, those who feel that the time has come for revolution … then out on the edges beyond any of those are science fiction fans whose favorite show has been canceled in an untimely way.

Chicago came on slowly. Like a migraine.

I like the stars. It’s the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they’re always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend… I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don’t last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle lke fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend.

I knowed a man in Paphlagonia who’d swallow a live snake every morning, when he got up. He used to say, he was certain of one thing, that nothing worse would happen to him all day. ‘Course they made him eat a bowlful of hairy centipedes before they hung him, so maybe that claim was a bit presumptive.

Everybody who has ever read Sandman knows exactly what the Sandman looks like, which is more than anybody who has ever read The Catcher in the Rye can say about Holden Caufield.

Goodnight world. While I sleep, I hope you’ll all continue to do whatever it is you do. Unless you murder sleeping authors. Don’t do that.

London grew into something huge and contradictory. It was a good place, and a fine city, but there is a price to be paid for all good places, and a price that all good places have to pay.

Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar are called Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar because that’s what they call each other, and no-one would dare call them anything else.

only a lunatic would apply shoe-polish to a weasel

“Only write what you know” is very good advice. I do my best to stick to it. I wrote about gods and dreams and America because I knew about them. And I wrote about what it’s like to wander into Faerie because I knew about that. I wrote about living underneath London because I knew about that too. And I put people into the stories because I knew them: the ones with pumpkins for heads, and the serial killers with eyes for teeth, and the little chocolate people filled with raspberry cream and the rest of them.

We feel, frankly, that if anyone’s going to dislike the French, it’s going to be us. On the whole we manifest our dislike for them by drinking their wines, buying up their cigarettes, and, despite the fact that all English people can naturally roll their Rs and speak perfect French, declining to do so, and when forced by circumstances to speak French the English do it with an English accent on purpose . These are tactics we’ve worked out over the course of hundreds of years, and if carried on long enough, they will bring France to its knees. I’m English. I know these things. Changing the name french fries to freedom fries, on the other hand, will just make them laugh at you.

There’s a trick they do with one pea and three cups which is very hard to follow, and something like it, for greater stakes than a handful of loose change, is about to take place. The text will be slowed down to allow the sleight of hand to be followed. Mrs. Deirdre Young is giving birth in Delivery Room Three. She is having a golden-haired male baby we will call Baby A. The wife of the American Cultural Attache, Mrs. Harriet Dowling, is giving birth in Delivery Room Four. She is having a golden-haired male baby we will call Baby B. Sister Mary Loquacious has been a devout Satanist since birth. She went to Sabbat School as a child and won black stars for handwriting and liver. When she was told to join the Chattering Order she went obediently, having a natural talent in the direction and, in any case, knowing that she would be among friends. She would be quite bright, if she was ever put in a position to find out, but long ago found that being a scatterbrain, as she’d put it, gave you an easier journey through life. Currently she is being handed a golden-haired male baby we will call the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness. Watch carefully.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters in it, human and otherwise, are imaginary, excepting only certain of the fairy folk, whom it might be unwise to offend by casting doubts on their existence. Or lack thereof.

This is how you can tell a real photographer: mostly, a real photographer does not say 'I wish I had my camera on me right now’. Instead a real photographer pulls out her camera and takes the photograph.

The views expressed above are not shared by Gamers.com, Gamers Extreme, or probably even the author himself. Please don’t sue us. It is almost impossible to imagine the amount of anguish one radioactive goat can cause.

If you think I wear the cloak of filth, then let me tell you baby, I wear it real good.

It seems stupid when people limit themselves to one kind of music. It tells me they’re not using their ears.

Economics is extremely useful as a form on employment for economists.

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Under capitalism - man exploits man. Under communism it’s just the opposite.

Where humor is concerned there are no standards – no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There’s a knob called ‘brightness’, but it doesn’t work.

Of course, back then we joked about malodorous UIUC pencilneck frat nerds who think ‘third base’ means that they died twice in regulation.

Tesla is not an environmental car; It’s an attempt to tell people you can afford a $120,000 car. The core axiom of evolution is men paying $150,000 for cars that can go 160 miles an hour in domains where you can only go 55. Women will continue to pay $600 for ergonomically impossible shoes to try and solicit inbound offers from those same men. Don’t laugh – I believe this stuff.

What would happen in a battle between an Enterprise security team, who always get killed soon after appearing, and a squad of Imperial stormtroopers, who can’t hit the broad side of a barn?

If I could just stop time and get a baseball bat, everything would be all better.

I read somewhere that 77 percent of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I’m more intrigued by the 23 percent who are apparently doing quite well for themselves.

No academic ever expects to be taken seriously by more than three other people, because really, we write for three other people in our field.

Every psychic investigator of [the medium] Mrs. Piper was impressed by her simplicity and honesty. It never occurred to them that no charlatan ever achieves greatness by acting like a charlatan. No professional spy acts like a spy. No card cheat behaves at the table like a card cheat.

The MFS node can handle circuits as slow as a T1, and as fast as OC48 - a whopping 2.6 GBps traveling over single-mode fiber. With signals like that, the MFS engineers must do their utmost to limit the amount of electrical noise in the room, which is about the size of a small coffee shop. Alternating current is a no-no - it generates too much interference - so all of the switching equipment is powered with 48-volt direct current. Wong let me snap a photograph of the DC distribution system. Each of the red cables in the photo is thicker than a carrot, and carries enough current to kill everybody in HotWired’s offices. (Not that this would ever cross my mind.)

Rieger floors it. My head snaps back, my foot stomps on the virtual brake pedal, and I’m a mess of quivering Jell-O as Bad Boy hits 100 miles an hour. “Fun, isn’t it?” says a grinning Rieger, when we screech to a stop. Fun! Sex is fun. Those four seconds of full-on palpitations were more than fun. They were intense.

Silence does not equal patriotism. Obedience is not the American way.

Maybe it was the snake drills. Maybe that’s what got to them. From time to time, it seemed right to throw a length of hose into the river, yell ‘Snake!’, and everyone open up with shotguns, Magnums, semi-automatic weapons, whatever was handy on the boats. Apart from being fun, it established that the Gunkhole was heavily armed and crazy, which was all to the good. You wound up being able to leave your tools out on the deck and go for a beer and come back, and nobody had messed with your stuff.

This note will surely be lost in a fog of corrective correspondence about Casablanca’s “unforgettable” closing airport scene, but here goes: Peter Berkowitz is wrong to say that Keith Angus was right to say that Rick does not shoot Major Strasser. Rick does. Berkowitz is right to say that Angus is wrong to say that the French police captain Louis’s ensuing command to “round up the usual suspects” is cynical. But Berkowitz is only half right to say that Louis’s order represents the triumph of “friendship over cynicism.” It also-at least as important-represents the triumph of moral integrity over convenience. Louis, finally, does the right thing. But if he had shot Strasser, as both Angus and Berkowitz remember it, his famous command would have been merely self-serving, and we wouldn’t have had much of a picture to not forget.

With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.

The Microsoft corporate culture can be broken down into four key parts: a tremendous work ethic; Bill Gates is always right; an us-versus-them mentality; and Bill Gates is always right. If you execute successfully on all of that, you get to retire in your thirties as a multimillionaire.

So, my question, Tosh, is: Am I slime? And is she really OK with it or is she just saying that?

A year ago, Steve was in the wilderness, and everybody thought that NeXT was going nowhere. Then, as if by magic, he manages to sell it to Apple, for a very high price, and gain control of Apple in the process, and now he is in the position of again becoming a revered figure in the history of computing. If that’s not leadership, I don’t know what is.

Another aspect of our work environment is that we’re cheap. In some companies, the thought police would advise me to say ‘spartan,’ but once you see the pair of 8-foot couches I bought for $10 in the summer of 1991, when we set up our first office in San Jose, you’ll probably agree that cheap is the word.

Corporate beer: less taste, more filling.

Don’t ask me ‘When is our IPO?’ My office overlooks the parking lot, and when I see the BMWs of investment bankers fighting for spaces, I’ll know it’s time.

Don’t try to lawyer me out of common sense.

I worked 22 years in the industry, and I noticed that operating systems get cancer with age.

If you ask people in the mainstream what they want, they’ll say faster and smaller and cheaper. But with that you don’t get innovation. If you align yourself with the ball-breaker, high-testosterone crowd, that leads to innovation.

It’s more important for us to find the next Adobe than to convince Adobe that Be is their next platform

On the Intel platform, Microsoft is the defacto standard. It’s the weather.

Thank you, but right now we are barely a fly on the giant’s butt.

The goal of the computer is to provide people with the means to extend people’s minds and bodies. It is an exoskeleton that expands our human reach.

The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time.

The way to find what the mainstream will do tomorrow is to associate with the lunatic fringe today.

When an idea, a proposition, a cause is presented to me in terms that leave me no alternative but to be for it, because it’s all pros and no cons, then I know I’m being conned.

You have the apple - the symbol of knowledge. It is bitten - the symbol of desire. You have the rainbow - but the colors are in the wrong order. Knowledge, lust, hope, and anarchy: any company with all that cannot help being mythic.

You know, our young Steve has said so many things …and their contrary.

You know the people who have the bumper stickers that say “Windows 95 = Mac ‘89”? These are the faithful, and I respect their faith, but I would like to respectfully point out that faith is dangerous. Religion kills.

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by men.

You know, the language of some of those messages that come up, it just absolutely drives me crazy. They are flat-out incomprehensible.

Any machine that can run a browser is not thin. The browser has to be the thickest application man has ever invented, and it’s getting thicker faster than anything ever development by man.

I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.

Microsoft does not dominate the software industry by any stretch of the imagination. We have lots of very able competitors who keep us constantly vigilant, and sometimes they beat us to the punch. Microsoft’s success to date is based solely on the fact that people like Microsoft software.

Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more 'user-friendly’ […] Their best approach, so far, has been to take all the old brochures, and stamp the words, ‘user-friendly’ on the cover.

Success is a lousy teacher. It makes you think you know what you’re doing.

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10.

Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies when you’re having fun.

I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don’t want to buy things they don’t need to impress people they dislike.

At the suggestion of several nanog readers, my traceroute 2.9.4 has been renumbered to The All New TrACESroute 6.0 GOLD. Note that this is a higher revision level than either Netscape 4.8, IE5, or AOL 5, and is therefore the clearly superior software. […] In the United Kingdom, please consider this superiour software.

If the product breaks after the 1-year warranty period, it’s cheaper to get it replaced than to have it repaired.

I have a social philosophy; you have political opinions; he has an ideology.

Happy is harder than money. Anyone who thinks money will make them happy, doesn’t have money.

Death is life’s way of telling you you’ve been fired.

The question is not how to use computing power efficiently, but how to squander it creatively.

I just saw Titanic, which is a $200 million film about a real-life disaster at sea, but according to Hollywood Logic, none of the actual passengers was interesting enough, so the writer-director had to invent a Romeo and Juliet-style fictional couple to heat up the catastrophe. This seems a tiny bit like giving Anne Frank a wacky best friend, to perk up that attic.

Impeccability, a finely honed strategic sense, and an intelligent application of personal ferocity beat out fear and hate every time.

theoretical physics is all about that tension between looking something up because you’re too lazy to derive it, and deriving it because you’re too lazy to look it up

It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises - but only performance is reality.

Nothing important happened today.

If there is going to be a Big Brother in the United States, it is going to be us – the FBI.

Yeah, we’re fascist netcops. Deal.

If you can write a nation’s stories, you needn’t worry about who makes its laws.

I once named a Usenet server tatooine, for the vast wasteland that Usenet is. Maybe this thread should be relegated there also.

The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.

Financial statements belong in the fiction section of the library.

If you can count your money, you don’t have a billion dollars.

A ‘No’ uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Necessity is the mother of the re-invented wheel.

The purpose of JCL is to give you something to debug once you have your programs running.

It’s leaky abstractions ALL the way down. There is no point at which the abstractions stop leaking – all the way down to the abstraction that goes “an electron is sort of a particle and sort of a wave, kind of but not really.” There exists no level of human knowledge where the leaks stop.

So last night we lost Dover, Pennsylvania - but thanks to our good friends in Topeka, Kansas, an increasingly creative interpretation of the word “intelligent” still lives on!

If you reveal your secrets to the wind you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.

An entire city block populated by morons that are so blessed with whatever it is that God uses to punish the weaker branches of the tree of life that any sort of advanced technology stops working here. This helps explain why we use Microsoft operating systems run on Intel motherboards.

Dear Generation X, We are sorry to inform you of the death of “The Voice of Your Generation.” We deeply regret his loss to suicide and wish you all the best in the future. Yours sincerely, The Management

I’m sure if Faisal were going to make up a story it would at least be interesting.

It’s kind of in her hands because, well, basically, I want to sleep with her.

No you don’t have to tell me an embarrassing story. I already know.

So the two rules for tonight are, I’m not going to sleep with you, and you’ve *got* to stop lying to me.

Those bastards over at TuCows registered lexgibson.com. Apparently there was a dearth of domain names dedicated exclusively to 404 errors.

What’s with this song? It sounds like R2-D2 asking a lot of really stupid questions.

Would you keep control of your clothing.

Distributed computing is where someone tripping over a cable in another building can ruin your day.

Hey babe, I’ve got an O(n) method for computing form factors.

Hey, that makes this the first recorded instance of someone playing StarFleet when they shoulda been doing work. Yeah, this is historic.

I always find my self wondering how people who can’t code manage to get through life.

I really love how the phrase “using the full power of C++” has come to mean “slow and sucky”.

I wasn’t aware Perl was sexually transmitted.

“Imagine you’re falling off a cliff and all you’ve got is a rope to save yourself. At the top of the cliff there’s a CMU graduate and an MIT graduate. Which do you throw the rope to?” “The MIT graduate.” “The MIT graduate!!? Why?” “I’m probably going fast enough to yank him off the cliff.”

hen people of good faith come together as one…. the rest of us end up in concentration camps.

So I faced the fight at every level. I bought all those embarrassingly titled self-help books (always being certain to wrap up the books in the latest issue of Hustler, so that strangers wouldn’t know what I was really reading).

“It’s not your father’s SAP,” Homlish and his fellow-managers like to say, paraphrasing those hipsters at Oldsmobile

The information glut has become a ruling cliche. As all resources - from energy to information - become more abundant, the presure of economic scarcity falls ever more heavily on one key residual, and that single shortage looms ever more stringent and controlling. The governing scarcity of the information economy is time: the shards of a second, the hours in a day, the years in a life, the latency of memory, the delay in aluminum wires, the time to market, the time to metastasis, the time to retirement.

amazon.com <— sign over paychecks. thank you, have a nice day. -bezos

At Mach 3, coffee does not get served. It gets Vaporised. SR-71A: As NOT seen on Russian Radar.

C++ is probably a good keyword on your resume, so might as well go with it. If the Dragon Book saw C++, it probably would vomit.

C++ is to object orientation as Winger is to music. I hereby declare a Jihad against the devil made flesh - Bjarne Stroustrup!

change must come from within […] what are the actual chances we’ll stop hanging with the same losers […] so its all talk, we must implement a paradigm shift to leverage our madness into an engine of booty

date of easter indicator is crossing the line from function to frivolity. imagine if you will, an M car with cupholders. oh wait.

hate = good : beer = food : food = good => hate = beer

He bought a new Ferrari. 328. $80k. That’s expensive for a car but quite cheap for Heaven.

He is dead. Something that that he disagreed with, ate him

I don’t do drugs because I like to keep reality where I can get hold of it ASAP.

I had already anticipated your lameness, and made plans to go to ballroom or something

I have lived my life doing stupid things, and I think I’ve had a very good time so far. When the piper comes to get paid. Shoot him.

I must admit my education in the assgoblin arena has been sadly lacking, perhaps you can clue me in

I wonder how do I show off my two uu t1’s?. maybe I’ll log on TWICE. for twice the daily recommended dose of idiocy

if you don’t know how to do this, chances are that you should NOT be doing this. Leave this sort of thing for the professionals. Given that warning, and being the sort of person who loves to give out rope so people can hang themselves, here we go:

If your so called “SARCASM” was any good, you wouldn’t need to go around telling people about it. Hey, look over here, I’m making a SARCASTIC statement, ain’t I so SARCASTIC? You, in the clown suit, wanna check out my SARCASM?

In a crisis, all correlations go to 1.

Is your continent year 2028 compliant?

It’s not just that amazon.com’s business plan is brilliant, but that their execution is brilliant. Note the complete lack of any pages with the extension “asp” anywhere on their site.

perl is not just an insane language. it is the insane language of CHOICE.

Shut up Fleur, you’re one of the guys.

that makes it better, or soemthing. if my name was anukul, I’d have lots of quotes in faisals files too

The architecture is fine, and in fact like all Powered By PowerPoint ™ architectures, looks good in labs and papers, runs extremely well on slide projectors and will probably run fine in the real world for a while too.

the issue is getting worked up over nothing and then the morons who send mail about people getting worked up and then the morons who send mail about morons sending mail about people getting worked up. if everyone just hit delete like I do, I wouldn’t see a problem. it is not hard to deal with a mailing list, I can’t see how you idiots can actually survive in the real world

The Revolution will not be available at stores.

[This] makes entirely too much sense, therefore we junk this premise.

Time to put on some excessive force.

Times when state in names is useful - when you are transmitting information over a very low bandwidth medium, eg, slide presentations to senior management.

we are all the same color once our skin has been removed and replaced by superconducting wire mesh to dissipate spot lasers

We don’t need solutions. We need shotguns!

WHAT DID YOU SAY KMFDM STOOD FOR AGAIN PUNK?

why is vampire guy asking about X.25?

will build dynamic routing meshes for food

Yesterday I had a weird dream - I had bought a car with an automatic transmission. And it was strange enough that I woke up.

You. You’re cute. You’ll do. Come with me.

you can do that, there is nothing physically preventing you from doing it. make sure the scsi controllers have different ids. also, go see a doctor. you are fux0red

You misunderstand – I am an end-user of pants.

you will CEASE from speaking, or I WILL RIP OUT YOUR TONGUE. Lightly braise it with a lemon/pepper sauce, and feed it to you.

Everyone I know is a bad person with great taste in records. I can afford to hold some of them in contempt.

There are two things that have been true throughout history in big hunks. You can find differences in ten years, but in 50 year hunks, 100 years hunks, you’ll find two things to be true. One, the world is always getting better. Two, people always think it’s getting worse.

A libertarian is just an anarchist on the gold standard.

Layered protocols give the software implementor a chance to ruin his performance in each layer.

Maybe I’m just insane. The question is, ‘Why did I jump off the cliff, and am I going to be able to assemble a hang glider before I reach the bottom?’

There is no better way to exercise the imagination than the study of the law. No artist ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

Faldo had begun the day six strokes behind Norman. By the time the two started their slow walk to the eighteenth hole, through the throng of spectators, Faldo had a four- stroke lead. But he took those final steps quietly, giving only the smallest of nods, keeping his head low. He understood what had happened on the greens and fairways that day. And he was bound by the particular etiquette of choking, the understanding that what he had earned was something less than a victory and what Norman had suffered was something less than a defeat. When it was all over, Faldo wrapped his arms around Norman. “I don’t know what to say–I just want to give you a hug,” he whispered, and then he said the only thing you can say to a choker: “I feel horrible about what happened. I’m so sorry.” With that, the two men began to cry.

Lands’ End has undergone three major changes over the past couple of decades. The first was the introduction of an 800 number, in 1978; the second was express delivery, in 1994; and the third was the introduction of a Web site, in 1995. The first two innovations cut the average transaction time–the time between the moment of ordering and the moment the goods are received–from three weeks to four days. The third innovation has cut the transaction time from four days to, well, four days.

The Dockers campaign, however, proved that you could sell fashion to men. But that was only the first of its remarkable implications. The second-which remains as weird and mysterious and relevant to the fashion business today as it was ten years ago-was that you could do this by training a camera on a man’s butt and having him talk in yuppie gibberish.

Until the eighteenth century, it must be remembered, many Westerners drank beer almost continuously, even beginning their day with something called “beer soup.” (Bealer and Weinberg helpfully provide the following eighteenth-century German recipe: “Heat the beer in a saucepan; in a separate small pot beat a couple of eggs. Add a chunk of butter to the hot beer. Stir in some cool beer to cool it, then pour over the eggs. Add a bit of salt, and finally mix all the ingredients together, whisking it well to keep it from curdling.”) Now they began each day with a strong cup of coffee. One way to explain the industrial revolution is as the inevitable consequence of a world where people suddenly preferred being jittery to being drunk.

We tend to credit those who create an idea, not those who perfect it, forgetting that it is often only in the perfection of an idea that true progress occurs. Putting sixty-four transistors on a chip allowed people to dream of the future. Putting four million transistors on a chip actually gave them the future.

What was Welch’s career-altering personal crisis? What wild-animal metaphors will he employ? (“As I looked around the room, I felt like a young wildebeest being surveyed by a group of older and larger–but less nimble–wildebeests, whose superior market share and penetration of the herd were no match for my greater hunger, born of my impoverished middle-class upbringing in the jungles of suburban Boston.”)

this is the voice you have learned to giggle hysterically at, this is the voice of an overly dramatic sample.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Why is it that no matter how far i travel and how light i pack, my neuroses always seem to catch up with me?

Everyone who uses Stacker has had problems with it. Some just don’t realize it.

Note: Neither the Information Technology Center nor Carnegie Mellon University has ever been awakened with a blowjob, so I don’t see how the opinions expressed herein could possibly reflect those of my employers.

There is no truth to the rumor that nns got “stuck” in alt.sex because it got “interested” in what it saw there, despite those who say that such behavior would be normal for a program I wrote.

MY HOME PAGE HAS JAVA.

When the voters of Hawaii awake the morning after the Nov. 5 election, they are likely to find they have done two extraordinary things: elect a live Republican to the governor’s office and a dead Democrat to Congress.

Laptop computers dramatically increased the time people spend doing work. (The internet dramatically decreased it, so we’re even).

I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she’s too young to have logged on yet. Here’s what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say “Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?

There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be "the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.

A love song in German is like a heavy metal song in French.

It is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.

He who is firm in will molds the world to himself

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

It is not enough to have knowledge, one must also apply it. It is not enough to have wishes, one must also accomplish.

Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and forthwith it is something entirely different.

One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back– Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.“

Kill every human on the planet? Sounds like a good idea! But first, we should concentrate on more immediate goals.

It’s like documenting the construction of the grand canyon!

You’ll notice that ‘telephony’ has a ‘phony’ in it.

It is fundamental that the great powers of Congress to conduct war and to regulate the Nation’s foreign relations are subject to the constitutional requirements of due process. The imperative necessity for safeguarding these rights to procedural due process under the gravest of emergencies has existed throughout our constitutional history, for it is then, under the pressing exigencies of crisis, that there is the greatest temptation to dispense with fundamental constitutional guarantees which, it is feared, will inhibit governmental action. "The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances … In no other way can we transmit to posterity unimpaired the blessings of liberty, consecrated by the sacrifices of the Revolution.

i guess that these are the some of the people you can fool all of the time.

With any luck this site should help ruin the internet.

I won’t be in the office today. Your bad airline karma has spread to me. Annie, my dog, was "mistakenly” flown to New Orleans instead of SFO. The city names are so close, I can see how the mixup happened.

I can see all the eggshells, now where’s this omelette?

If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

Startups are run by people who do what’s necessary at the time it’s needed. A lot of time that’s unglamorous work. A lot of times that’s not heroic work. Is that heroic? Is that standing on a stage in a black turtleneck, in front of 20,000 people talking about the future of phones? No. But that’s how companies are built. That person who did that for the iPhone launch at Apple, we don’t know who he is. All we know is that Steve Jobs came up with the iPhone. But he didn’t ship it. The person who bought the donuts did.

I liked Beauty and the Beast a lot. Bitter, isolated, and physically repulsive. I can identify with that.

Is there such a thing as a weather penis?

Remember, it’s not the size of the paintbrush, but the amount you flaunt it on the net that counts.

Let me draw an analogy here; I’m quite fond of a well mixed bloody mary, but I can’t stomach straight vodka. Likewise, I would imagine pure Goth, replete with angst but lacking any ANGER, would be insipid and self-indulgent beyond my ability to endure it.

Where are we going and what’s with this handbasket?

A lot of people have these quotes pages full of funny and sometimes thought provoking things people they know or admire say. Most of the time the quotes are painfully sarcastic or full of angst and ultraviolence. This is useless and will not be supported here.

.666 – The Number of the Millibeast

We put the “laughter” in Manslaughter.

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

Hello. This is Evan Golub’s e-mail filter. According to my internal clock, it is 1900 and e-mail will not be invented for several decades. Your message will be held in a queue until this invention has been made. However, please note that Evan may not respond for several more years as he has not been born as of yet and certainly does not know how to type.

I unfortunately let AOL start up.

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

Oh my god, using a computer in denny’s. Believe me guys, that must come with INCHES of being a multiple orgasm!

I have this point to make about software engineering: when your your wrappers have grown wrappers it’s time to switch to decaf.

It is true that some lawyers are dishonest, arrogant, greedy, venal, amoral, ruthless buckets of slime. On the other hand, it is unfair to judge the entire profession by a few hundred thousand bad apples.

Crossposting isn’t inherently evil, in the same sense that necrophilia doesn’t really hurt anybody. One wonders only whether it’s appropriate to the occasion.

Those who are obsessed by ideology are the Republican Party, where they are in such disarray that the right hand doesn’t know what the far right hand is doing

Cisco cleverly sold software that plugged into the wall, had a fan and got warm. People had a long history of buying things that plugged into the wall, made noises and got warm.

there are 2 kinds of music: laibach, and othe music. other music allsounds the same.

We all enter this world in the same way: naked; screaming; soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn’t have to stop there.

In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

This committee has not tried to determine whether the National Security Agency tendency to advance exaggerated claims of authority … stems from conscious policy or the actions of individual NSA employees.

The reason why everything else in this ship is, I maintain, safe, is that no one is really crazy enough to use them. No one. At least no one that crazy would ever get near them. Anyone that mad or dangerous rings very deep alarm bells. People may be stupid but they’re not *that* stupid.

The plural of moron is focus group.

There is such a fine line between goth and skanky biker ho.

Disposable income is very cool and that’s the reason we’re in grad school.

How can you dream the impossible dream, when you can’t get any sleep?

Parking is an art in Los Angeles, which is fortunate, since the movie industry has pretty much ceded any pretense of being about art and L.A. needs all the culture it can get.

You’re damn right we need a rational code of morality and ethics. But not much progress can be made in that direction while we’ve still got a majority ranting about gods, devils, souls, and absolute morality, and using an ancient book written by ignorant nomads as a guide.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it’s populated by adults, but that it’s very large, and the things you do have real effects. That’s what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

If you want to trick a pointy-haired boss into letting you write software in Lisp, you could try telling him it’s XML.

If your first version is so impressive that trolls don’t make fun of it, you waited too long to launch.

Paranoia will get you through times of no enemies better than enemies will get you through times of no paranoia.

A lot of parents aren’t very good at parenting, and part of being a teenager is saying and doing stupid things…

now that departments have a choice between Unix and Windows there’s a lot of interest in Macs…

Whenever there has been talk of exterminating rats, others, who were not rats, have been exterminated.

In my country there is a belief, and rightly so, that the only thing that separates us from animals is mindless superstition and pointless ritual.

Argument from Design: 1. One looks at a simple computer, and sees evidence of intelligent design. 2. One looks at a Sun Sparc 20 and… um… well… Okay, One looks at a DEC Alpha and sees evidence of intelligent design. 3. It is therefore likely that something created them. 4. One looks at the network and sees evidence of intelligent design. 5. It is therefore likely that something created it. That something is the System Administrator. Counter-argument: 1. If you think the network implies intelligent design, you haven’t seen *our* network. 2. Even assuming this proves the existence of a System Administrator, there’s no evidence the System Administrator is intelligent.

Like a fly to a bug zapper, you are drawn to the cafeteria.

Something bothers me about a bunch of scrawny kids in $150 oxblood DM’s, $150+ Leather jackets, and a ton of expensive jewelry and decorations sitting in doorways begging for change. WAKE UP CALL!!! LOOKING LIKE A FREAK IS A LUXURY! YOU CAN’T ALL WORK AT TOWER!!!!!!

“This” cyberscene? Yeah, like this bboard is a “virtual reality”, not just a bunch of ASCII-twiddling weenies who have the privelege of Internet access…

Here is the set of “organisations using encryption codes legitimately” and here is the set of terrorists. Observe the intersection. There is NONE. IT IS THE NULL SET. VENN DIAGRAM THAT LOOK LIKE TWO BIG CIRCLES EQUAL BAD PUBLIC POLICY.

and the obvious answer to that is yes, you smoke crack like an engineer drinks espresso.

Are you sick and tired of men sniveling and whining about how we women want to smother them? If you can still hear them whining you aren’t holding the pillow down hard enough.

Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.

Q: How many Newtons does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Foux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.

Reality is an illusion that occurs due to lack of caffeine.

The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn’t belong to anyone, ever.

Building trustworthy computers is literally the hardest problem in computer security. Honestly it’s almost the only problem in computer security.

… if you blow up a mountainside and find 1000 tons of rock and one alien spaceship, who cares about the rock?

Civilization remains a fragile, vulnerable, precious thing. And like a pretty girl in a short skirt walking to her car after last call, civilization must sometimes keep her keys splayed out between her knuckles, just in case. Only we left behind over a year ago. Now the pretty girl has to walk back to her car with a flak jacket, a grenade launcher, a GPS designator, and a platoon of Special Forces bad asses with heavy armor on call. With all that extra gear, it’s s sometimes hard to remember how good she looks in that skirt, but never forget that civilization is that girl. She’s everything you want, but, through no fault of her own, she’s in serious need of protecting.

The problem with The People is, you put them in groups and they often become very, very stupid. The Wave will serve as Exhibit A. For Exhibit B, just take notes on your rush hour drive home from work today. If you actually take notes in the car, then you’re part of the problem.

The PhD student is someone who forgoes current income in order to forgo future income.

Actually, for those of you counting at home, two war crimes. … Of course, only the losers face war-crime tribunals.

Along, the same lines, I’ve proved P = NP, but I don’t want to tell anyone yet.

Dammit! Rob posted my entire point, and made it more succinct.

I guess what I am saying is that you would have to be more specific in order for me to answer your question…. But my post does have a lot of acronyms

I think I’ve been reading /etc/passwd *way* too much.

I’m gonna get luddite on your ass!

If your sysadmin’s not being fascist, you’re paying him too much.

Let me just point out that this is all I saw I of your message. Then my head exploded.

Nope, those weren’t the Rockettes. They were just average citizens from New York who happened to be walking through Times Sqaure. They were so amazed by the downright funkiness of the Pentium II that they had to start dancing in a sychronized line right then and there.

Seg fault. Core dump. Machine panic. Lost contact with all afs file servers. WAR BREAKS OUT. THE SUN EXPLODES. MERHABIAN SHAVES HIS MUSTACHE.

SOPHISM SMACKS! Only one distorted statement per spoonful! (Nothing goes better with Sophism Smacks than a hefty helping of Infinitoes.)

Technology is useless without art.

[We] might not see eye to eye on quite a few topics, but on this one, we are in complete agreement. Except of course, for the cars, women, and cash, there have been very few perks in running the various incarnations of this or any social list.

What’s up with the Jewish Conspiracy? Where’s *my* power?!!?

When I say ‘morning’, what I really mean is ‘afternoon’.

yep.! I’ll call tomorrow afeternoonfgr. I’d fix that byut I am toe lzay to move my hand to the deleteeee key.

You broke up over a year and a half? That’s one *long* phone call.

You put the art back in fart.

I am one of the culprits who created the problem. I used to write those programs back in the ‘60s and '70s, and was so proud of the fact that I was able to squeeze a few elements of space by not having to put '19’ before the year.

I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.

Although the Buddhists will tell you that desire is the root of suffering, my personal experience leads me to point the finger at system administration.

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

Computers are the tools of the devil. It is as simple as that. There is no monotheism strong enough that it cannot be shaken by Unix or any Microsoft product. The devil is real. He lives inside C programs.

For some reason, Web service seems to attract incompetent system administrators and antique, unloved hardware. Here at MIT, for example, we actually do have some modern computers. They’re in the new $70 million biology building. In the computer science building, we like to say “I haven’t seen anyone using that SPARC 2 since 1988, let’s make it the Web server for 100 creative programmers.” Then we’re surprised when the machine dies at 1/600th of the www.netscape.com traffic. Anyway, as you might expect, a substantial percentage of the links on the Web go dead (look at the entries in Yahoo).

Frame is a good enough piece of software that there are actually rewards to taking an intelligent and formal approach to your problem. But if you want to be stupid, you can think of Frame as a version of Microsoft Word with most of the bugs taken out.

Like most people in Academia, my vision of the future is the same as the average industry person’s vision of five years ago.

Most people who are rich chose their parents wisely.

Price to universities: a system that is cheap for university CS students will, ten years later, be the dominant technology in any market where software development innovation is important

Remember that in 1993 a company with a bad Web site needed an engineer. Today, a company with a bad Web site needs a psychiatrist.

Start by putting yourself in your users’ shoes. Why are they coming to your site? If you look at most Web sites, you’d presume that the answer is “User is extremely bored and wishes to stare at a blank screen for several minutes while a flashing icon loads, then stare at the flashing icon for a few more minutes.”

The devil is real. He lives inside C programs.

Web/db connectivity was a sort of interesting problem in 1994 when everyone was using CGI (see the database interfacing chapter of Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing). It became a completely uninteresting problem after it was solved in 1995 by AOLs erver (then called NaviServer), whose connection pooling scheme and interpreted language API improved performance by roughly a factor of 100 over CGI. The irrelevance of even this level of performance gain is illustrated amply by the fact that Amazon.com ignored the connection innovations, continued to use CGI, and cried all the way to a $25 billion market capitalization.

Earth is a single point of failure.

What’s the saying? “You reap what you sew” or is it “you reap what you allow to fester long enough?”

You can only kiss so much faculty butt before you get a mouthfull of hair.

Big breasts are popular, people look around, they say, “Oh, there’s lots of big breasts – they’re very big, they’re scary, someone might get their eye put out. I’m going to vote for Buchanan.” … It’s not that “Political times are repressive, ergo we like big breasts” but that “There are a lot of big breasts around, ergo we get scared and we get conservative.” And, conversely, like in the sixties you had people like Penelope Tree and Twiggy, and people looked around and said, “Oh, there’s lots of small breasts around – it’s okay, it’s safe. I’m going to join a commune and take drugs.”

Live Fast. Die Young. Leave a Flesh Eating Corpse.

90? 110? You know. It’s a Ferrari, baby – you don’t do 50 in a Ferrari.

I don’t know the answer to this… but you don’t either.

If you try hard enough, you can blow a 50 minute lecture.

Simple little math teachers say that 10/0 is undefined.

The best things about solid mechanics is that you can break things all the time. Getting paid money to destroy things - what more could a man ask for?

The stresses.. They just don’t care. They’re like you on Sunday morning.

You wonder what faculty do? We sit around drinking beer and discussing free-body diagrams.

When you hear the word ‘nonhomogeneous’ do you feel queasy inside?

As an aside, I next plan to gun for both news.announce.newgroups and comp.risks. I figure that along with the mysterious but timely disappearance of alt.conspiracy and talk.politics.guns, once I’ve gotten them, I’ll have accomplished my goal of imposing my will upon all of USENET’s readership. I’ll control Star Trek, I’ll control humor, I’ll control which newsgroups exist, and I’ll ensure that no one can be warned about the threat I pose. So Mr. Neumann and Mr. Lawrence, you’ve been warned. And once the Internet is present in every household in the world, I’ll have fulfilled my dream to become the absolute ruler of the hearts and minds of every sentient being on the planet. But I digress.

Anu, you’re babbling, go to eat'n park.

Anything’s funny with blood all over your face.

I want something to organize my life and it should play tetris.

I’m feeling slightly less existentially despondent.

Can you STOP talking about spinning metal penises!

If at first you don’t succeed – give it up. It isn’t worth the pain.

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

If companies don’t know that they can run out of money, they won’t be thinking of ways not to run out of money.

Sorry dude, didn’t realise you had the detector. I hate it when they use the old fashioned “pacing” technique. It’s just darned sneaky, as opposed to blasting 200W of microwaves all over the place so we can detect them.

I’ll have the plate of vomit.

I did not have “Rene Ritchie gets a Google employee badge” on my bingo card, but that’s why I don’t play bingo.

We have turned conflicts of interest into synergies.

I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to mis-attribute this quote to Voltaire.

This is the philosophical ramblings of a tortured mind. We’ll print it exactly the way he wants it.

This fellow Charles Lindbergh will never make it. He’s doomed.

Funded competition is your R&D department.

An ideal wife is one who remains faithful to you but tries to be just as charming as if she weren’t.

You can pretend to be serious, you can’t pretend to be witty.

when peopel come to rails, they often have this extreme conservatism about sql queries… they want to get everything done with just one query. It’s like my eastern european grandparents and their obsession with conserving toilet paper

The difference is that manure is manure, with any bucket as useful for fertilizer as any other. A more apt comparison would be to think of the Usenet archive as dumptrucks full of manure, each containing a single peanut butter cup…somewhere…

Oh, good. Symbols on the floor. That always goes well.

The security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone, Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.

If you can think up a company in your head, there are likely five other people who can do the same. […] At last count, there were something like six venture-backed seafood exchanges. I doubt that the canneries are crying out for that much innovation just yet.

In many industries, such as biotech, the cost and time required to develop a new product are enormously high. In these markets, it is sensible for the government to grant an award to innovators such that investors have the proper incentives to fund new health discoveries. … To argue that the Internet sector suffers from a lack of funding incentive would be, pardon the pun, patently absurd.

Of course, one could argue that revenue is not the proper metric for measuring the success of a company with a potentially negative gross margin.

Of course, success invites arbitrage, and on the Internet, that means someone is selling what you sell for cheaper.

The good news is that you can build a portal overnight; the bad news is that so can everyone else.

This spring, my parents ran out of storage space in their garage, and I finally brought my Lego home. My wife also brought her Lego home from her mother’s, and we ritually mixed the two collections. It’s funny, but we both felt that this was the ultimate sign of total devotion. Marriage is fine, but when you mix your Lego collections, you’re really serious. We were going to put it all away, but somehow, the boxes didn’t quite make it to the basement. We have now been spending several of last month’s evenings at home building Lego until late at night. But we are going to put it away now. Really. Real soon. Any one of these days. We can quit any time we want. Honestly.

A sacrifice… how about a young, nubile, willing dancing girl, dressed in thin white silk, holding a chocolate chip cheesecake in one hand and a six-pack of Blue Ridge Porter in the other? Just send her to my place and consider yourself paid up.

…almost everyone in the film is made a little too dumb for my taste (even by New Hampshire standards).

At this point, wanting to get my point across with the proper sign language, I tried to strangle him.

Ever fly through a thunderstorm? It’s pretty, in an “I’m gonna die” way.

If you placed all the blood vessels in your body end to end, you’d be dead.

So, I went over to the X Marks the Pedwalk web page, in hopes of figuring out what the HELL the lyrics are to Facer (one of those questions that keeps me up late at night, along with “does God exist?” and “If Colin’s five years older than me, how come *he’s* always the one getting carded?”).

Support your local medical examiner. Die strangely.

The frustrating thing about […] is that he… really tries to dominate my attention… which would be okay if he’d sleep with me.

Well, I saw Hackers last night…. It was flashy, gorgeous, stylish, and appallingly dumb - much like many people I know.

Yes, I know, it’s Adams Morgan. Yes, I know, it’s about ten degrees out. And I know just about everyone’s suffering from Seasonal Affected Disorder at the moment. But hey, you know what they say, misery loves company! Brave this wintry hell and drag your PVC-clad butt out to Heaven this Tuesday!

Come on, why would anyone want to live in California any more? People can’t even read their pink slips because the power is out.

Etc. (gratuitous parenthetical phrase).

Santa Claus wears a Red Suit … he must be a communist. And a beard and long hair … must be a pacifist. What’s in that pipe that he’s smoking?

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

We’ve got people looking seriously at adopting Communicator as an institutional standard, but I’m looking for something that works well instead.

Oh my! An ‘inflammatory attitude’ in alt.flame? Never heard of such a thing…

UNIX was never designed to keep people from doing stupid things, because that policy would also keep them from doing clever things.