Quotes: m

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency... Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the nation will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your public service must be duty, honor, country.

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.

No war ought ever to be undertaken but under circumstances which render all intercourse of courtesy between the combatants impossible. It is a bad thing that men should hate each other; but it is far worse that they should contract the habit of cutting one another's throats without hatred. War is never lenient but where it is wanton; when men are compelled to fight in self-defense, they must hate and avenge: this may be bad; but it is human nature.

A motorcycle is a combination of pony, blow dryer, and vibrator - perfect for girls of all ages.

After riding a motorcycle, riding a car is like riding a living room. Except Claudia's car, which is like riding your crazy grandmother's attic.

Don't burn your bridges while you're standing on them.

Gee, hopefully I'll be less drunk this time so I can remember what I did.

God, I *love* Capitalism. Hot towels, clean sheets, good food, and we'll have those Commie bastards on their knees in no time.

Guests are welcome so long as they behave themselves. I've got a whole back yard now, and a shovel.

This is like a cross between 'Thelma & Louise' and 'Raise the Titanic'.

Nokia is one of the greatest logistics companies on the planet. It churns out hundreds of millions of phones, changes models frequently, and almost everything works properly. If Nokia were running the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, New Orleans would be 20 feet above sea level by now.

caution: if you write code like this, immediately after you are fired the person assigned to maintaining your code after you leave will resign

If you're a Mac user who depends on fonts for your work, you probably fall into one of two categories (we hesitate to say types): You don't even pretend to understand the Mac's font architecture and you have a difficult time managing your typefaces, or you're an experienced user with a thorough understanding of the Mac's font architecture and you have a difficult time managing your typefaces.

It is a common failing of man not to take account of tempests during fair weather.

It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to management than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones.

Being rich isn't about money. Being rich is a state of mind. Some of us, no matter how much money we have, will never be free enough to take time to stop and eat the heart of the watermelon. And some of us will be rich without ever being more than a paycheck ahead of the game.

The subspace W inherits the other 8 properties of V. And there aren't even any property taxes.

RB AND RS: These commands no longer reboot if there are extra parameters on the command line. The motivation here is that Dave recently typed 'rb -s' when he meant to type 'rd -s', and he really, really didn't mean to reboot his system at that particular time.

There comes a time in the history of any project when it becomes necessary to shoot the engineers and begin production.

Called up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms regional office and asked, "What wine goes best with an M-16?" The guy who answered did his best to be helpful: "That depends. What are you smoking?"

XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

Labor is mobile. Pittsburgh is everywhere.

A unix signature isn't a return address, it's the ASCII equivalent of a black velvet clown painting. It's a rectangle of carets surrounding a quote from a literary giant of weeniedom like Heinlein or Dr. Who.

Because, honestly, what can you do with a pumpkin soup bowl besides put pumpkin soup in it? If you put tomato soup in it, God will murder you.

Computers can figure out all kinds of problems, except those that just don't add up.

I notice that on each box, there is the phrase "Baked by authority of Girl Scouts of the USA." I suddenly picture a little girl scout handing someone a big rolled doobie and saying, "Here you go. I have my permission to smoke it."

I have a headache this big, and it has a boot to the head written all over it.

I thought they stuck with their call letters - WHFS (White Heroin addicts From Seattle)?

I've heard so much Green Day that I've got dookie coming out my ears.

So far, Owen does not have access to: music, alcohol, caffeine, beef. Who wants chip in and send a care package? Who will voluenteer to wrap the cow?

Step one: Pour gin in a glass. Step two: Drink gin. Step three: Repeat 15 times.

That was so funny, I just shot milk out my nose. Which is strange, because I am not drinking milk right now.

Um...this week's word (according to Vince) was "moderation." We'll try not to do that again. Anyway, thanks again for hosting. Now, where is that Owen?

Well, the real question is when is Karen going to get the Mattel tattoo on her butt?

Why don't you come over to my place? I've got a bathtub full of MAYONAISE!

Jay is the werewolf or the seer. He's the village Solid Gold Dancer.

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

I've been informed that alt.religion.kibology is a *MODERATED* group, strictly for postings by ai's.

Yellow and blue make green... thanks, next you're going to tell me that red and blue make purple. Wonderful.

'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.

There are plans afoot to connect every teenager in the US to the internet by the year 2000. Most of these, considered as individual units, are barely able either to understand or to write a coherent English paragraph, yet aggregrate them them into one vast world wide parallel computational soup and it's almost impossible to underestimate what they might achieve.

I'll get the implanted cellphone. With an answering machine for when I'm out of my head.

As for two years from now... who knows where it'll be. I think we'll ideally be doing a lot of the same stuff, but maybe with spell checking.

Let me just say that it is super wierd throwing your own bash at a conference instead of just leaching off everyone else's, but hey, free beer, right?

A general rule of thumb that has helped me maintain perspective is that, given enough time, you are either proven to be an idiot or a genius. A corollary to that law is that you will eventually reveal your true self on social media.

There are different types of depression. ... This is, if you will, The Psycho Venn Diagram.

A lot more people have been killed over religion than over rock and roll, but what's the one they try to tell you is bad for society?

So I decided to try Galaxies after all, although with some trepidation. I felt better when I came to understand that it did not have to be a novel but merely a set of notes for one. Knowing this I was not shamed nor did I grieve, for one's life is merely a set of notes for a life and Ridgefield Park merely a rough working model of Trenton in which nonetheless several thousand people live unable to divine their right hand from their left, and also some cattle. Shalt thou have not pity on the cattle? For they too grew up and perished in a night.

We're people just like you who happen to be huge and muscle-bound and own a truck.

Hell! HELL!! I'VE WORKED IN THE COMP CENTER FOR TWO F*ING YEARS!!! HELL WOULD SEEM LIKE CLUB MED!!!!

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves--Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are we not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.

So welcome to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Biden. It’s the best zero-sum game in town.

I know, I know. "Vim is better" and "emacs is better" and "cuneiform scales better" and "BBEdit saved my baby from a man with a big knife," but please don't carp here.

it's probably not going to stay as longhorn, maybe they'll call it Microsoft Windows LOL

Tonight's been one of those nights where I savour the alcohol in my mind, not my stomach.

Because of the subtlety of differences within the same range of styles, it took more time to fathom other people than it does to read their philosophical bottom lines, so to speak, on their pants, buttons, caps or T-shirts. To probe candidates for friendship and other intimacies, one had to talk to them, which is unquestionably less efficient than it is to look around a room, decide, "They're all jerks," and go home and play computer games.

Her other recommendation, which also applies equally to conventional weddings, is actually at odds with the unfortunate current practices of society as a whole. That is to plan the occasion remembering that its purpose is not to show off your love for each other, but to establish yourselves as a public and dignified unit in the society in which you move.

If it's against state law, it's generally considered a breach of Etiquette.

Miss Manners does not recommend anyone's inviting society as a whole to any social event. Society as a whole doesn't approve of anything.

Miss Manners is not quite so naive as to believe that love produces any agreement of views after that first rapturous discovery that both people like movies and the outdoors.

There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection IS the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.

You can take a pile of rocks and use them to build a house, or you can take the same pile and start a war. Tell children not to throw rocks, make rules against picking up rocks, and then make mad. Keep projecting what not to do and you make the thought in their brains of what can and will be done.

the internet is the trailer park for the soul

I was 15. She was punk. D.R.I. was playing "Dead in a Ditch" and our friends were waiting for us in a nearby park (we went out to get the cold malt liquor). As we bonded in the backseat of her Honda, I told her I loved her. She said "don't ruin it".

A revolution is not a dinner party.

Everything under heaven is chaos; the situation is excellent.

Victory will go, not to those who can inflict the most, but to those who can endure the most.

If someone thinks we're not after Lotus and after WordPerfect and after Borland, they're confused.... My job is to get a fair share of the software applications market, and to me that's 100 percent.

Blaspheme Quarantine is hard. Hard as Hell. Bungie made it that way. We made it that way. We don't want hear any whining about it. We aren't the first to say, "Hard stuff rules."

I’m not smart enough to know how to pronounce that number so I’ll just say 704 billion trillion trillion (I hope I counted correctly). It’s a significant number. To use an absurd analogy, if this was a stack of papers, it would stretch from here to the sun. ... 503,159,589,676,427,159,263 times

If and when the Feds get special authority (and exemptions from the Bill of Privileges) to go after terrorists, we will be absolutely amazed to find out just how many terrorists there are in this country. Thousands, maybe millions-- at least one under every bed and several behind every bush.

There are only two things of importance. One is the customer, and the other is the product. If you take care of customers, they come back. If you take care of your product, it doesn't come back. It's just that simple. And it's just that difficult.

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete stangers to kill again.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Listen up folks! Here's the skinny. The reason that the rumor is being delayed is because Apple had to take rumor engineers off of the the thin book so that they could release the rumor about the new xMac on time. The xMac rumor was in danger of slipping and not being ready for the 2007 Holiday rumor season and the all important lead up to MWSF 2008.

On a related note, John is telling me how Winona Ryder was at Tsunami for both RTTS2 and Growling Mad Scientists in November. Winona Ryder!! I'm shocked I didn't notice her. What I wouldn't do to get her dressed like a duck.

I find it very disturbing that you people know how to use my penis better than I do.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?

A true capitalist fights with their wallet. A true anarchist fights with the opponents' wallet

I don't use computers like I don't give myself enemas - they're both occasionally useful, and I know how to do them both, but really, I could just go stub my toe for the fun of it.

There is a differerence between being different and being new, a difference between questioning social customs and just being rude, a difference between being daring and simply breaking rules. Most people do not understand this difference. It makes them easy to tell them apart.

You need to understand... no... wait... you don't...

Post mortem debugging can be fun, especially when you get to see the victim die over and over again in slow motion!

It is not enough to fight. It is the spirit which we bring to the fight that decides the issue. It is morale that wins the victory.

There's nothing quite like speeding down a dark New England country highway, frigid outside the car and comfy enough inside, hitting on just the right song on the radio and playing it really, really loud. And heading north tonight I was hitting them one after another. Sometimes ... well, sometimes Led Zeppelin is just more important than politics.

History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.

Meetings get a bad rep. Because they're such a waste of time.

On the first date, they just tell each other lies, and that usually gets them interested enough to go for a second date.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but fooling Usenet doesn't take much time at all.

He's got a neon sign above his head that says 'assmunch'.

The most dangerous moment in any financial market boom is the one where the suppliers of funds stop paying attention.

Communication has changed so rapidly in the last 20 years, it's almost impossible to predict what might occur even in the next decade. E-mail, which now sends data hurtling across vast distances at the speed of light, has replaced primitive forms of communication such as smoke signals, which sent data hurtling across vast distances at the speed of light. Let's suppose that you want to say, "I am a jerk." In the 18th century, you would have to go around person to person and utter the phrase individually to each one of them. However, here in the third millennium, with our advances in telephone communication, it is possible to say, "I am a jerk" to a thousand people at a time by forgetting to turn off your cell phone and having it ring during a performance of "Death of a Salesman."

The dogma of the church was challenged in the mid-17th-century by Renee Descartes's famous pronouncement "Cogito ergo sum" ("I am nervous about having to add"), and the age of rationalism began. Rationalism then gave way to empiricism, and David Hume declared that it was impossible to know if anything existed at all, though later he recanted when he stubbed his toe on a doorjamb.

Actually, this has been a feature of Unix for years now. A process may have all of its child processes reaped without warning, lose its entire flock, and even find itself afflicted by boils, all at the whims of the scheduler. This is why the operating system refers to a suspended process as a "stopped Job". Unfortunately, most implementations fail to capitalize the name, leading to widespread confusion and mispronounciation among users.

Bring Captain Solo and the stock options to me.

But perhaps it's unfair to berate Microsoft for little shortcomings like these. Clearly, they had weightier issues to grapple with. Who's got time to do usability testing when you're struggling to empower your users with the ability to surround text with a border of animated flashing marquee lights, Las Vegas style?

But while we're on the subject of file formats, let's pause for a moment in frank admiration of the way in which Microsoft brazenly built backward-incompatibility into its product. By initially making it virtually impossible to maintain a heterogenous environment of Word 95 and Word 97 systems, Microsoft offered its customers that most eloquent of arguments for upgrading: the delicate sound of a revolver being cocked somewhere just out of sight.

Clearly, I need to start soliciting fashion advice from Martin.

"Congratulations! You've described the PostScript filesystem! What does Aleecia win, Don?" "Alex, Aleecia wins second prize -- dinner with Stephen Jay Gould!"

Crafty weasel-like hedging? From CMU? You don't say.

Dear Spammers, Thank you for your recent note, which I shall treasure as much for its blatantly forged headers as for its inept use of the English language and carefree disregard for hoary, hidebound, established conventions of legible formatting or coherent punctuation.

Do not bait Happy Fun Boy.

Do not meddle in the affairs of Win32, for it is subtle, and quick to anger.

Dude, your company is teetering on the very BRINK of technological RELEVANCE. Now is not the time to make feeble sport of the company whose BOOTED HEEL is at your THROAT.

Excellent! Now I can precisely measure my penguin slippage!

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Dan, and I'll be your designated ranter for the evening. Flying spittle is one of the risks of attending a live performance, so you may wish to shield yourselves with your dessert menus.

Happy Thread, take me away!

have I ever told you how much more authoritative and convincing your arguments sound when you sprinkle them liberally with expletives? No, really. I'm just so completely won over by the forcefulness and lucidity of your rhetoric.

[He] has taken a basically valid observation [...] and extrapolated it somewhere into the Oort cloud.

Hey! Anyone for a round of "Reinstall Service Pack 4"?

Hey, man -- if there's one thing we need more of around here, it's enough rope to hang ourselves with.

However, this line of thought is threatening to transmogrify into the dreaded "What Is Art?" thread, which leads me to suspect that I should probably drop it before Dr. Faisal decides to make a house call and adminster several whole units of blunt force trauma.

I can only hope that one of either Devlin or Emmerich decides to raise his slavish emulation of the pair's obvious role models in the art of making big dumb movies, Simpson and Bruckheimer, still one notch further by dropping dead.

I could have sharp, bony projections sprouting from my body at all angles, reek of sulphur and brimstone, and sport a tongue pocked with the occasional eyeball; I'd still be able to get geek dates as long as I was female.

I don't buy the notion that Tomb Raider was a hit because of Lara Croft's unusually large, um... polygon count.

I don't know whether reading Roo's mind is something to be proud or afraid of. Either way, I'd guess that knowledge of the contents could probably get me arrested in several states.

I feel obligated to point out that it's quite possible to like Martin *without* in any way distancing oneself from the belief that he's a real poindexter. (Yeah, yeah. Glass houses and all that. Pot. Kettle. Your mother.)

I found uninstallation to be the most satisfactory approach. I didn't take the time to familiarize myself with any less radical ones.

I have been placed upon this Earth to torment you. YOU....

I haven't yet decided whether the blame for this arrangement belongs to Netscape or to Apple, as could be inferred from the fact that no one's been seriously injured for it yet.

I hope we will pull into San Franciso with a truck full of guns and hearts full of hate.

I just succeeded in getting my SPARCstation and my PC to use the same Netscape bookmarks file. All it took, aside from mapping an SMB server to a drive letter, was a little surgery on the Windows 95 Registry. I don't know whether to be really pleased, or to succumb to the feeling of impending disaster and of tampering with unholy forces that always attends tinkering with the Registry.

I no longer wish to destroy an inanimate object. I wish to *murder* it.

I think that your faith in the wisdom of Congress is grossly misplaced. Don't forget that this is the same body which said, while proudly passing the PATRIOT and USA acts, "We're going to replace the fine toilet tissue we normally use with the U.S. Constitution. Let's wipe our asses and see if the Supreme Court notices."

I went and invented a new variant of Roshambo we'll call "Rock, Thumbtip, 7,000 RPM CPU Fan".

I won't be a full-fledged Pod Person until I have a PCS phone.

I'd hesitate to accuse anyone of being outright *corrupt*, but I'll admit that I'm probably not going to expect a hard, searching look at all things Microsoft from magazines with names like "Windows Sources" and "Windows Computing" ("NT 5.0: The crashproof Windows you've been waiting for!" Shyeah, right. 'This time for sure.'). When you have the name of a company's product in your *title*, and every other product you review requires that company's product in order to be useful, you probably don't need to do a spectrographic analysis to figure out which side your bread's buttered on. All of the above notwithstanding, Ziff-Davis as a corporate entity is so far down Bill's pants that they need to run a pressurized air hose down there just to breathe.

I'd mention Emacs's folded-editing modes, but you'd only get annoyed with me.

I'll be bitterly disappointed if Martin doesn't come up with a way to quote this back at me, in whole or in part, at the most embarassing moment possible.

I am glad to see the close of the era when reviewers thought it was okay -- or even worse, obligatory -- to ding an otherwise-excellent design for lacking a multiplayer component. ("'Robinson Crusoid on Camus's Planet' presents a compelling challenge of solitary survival in a hostile environment, as well as a brilliantly harrowing exploration of the aching emptiness one feels upon realizing oneself to be alone in an uncaring universe. I'd have given it five stars if only I could go online and play it with my friends.")

I'm not sure what kind of career path one can look forward to as a nomadic city-vaporizing lunatic, but it's got to be worth a try.

If you shoot me with .25 ACP, and I find out about it, I'll kick your ass.

If you're testing a script incorporating "rm -rf" by actually running it, your balls are so much bigger than mine that the difference is most tersely expressed in AU.

If your response to Chris really is going to contain a moral argument, I can't *wait* to see it. ("And the LORD spake unto them, saying, 'Partake not of the fruits of the Xing player, for its keys are not encrypted in accordance with the licensing agreement; it is an abomination.'")

If your spirit has become karmically burdened with the belief that obvious wire work somehow detracts from rather than contributes to the enjoyment of a Hong Kong film, you are not merely unready to leave the temple, but in imminent danger of being forcibly confined to your cell.

Ignore me. I'm raving. If you put me under glass and pumped out all the air right now, I'd burn for a thousand years. I am full of hate, and it's got nothing to do with you. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Is stuff being delivered out of order again, or did we just witness the latest installment of Aleecia Needs A Real Mail Client Theater?

Is there a W3O-approved systax for Stellman-side includes yet?

It could be argued that I know slightly less about what it means to be in a healthy long-term relationship than your average monkey does about what it feels like to drown in quicksand.

It was like watching a first-year film student's halfhearted attempt at a satire of superspy movies, except that he had an unlimited budget courtesy of his insane rich uncle, and editing courtesy of the strung- out smack-addict roommate he felt vaguely sorry for. I think we were also hoping against hope for something to happen that would make it all worthwhile, or at least make sense. Maybe Uma Thurman and Ralph Fiennes would shed their human skins, or Jeremiah S. Chechik -- the director, whom you've never heard of, and for damn good reason -- would pop up from behind one of the props and say, "Hah! Got your money, suckers!"

It's claimed that NT 5.0 will fix this, but then, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if the marketing literature stated that it'll cure prostate cancer.

It's incidents like these which serve to reinforce my conviction that if Khruschev and Kennedy had had e-mail during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we wouldn't be sitting here speculating about it.

Jesus Christ, will you east coasters GET TO BED?!?

Join Computing Services! Good pay! Flexible hours! No adult supervision!

Just now I remembered why we should cut the poor guy some slack: he's in the process of migrating from an Indy to an O2. And he's going to have to find some way to get his work done with only 128 MB of RAM to operate in. The rat bastard.

Look, cupcake, you're aggravating my PostScript-traumatic stress disorder.

...manufacturers provide Installable Client Drivers (ICDs) implementing a limited subset of OpenGL, sometimes referred to as "mini-GL". The term for such a driver is thus "mini-GL ICD", pronounced "enough GL functionality to play GLQuake with."

Maybe this weekend. (And maybe your place of business will be buzzed by the Air Force's 51st Tactical Pork Wing. I say again: kill me.)

Messing with the user's expectations of the CD user interface isn't a good way of demonstrating your hip, iconoclastic sensibilities. It isn't a good way of demonstrating *anything*, really, except maybe what a complete bunch of self-indulgent screw-offs you are.

Methinks Sam's getting uppity. Looks like it's once again time for me to stand between his Newton and the best light source in the room.

Must... restrain... condescending Unix user fist of death!

Nicely put. However, as any anally retentive person will happily tell you, "anal-retentive" takes a hyphen.

No, I'm not using a slippery-slope argument to point out the drawbacks of a slippery-slope argument. You will bring Captain Solo and the Wookiee to me.

PDF has its own quirks, but at least it doesn't require that tools for analyzing and/or manipulating it solve the Halting Problem.

Perl is the crystal meth of programming: it's so incredibly useful when you need to do a large amount of work in a small amount of time that you tend to overlook the fact that it's basically precipitating the implosion of your vital organs.

Personally, I'd prefer first prize -- dinner without Stephen Jay Gould.

Pot. Kettle. Event horizon.

Speaking of flaming assholes: there have been a number of times, most of them experienced while I watched or listened to the news, when I heard about one factional squabble or another, and thought, "These people don't really disagree. They've just been caught up in their own rhetoric. If a neutral party were to step in and explain each side's point of view to the other, they'd see that they have more similarities than differences." I've sometimes fancied myself as that third party: objective, reasonable, tolerant, able to portray each group's goals in terms which the other would understand and find acceptable. ... So it's something of an eye-opener to enter into a discussion of semiotics in personal mail exchanged with Richard Stallman, and realize that, no, the problem is in fact not one of terminology at all: the man's potato has simply been baking too long.

So, if you discovered a new feature in Gnus *while* rolling on the juice through a well-cambered turn on your bike, would your pleasure center simply short itself out?

Suddenly, I'm unable to shake visions of Stormtroopers in bell-bottomed combat armor, Imperial Officers wearing big, ugly gold medallions, Grand Moff Tarkin ordering the obliteration of planets from his hot tub, and the Death Star as a moon-sized disco globe from my mind. And it's not even 9:00. Gad.

That tinkling sound in the background -- that's the sound of my whole little world shattering

That's all there is to it! Wasn't that fun? We sure hope so, because you're going to have to do it EVERY SINGLE TIME you want to modify a style! Oh, we know. You can hardly wait. We can see you trembling with excitement now. Did the vein in your temple always throb like that?

That'd be cool. Unfortunately, being a hapless loser, I chose to pursue computer science at CMU, instead of doing the manly thing and learning to drive the big rigs at the Pittsburgh Diesel Institute.

That's a category we need to corner -- content aggravation.

That's int main() to you, citizen

That aged looking kid in the back of the class was actually Rupert Murdoch. There is no conspiracy.

The idea that we're governed by some larger intelligence when we crowd together in sufficient numbers would certainly explain a lot, though. Nazism. Woodstock. The Macarena.

The impossible has come to pass. I find myself envying friends of mine who live in Pittsburgh. I need to drink and/or see "Chasing Amy" again. Wings and Guinness would come close enough.

"The Red Book will you read, hmmm? You data on the stack, followed by your operators will you put, hmmm?" "I'm not afraid." "You will be. *You will be.*"

The repeated juxtaposition of "salary" and "penis length" has evoked in me an irrational but persistent anticipation that someone is going to make a post announcing how many inches they make in a year.

The sibilant sucession surmising "sixty-six satellites" sounded somewhat silly.

The world's various religions are just beginning their research into Clerical Acceleration, and it will be a number of years before they can even begin to consider reaching near-luminal velocities. This is a shame, since it means that a number of tantalizing theories must remain little more than speculation at this point, and a number of fundamental questions go unanswered. For instance, if a Catholic priet's speed were to come close to that of light, and it were Sunday in his frame of reference, would he in fact approach infinite Mass?

There is a Purify for NT. I've used it, and it's pretty slick. However, I don't see how even Purify is going to help Laurel with a compile error.

To Scott, for a thoughtful, if brief, musing on the apparently impending convergence of the web and the desktop, points++. And, for attempting to use "inherent" as a verb, a boot to the head.

Uh, now that you mention it, how are X packets getting into and out of your home system through the firewall? (Hint: the correct answer is, "They're being port-forwarded via SSH." If this is not *your* answer, please administer yourself one dope slap, so as to spare me the time and expense of cross-country travel. Then rearrange things so that it *is* your answer. [...])

You are talking about the Count Dracula of the computing world. The tree large enough that a stake capable of killing COBOL could be fashioned from its trunk has not yet grown anywhere upon the face of this verdant planet.

You're Grand Moff Berkun -- Grand Moff Tarkin's younger and much shrewder cousin, who was quietly building a power base in an outlying sector while his brutish relative was getting himself and Emperor Palpatine's expensive hardware blown to atoms at Yavin Four.

You're right, of course. Let's get back to the order of the day: petty bickering!

You're thinking of Captain Pedantic's faithful sidekick, Kid Sphincter. Not to be confused with Buttboy, who appeared alongside Pedantic and Sphincter in the eight-issue limited series, "Dualitrauma", but was never made into a regular character.

Well, on the one hand I feel as though I might be perilously close to encouraging the birth of some kind of cult of personality or something. On the other hand, I'm a shameless ego-whore, so... sure.

Well, yeah. That's just iCandy.

What? You think it's disorienting to see a test, a block of code, another block of code, and then finally an "ifelse"? What's wrong with you?

What's that application, you ask? What obscure, rogue, poorly-written, backwater hack could fail to interact properly to an interface setting built into the operating system itself? Why, it's Visual C++.

While trying to answer this question, I got a blue screen and had to reboot my system. I think there's a lesson there for all of us.

Windows CE, while storing dates as 64-bit quantities, uses a minimum tick size of 100 nanoseconds, and starts counting from some point in the 1600s -- I'm guess that to be the inception of the Gregorian calendar. CE dates are therefore "only" good for approximately fifty thousand years. I'm going to go on record as saying that if there are any CE devices still in existence at that point, they will all be under glass, in museums, and the bulk of their internals will long since have rotted into uselessness as a consequence of metal migration. (And if I'm wrong, you may wander over to my severed head, floating in its amniotic tank at the Hall of Oddities, and say "Neener, neener, neener".)

With Word 97, Microsoft has at last succeeded in reproducing in the Windows arena the elusive success of Word 6.0 for the Mac: an upgrade so vile, so utterly beyond accomodation, that users will go digging through their attics in search of the media needed to install the previous version.

Woo-hoo. Full-bore memetic warfare on the horizon. Y2K less than a year and a half away. The End Times *are* upon us. What the hell's keeping those Xists?

[X] YES! Please rush me my first issue of "unhinged: the journal of postcollegiate angst". I understand that if for any reason I am not completely satisfied, I may write "CANCEL" on my invoice, return it, and owe nothing. Even if I choose not to continue my subscription, the free copy of "White Phosphor: Faisal Jawdat's Best Rants", the Jody Prival signature chocolate sampler, and the Rob Earhart Limited Edition XPilot Cockpit fuzzy dice are mine to keep.

People who build bridges often have to deal with trolls.

I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.

These are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.

Time flies like an arrow, and fruit flies like a banana.

Capital is dead labor that, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

You're free to be as much of an asshole as you wish -- as long as I'm not paying for it.

France has culture but no civilization. England has civilization but no culture. The United States has neither. Canada has both.

The Air Force pinned a medal on me for killing a man and discharged me for making love to one.

...what's the point of making non-addictive drugs illegal? If anything which alters the mental state of the individual is to be illegal in case he's unable to function in society, can we have a ban on religion please?

The world is a hoax, an elaborate deception spun by all-powerful machines of artificial intelligence that control us. Whoa.

Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.

You are part of the world's most feared and trusted force. Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.

Agile is a silver bullet. Unfortunately, people are often firing it into their foot.

If a child, an untrained person, an ignorant person, or an insane person incites trouble, it is the fault of authority for not predicting and preventing that trouble.

My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. 'Something cannot emerge from nothing,' he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be.

What do you despise? By this you are truly known.

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that, too.

In this world of sin and sorrow if virtue triumphs over vice it is not because it is virtuous, but because it has bigger and better guns; if honesty prevails over double-dealing, it is not because it is honest, but because it has a stronger army more nobly led; and if good overcomes evil it is not because it is good, but because it has a well-lined purse. It is well to have right on your side, but it is madness to forget that unless we have might we might as well it will avail us nothing. We must believe that God loves men of good will but there is no evidence to show that He will save fools from the results of their folly.

It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

I've decided that the dinosaurs weren't killed by a giant asteroid. My new theory is that the facilities staff just decided they were too difficult to maintain.

Let's hit The Penguin. It's like, what, 1:20? It's almost cocktail hour....

What I used to able to pass off as another bad summer could now potentially turn into a bad life.

Before we go on, a word to the wise. What we're suggesting here is that you install parts of a development-level, unsupported operating system and install them onto a similar-but-not-identical, still-in-beta operating system. This is frighteningly close to the thin line that separates geekery and madness. If you run into trouble, we'd be interested to know just how long it would take Apple to quit laughing at you before they told you they couldn't help.

Being condescending and rude is appropriate when an argument is so pointless and stupid that one needs that "extra special edge" to win.

History! Tradition! Culture! These are not concepts! These are trophies I keep in my den as PAPERWEIGHTS!

We're not picking specifically on Macs here, but if you watch those 'Get a Mac' commercials enough, it eventually makes you want to stab one of those users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something.

'Ben-Gay' now comes is an Extra Strength variety. "Always check first."

Cats are essentially narcissistic masochists.

Childish as it may be, line three gives us more clues to the rhyme scheme of our fledging work. This turn of events safely rules out a Sicilian Sonnet (abababab cdecde/cdcdce), the sonetto rispetto (ababccdd efgefg/efefef), and the English Sonnet (ababcdcdefefgg). The Spencerian Sonnet (abab bcbc cdcd ee) is also ruled out, because they suck to write.

destroy destroy. stand up. walk around

I KNOW you, sir. I have SEEN you TRAIPSE on the FIELDS of the APACAPSE. I have WATCHED you BEACH your BOAT on the BRANDED SANDS of the ISLE MOTAG. I have FELT the ANGELS BLEEDING, their SOILED SWEAT landing with a TRICKLE upon your UNFETTERED BROW. I have TASTED the BLACK GUM you have left on our SWEET STREETS in your MAD CHASE for the next SPEED BUMP. With my LEFT HAND I have USHERED IN this AGE, and with my RIGHT, this BURRITO. I. KNOW. YOU.

I'd also like to say that I'm sick of hearing about guns. Guns guns guns. Will you people get some sex or something?

If I end up buying these albums because of this, I'm gonna slap you so hard you'll think I ended this sentence with something clever.

New For Spring on NBC's Wednesday 'Must See TV' lineup: Idealist at Heart, the wacky adventures of cynical Gen X'ers struggling to find some semblance of intelligent management in corporate America.

Only God, or possibly Jeff Hutzleman, knows that.

People are stupid. ALL THE TIME.

Precision Backhoe Team. It's like the Mission Impossible theme played by tubas and kazoos.

rich memery butter!

The distance between Heaven and Hell is measured not in miles but in moments.

Things Not To Do in Formula One Racing. IF you are racing at Spa-Francorchamps, try not to do it in the RAIN. IF you must, use RAIN TIRES. Not INTERMEDIATES. They don't work so well in the RAIN. UNLESS you're British; then use TYRES.

This is, of course, too beautiful for me to put into context.

We looked at the programs and the parties, and they're all the same, only with different famous people, and they're all the same as well. You aren't going to look back on this in twenty years and think 'Sonny and Cher'. There's no ideal place to be for Y2K. Well, except maybe Natalie Portman's lap.

WHOOPS! FORGOT to MENTION my PANTS!

Yeah, but in perl there's more than one way to OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT THING

zsh is turing complete. csh is turing completely stupid.

I am a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh in astrophysics, so must of the stuff I do is create code that no one cares about.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, the rest are fooling themselves.

You need an exit strategy to be able to walk away a winner, and today, mine was realized.... Effective today at midnight, I have resigned from America Online Inc. in order to spend money, race motorcycles, and drink scotch. I am, at age 27.85, retired. It's the American Dream, but with less full frontal nudity and more political undertones. God Bless Steve Case!

Yoda wouldn't hear of it. He was insistent that he work with Frank Oz again if we wanted him back. He told us, "Frank Oz! Or I will help you not!"

That which does not freak us out, makes us stronger.

May I be Frank?

The measure on a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

The decisions that really matter are made outside the democratic process.

The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste you time waving your hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do.

There's nothing like a five year old getting hit by napalm to make your morning if you don't have coffee.

But, I thought that was why I liked UNIX? The incompatibilities, the arcane syntax. I hope some day to contribute some really bad software to it.

All this proves is that anyone setting themselves up as a kind of digital moral compass quickly finds themselves plunged into a kind of virtual Bermuda Triangle, where vertigo reigns and you hope to hell you pop out the other side still on course. Technology is never a substitute for conscience.

Our general perspective is that anything anyone else is afraid of is arbitrage for us.

Lots of Mozilla architecture begins with a premise that is hard to put in context. As if every problem sounds like: if you take every faculty member from every college in the U.S. and lay them end to end, how many engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Even in the fact of massive competition, don't think about the competition. Literally don't think about them. Every time you're in a meeting and you're tempted to talk about a competitor, replace that thought with one about user feedback or surveys. Just think about the customer.

ah, the infamous "Booth Babes". Avoid them for they are specially trained to extract corporate secrets.

i am the 'travel bingo' of the information superhighway

I herd cyberpunks on the electronic frontier.

Is it bad when you start to think of work as "that place with the really fast internet connection"?

You're high or something; try actually using that class you just made.... See, told you.

There is no interest in the common good.

The thing I like about having a steady significant other is that aside from love, affection and presents (AHEM! I said presents, boy!) is that if you get drunk and have sex with him every weekend, no one will call you a slut.

I wish everyone would just wake up and buy a Macintosh.

Someone who may or may not still be a friend of mine... once wondered whether anyone ever felt like their lives were bad FOX-TV soap operas. I'm inclined to agree with him. However, I should point out that this means nothing, anyway. Everybody feels this way at one time or another. However, I can only wish I got the babes like Dylan McKay.

Science fiction is over. We live in a world where we can clone sheep.

I use so much beta software (including Netscape 1.1b3 and the Microsoft Word 6.0 for Mac release version), that I tend to forget that others don't "upgrade/test" as quickly.

Winners always want the ball when the game is on the line.

The route to the Semantic Web lies in letting a thousand flowers bloom, not forcing us all to instantiate multicellular organisms based on a gene pool ontology.

Small towns in Germany are usually about ten kilotons apart.

Audiophiles know squat about auditory perception and Shannon's sampling theorem, so we get these misconceptions about CDs and tubes repeated again and again, and these misconceptions influence what people believe they hear when they play their systems (especially audiophiles, who are both near-deaf and extremely gullible).

Considering that over half the traffic on this list is in response to postings or forwards from others, I do believe that you may have a better crack conncection than the rest of us, and suggest you kick down with your contact before the IS Death Squad opens a Touble Ticket on yer ass.

While my duties as a serf are not onerous, involving mostly turnip-gathering, wood-hewing, pig-minding and the maintenance of a large object-oriented DBMS written in C++, and I have no real reason to complain of my lot in life, you will understand if I am not immediately in a position to take advantage of the possibilities offered by your no doubt excellent handbook.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is a moron, because I said so.

May the bridges I burn light the way.

Today, on automobiles all over America, the Fish Wars are raging. On a typical day an early morning commute can turn into a near-religious holy war as Jesus Fish cuts off Darwin Fish, Darwin Fish evolves to make the exit ahead of Jesus Fish, Jesus Fish invokes divine intervention to prevent Darwin Fish from finding the last parking spot. It's a never ending battle and Americans are joining the fray and choosing sides at unprecedented rates.

I think you CAN make progress spiritually with psychedelics, but not necessarily.....Aldous Huxley said of psychedelics that they are neither necessary nor sufficient for the attaining of salvation. He called them 'gratuitous graces', meaning you're sure glad you have them, but they're neither necessary nor sufficient.

It's very hard to be a psychedelic person and not participate in one of the central tenets of both Buddhism and Hinduism, which is the primacy of mind -- Mind Only, the dogma that all manifestation is somehow a product of the ratiocination of mind -- that's a pretty Buddhist point of view.

What is waiting to be born is a psychedelic ethic, a moral vision that could be a counterweight to the Fundamentalist vision and the Existentialist vision, both of which are observed to be inadequate. Ethics on the basis of symbiosis with the natural environment.

When you cease to believe that you're Nobody and you begin to believe that you might be Somebody, this is considered proof of severe mental disturbance, and you become a candidate for sedation at this point, because usually the discovery that you're Somebody excites you into inappropriate states of arousal, which means you interfere with other people's being asleep, and you run around trying to inform them of the true nature of things.....The only conjuration against that developing into a problem is Humour. You have to have a completely jaundiced view of reality; you can't take anything seriously, including your own most serious constructs and expectations, because it is ultimately some kind of joke.

If I can get up today, I can get up any day, no matter what's thrown at me.

Eknath Easwaran, the California meditation teacher whose book "Gandhi the Man" is the simplest, and therefore loveliest, of the many Gandhi biographies, describes seeing Gandhi meditate during the evening prayer service in the last years of his life. The text that evening was from the second chapter of the Gita. As the sonorous verses were read, you could see him completely absorbed, his mind growing calm and still. His concentration was so complete that it was no longer the second chapter you were listening to, it was the second chapter you were seeing, witnessing for yourself the transformation it describes: "They are forever free who have broken, Out of the ego-cage I and mine, To be united with the Lord of Love. This is the supreme state. Attain thou this And pass from death to immortality." On the other hand, you could have 1.6 Gb, a 10xCD-ROM, 128 MB RAM and a smug dose of superiority.

The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield.

Before I started working here I drank, smoked, and used foul language for no reason at all. But thanks to this job, I now have a reason.

Get next to a clue and hope the wind blows, dude.

Physical Plant: The plants are no longer touching; They're spending their time playing mind games.

Remember, the strong get funded...the weak get jobs. As it should be.

VC's are among the most incestuous creatures on the planet. If your presentation clicks in the hearts and minds of the folks at Novak-Biddle, Draper or Sutter Hill, to think that FBR, NEA or ATV won't be studying your Plan within 48 hours, is like believing that the woman you were out with Saturday night won't be on the phone to her girlfriend Sunday giggling over the steamy details.

When Keebler releases an XML spec, they might describe it as "baked by tiny recursive elves" or something.

Nietzsche must have had a bad childhood.

The idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to change the world.

Husband, McCool, Anderson, Brown, Chawla, Clark, Ramon. Komarov, Grissom, White, Chaffee, Dobrovolsky, Volkov, Patsayev, Resnick, Scobee, Smith, McNair, McAuliffe, Jarvis, Onizuka. These names will be written under other skies.

Chicks may dig Unix, but I don't dig chicks...so I'll just have to be hip in some other area of my life. Chown this, buddy.

I should have thought about the fact that putting the words "Active TS/SCI with full scope polygraph" on Monster is like walking into a frat boy-laden bar naked and covered in jagermeister.

I am going to build a radar system when I graduate specifically targeted to blowing up your head.

I'm so gothic I have BATS IN MY HOUSE. Have you ever had a BAT swoop at your HEAD? You forget about booty REAL QUICK.

hey, he knows the terms. I'm like a porn site. there are benefits and a tour for non-members but for the goodness, j00 gots ta join.

HEY! WE SHOULD HANG OUT! WHO'S THE HOTTIE? Did she get attacked by the estee lauder counter?

she's pun-krock

You've seen the sheep, now ph33r the pumpkins.

NT 5.0 is the last nail in the Unix coffin. Interestingly, Unix isn't in the coffin... It's wondering what the heck is sealing itself into a wooden box 6 feet underground.

So I challenge Karl Rove to wear his ignorant words on a sandwich board and parade them from the Sheraton Hotel down to Ground Zero and let him sample some wimpy, liberal New York. The only therapy he'd be offered would be physical therapy.

She is lying. It's obvious. ...the middle class lies well only about sex.

The big debate [was] over Richard Stallman's emphasis on the "free" in "free software." The way it was characterized politically, you had copyright, which is what the big companies use to lock everything up; you had copyleft, which is free software's way of making sure they can't lock it up; and then Berkeley had what we called copycenter, which is take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want.

At the empirical level of consciousness, the medium is the message, whereas at the intelligent and rational levels of consciousness, the content is the message.

Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity.

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

Yes, but if ISP A peers with ISP B in the woods, does anybody snoop the packets?

AT&T has Bell Labs, and we have Bill Joy. We get a lot more for our money.

Microsoft is now talking about the digital nervous system. I guess I would be nervous if my system was built on their technology too.

Microsoft says we're 100 percent committed to Java, but we're not pure. I don't think my wife would buy it if I said, 'Honey, I'm 100 percent committed, but I'm not pure.'

Okay, wait. We majored in golf in business school. Could somebody tell me what this thing does?

You people just don't get it, do you? All Linux applications run on Solaris, which is our implementation of Linux. Now ask the question again.

Bringing the original Black Sabbath with Ozzy Osbourne to New Jersey is like ... what, bringing the Olympics to Athens? There's an Ozzy Osbourne service area on our Garden State Parkway. Our state bird is the Headless Bat. The State Legislature failed to elect a chairman one year in the early '80s, issuing instead a proclamation that "Ozzy rules forever."

Probably the four biggest reasons for a slowdown in network innovation are BellSouth, SBC, Qwest and Verizon.

Architect: Someone who knows the difference between that which could be done and that which should be done.

Don't confuse the desire to perform with the ability to perform.

In college, they started all physics problems with `assume a frictionless surface.' The difference between college and industry is that in college you spend all your time on the formulas and in industry you spend all your time on friction.

Solaris has over 3,000 kernel locks. Whenever an OS gets that multi-threaded, you've made a pact with the devil.

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted,then used against you.

'me' is a token, it returns whoever calls 'me'. in general though, whenever people call 'me' they get my answering machine, because i'm never home

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.

Many Bothans died to bring us this information.

It is useless to hold a person to anything he says while he's in love, drunk, or running for office.

There are many better-sounding names for a site than Mac OS Rumors, but none that so clearly state the need for readers to think for themselves.

Carl called and told me a friend is coming this Saturday. He said the club would be 'wild' and then we proceeded to discuss the ongoing, escalating dynamics. I don't care too much for 'wild' anymore; I've lived it, and I've written it. It causes abuse of punctuation, & comma splices. Abuse of semicolons. Too-long sentences.

Just to let you know, I have a Winston Churchill quote *and* a Vince Lombardi quote.

The network is the business.

IRC is an ideal medium for asking questions extremely slowly, and not reading the answers carefully.

You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime. That's contradictory. If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.

Don't be humble. You're not that great.

I want this group. What do you think? Anyone who disagrees with me is a communist.

Does anyone else ever get the distinct impression that some day a group of people in suits are going to walk into your office or your home and say, 'We've got you now! You had everyone *thinking* you were a grown up, but you're not. Now get your things. Your mother's got supper on the table and you have to be in bed by 7:30.' Or is it just me?

In the government they make haste very slowly.

Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to penalize the free play of ideas.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong.

In brief, she assumed that, being a man, I was vain to the point of imbecility, and this assumption was correct, as it always is.

In this world of sin and sorrow, there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.

The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

The best teacher, until one comes to adult pupils, is not the one who knows most, but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and the wonderful which slips into the infantile comprehension...The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.

Five months of torturous pain is a long time, Diablo. Five months of nothing but pondering revenge against you and your friend Twix. That, and reading 'Newsweek.' And sampling different varieties of Ben 'N' Jerry's wonderful ice cream flavors. And of course the occassional game of Yahtzee, but as we all know, my sentient pea-plant henchmen aren't very good game players, so there was little challenge there. They often ate the dice. But mostly, I pondered revenge. Revenge and monkeys. Monkeys are funny.

Do you think it's a coincidence that insurance companies ask people if they do the sorts of stuff we do?

If you want to dine with the devil, you'd better bring a long spoon.

Now, suddenly, dynamic HTML makes the Web as interactive as my old Apple IIc.

Finding bad websites is a little like stalking and hunting a herd of dairy cows with an uzi.

Only flirt with those you intend to refuse: then you acquire a reputatation for invincibility, whilst slipping away with the lover of your choice. A poor choice is less dangerous than an obvious choice. Never write letters. Get them to write letters. Always be sure they think they're the only one. Win or die.

When I came out into society I was 15. I already knew then that the role I was condemned to, namely to keep quiet and do what I was told, gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe. Not to what people told me, which naturally was of no interest to me, but to whatever it was they were trying to hide. I practiced detachment. I learn how to look cheerful while under the table I stuck a fork onto the back of my hand. I became a virtuoso of deceit. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think, and novelists to see what I could get away with, and in the end it all came down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.

it is only the strong who are capable of ripping off their own limbs.

excuse me, i'll just be over here reading the student employment book of mormon.

This was not a trivial matter like taking a pen or a pencil. The helmet in question was Darth Vader's helmet.

Alcohol can clean a bathroom, it ought to be able to clean your arteries.

I am the ultimate artiste and everything I do, from my painting and drawing to blowing my nose and emptying my bladder qualifies as art. I have many jars of my "art" if you want to buy some.

if asdf ever becomes a word, I'll be able to type it real fast

Sure, I have a lust for life, but I'm not really ready to make a commitment.

That's Yngwie *J.* Malmsteeen to you. The "J" is, of course, to distinguish him from the multitudes of other Yngwie Malmsteens operating in the Heavy Metal genre.

There's 'bound' if you care to see debauchery and fetishism at its worst...and who doesn't?

You've got to be suspicious of any sentence that begins, "The funniest thing I have ever seen in a urinal..."

pixel, n.: A mischievous, magical spirit associated with screen displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology: Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence, and the trolls in the marketing department.

Programmatically is a Microsoft euphamism for 'with many lines of code.'

The pen may be mightier than the sword, but if I cut your arms off with my sword, what are you going to do with your stupid pen then, Mr. smarty-pants?

"Oh, Christ!" I scream aloud, taking the name of the Lord in vain to underscore the seriousness of the situation.

new cities are good and bad. low culture, high personality. but then the city decides what it's going to be one day and you are either part of it or you have to leave.

You can spend your whole life trying to change the world. No, seriously, you can.

By downloading these unsupported tools you are using them at your own risk -- you know, like bungee jumping in your underwear or dating your best friend's sister.

So I call up Sally: "Hi, I'm doing research. Do you have a boyfriend?"

I feel no different. My hate's the same.

"We have Attention Deficit... uh, Disorder!" "What?" "What!?"

Just imagine, if you will, what kind of delicious suffering awaits you at the hands of the most powerful milkman in the universe.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

Prince of Darkness: ... We offer a way out of the guilt and constant drumbeat of negativism, the don't-do-thises and don't-do-thats of the past. My message is basically one of optimism, achievement, and empowerment. For me, the glass is always half full. Forget about 666, our new watchword in the wired world is 24/7!

Bill Gates is a monocle and a Persian Cat away from being the villain in a James Bond movie.

If some unemployed punk in Trenton, New Jersey lying on a sofa with a bong can get a cassette to make love to Elle McPherson for $19.95, this virtual reality stuff is going to make crack look like Sanka.

Queensboro president Donald Mannis, charged with receiving bribes in exchange for city contracts, resigned on Tuesday. Mannis feels he must devote more time to impending litigation, some of which might emanate from a recent statement he made comparing New York Mayor Ed Koch to Nazi Martin Bormann. A spokesman from the Bormann estate said they are weighing the odds of a slander suit. Mayor Koch could naturally be reached for comment, but we chose not to listen.

Adolescence is a marketing tool.

I didn't choose this role, but I'll play it.

It amazes me how much some programmers love complexity. Doing things the hard way doesn't prove smarts. It proves you don't value your time.

The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again.

It's silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons.

The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.

Everyone makes mistakes, but not everyone dates 30 year-old virgins from the Church of Christ.

Eww... No, he's waiting for marriage. Besides, I don't think he'd doink a Jew. That'd be dirty!

Gee, I forgot my penis, can't join in this conversation!

Political humor used to belong to the left, but that all changed in the 1990s, when the priggishness of political correctitude injected new vitality into a segment of the population that had been shut out of comedy's pantheon: ass holes.

I have a conservative penis.

I have some really awful lemonade. It'll give you diarhea. It's great.

sleeze... I need sleeze....very much so........

Insanity is doing the same thing you've always done and expecting different results.

(Top story on "Entertainment Tonight," Sept. 25, 1998) "How do you follow an act like a show about nothing? With "Nothing"! NBC proved that there is life after "Seinfeld" last night when it debuted the revolutionary show "Nothing" in "Seinfeld's" old Thursday 9 p.m. slot. For one half-hour, the screen was blank, except for commercials. And it didn't seem to bother viewers accustomed to tuning in for "Seinfeld" one bit! "Nothing" was the highest rated show of the night, handily winning its time slot over CBS's "Mandelbaum," Fox's "World's Scariest Naked Fat Guys on Crystal Meth" and ABC's "Cracker" ...

You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.

The road to hell is paved with deleterious mutations.

In my music I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.

Power corrupts. Absolute power really turns on the chicks.

Until the day animals stand up and demand equal rights, I have the right to eat them.

...anyone could learn Lisp in 1 day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take 3 days.

I bet the human brain is a kludge.

It's not that they waste money. It's that they waste ALL the money.

Why do we like sports or movies? It's just incredible that a trillion-synapse computer could actually spend Saturday afternoon watching a football game. It's a colossal phenomenon that needs to be explained, and I'm not joking.

On one side, the Americans are the champions of democracy and human rights. On the other side, they are fighting against Osama bin Laden with the help of military dictators and kings who don't believe in democracy or human rights. Osama bin Laden is not a hero because of his ideas. He is a hero by default.

If you copy from one author it's plagiarism. If you copy from two, it's research.

The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more.

I believe aborting the keyboard with coke is only allowed to save the life of the motherboard.

Please resize your browser window to be exactly as wide as the following line:

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One day I returned from lunch, and my screensaver had evolved intelligent, self-aware, beautiful life forms. They had art, science, a reasonably complete understanding of their universe, and monumental architecture, most of which was devoted to the message: "Please don't move your mouse!" But what was I supposed to do? I had to see how the market closed.

And if that doesn't work you could always convince yourself that it's really unimportant.

Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.

I think that all good, right thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that all good, right thinking people in this country are fed up with being told that all good, right thinking people in this country are fed up with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not, and I'm sick and tired of being told that I am.

You see, our experts describe you as an appallingly dull fellow, unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab and awful. And whereas in most professions these would be considerable drawbacks, in chartered accountancy they are a positive boon.

Rush [Limbaugh] fills the same niche in political discourse that WWF wrestling fills in sport.

"For, finally, one can only judge oneself by one's actions. ... I have looked at what I have done, not at what I meant to do or thought I would like to do, and what I have done has, in the main, been foolish, destructive, and with little point. Yyrkoon was right to despise me and that was why I hated him so."

No exponential is forever. Your job is to delay forever.

I thought that you should be the first to know. I joined the psychotic friends network.

Man, it's really dark in here. Somebody should light a witch.

Now you have to choose if you want to be a warrior, ranger, rogue, or academic. Hint: don't pick rogue.

You could come with us if you want. In fact, if you did... you might not even suck...

Your BASTARD AI pushed me off a cliff!

Who needs foresight when you've got apathy?

When the rabbit of chaos is pursued through the field of anarchy it is time to hang your pants on the hook of darkness.

Don't be misled. The light at the end of the tunnel in the Mid-East is an oncoming frieght train [sic].

I found American partying to be very much like the origins of the Universe (quite sweaty, fundamentally inhospitable to human beings, absolutely no one playing the four-minute radio version of Alphabet Street)

Down the street, at the Touretzky Nasal Grindworks, they have a different motto: "Miserable Today - For a Better Tomorrow"

It's now more important to learn boring algebra than to practice fun rock throwing. So you take your choice. If you choose happiness over survival too consistently--well, then you die happy. Or else, you thrive grumpily. It's the tragedy of the human condition. About time we changed it, in my humble opinion.

On this side you have customers coming in, and the customers coming in better bring some dollars with them, because if they don't bring some dollars with them they're not really customers.

It's fine. No, it's bad. Wait, it's fine after all. Just a minute, it's...

I can't kill myself with idiocy, it's not sharp enough.

instead of ICMPs, let's try sending llamas. they're a little bigger

Oh, and none of us are responsible if you somehow manage to fux0r your computer running this program. If you can't handle CLICKING by now, get off our internet.

The common thread of the thesis was the staple that held it together.

You are nothing. You are not a man. You are not a god. I will find a man, and give birth to a god!

Hello, kettle? It's the pot. I'm black.

When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue -- you sell him a whole new life.

I love Gummi Bears ... and I want Gummi Bears and I like Gummi Bears and I eat Gummi Bears and I don't like it when I don't eat my Gummi Bears, but I'm certainly not addicted to them.

I eat slippery slope arguments for breakfast. You're doing it wrong.

Another minor point, by the way, is that we don't say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself. This way it looks less like we are making things up.

Of course, no real deconstruction would be like this. I only used a single paragraph and avoided literary jargon. All of the words will be found in a typical abridged dictionary and were used with their conventional meanings. I also wrote entirely in English and did not cite anyone. Thus in an English literature course I would probably get a D for this, but I already have my degree so I don't care.

Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

The person who walks alone is soon trailed by the FBI.

One of the wonders of the Internet is that an acorn can grow into a forest fire in a matter of hours.

When bears say "deliver business value," they mean eating your whole campsite.

They have treated Clinton as if he was a black president.

She said, 'I know you....you cannot sing', I said, 'That's nothing, you should hear me play piano.'

you will get a better response in New York by snarling at people over a period of weeks. Once you are recognised as someone who has no desire to be in anyone else life, the possibility of intimacies such as mutual nodding opens up.

You know you're in college when you go to Entropy and the only two things you buy are Saline solution and Trojans.

It's hard to drive at the limit, but it's harder to know where the limits are.

Just remember: you're not a "dummy," no matter what those computer books claim. The real dummies are the people who, though technically expert, couldn't design hardware and software that's usable by normal consumers if their lives depended upon it.

A good Olds goes through a bad winter. A good Porsche goes everywhere.

Walter Rährl ... goes much, much faster than anyone wearing a cardigan sweater has a right to. Without force, without breaking into a sweat, and while talking to you in a tone that would suggest you were chatting with him at the pool side, this two-time World Rally Champion can finesse a 911 Turbo around a track at speeds that have you swearing a big crash is just a nanosecond away. Late, late, late, near-disaster braking points, 6-5-4-3-2-1 downshifts faster than a Nikon motor drive can catch it on film, a three pedal Terpsichore at Mach VIII velocity, and a perfect rotation into the hairpin, full throttle acceleration through the esses, and then hard braking to stop in the pits - he's like Bing Crosby on crystal meth.

Find bad web sites 8x faster.

Well, we've come full circle, Lord; I'd like to think there's some higher meaning to all this. It would certainly reflect well on you.

When somebody says they are "neither conventionally right or left," it means they are to the right of Mussolini.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion. He is not entitled to his own facts.

Secrecy is for losers.

Am I going on a bit here? I don't care.

Any film of Polanski's that begins in the United States, as this one does, is entirely predictable. It's only going to stay there for as long as Polanski is capable of eluding the authorities.

In each of Van Damme's films, there's a new, ridiculous explanation as to why he's been allowed out of Belgium.

As it turns out, Zardoz is just a puppet utilized by some upper class beings to spew manipulative nonsense at the unwashed masses, sort of like George W. Bush, only smarter.

Let me tell you just how much of a struggle Matt Damon was experiencing at the time: He was starving, not knowing where his next meal would come from, freezing during the Boston winter as he tried to sleep in a cardboard box using bagel bags for socks and slabs of wood for shoes. Oh, wait. That might be an actual inspiring story. In truth, Matt Damon was starving in his warm Harvard dormitory. If you bought the former tale, thank you for sucking the penis of Miramax Films. Please exit to the right.

Two amateurish storytelling techniques utilized in the first five minutes, and it's pretty obvious we're going to spend a few hours with Mr. Clich´ shoving his hands down our pants.

Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic

Because magic is usually not a major factor in economics, none of that happened.

You buy Windows, and you put it on your machine-you can't do a whole lot with it.

Cool is only three letters away from Fool.

Nine is the ideal age to write a poem. You don't know what you're doing.

Sleep is the mind-killer! Defeat sleep! And you can end up like Anu!

Physics is that part of science in which friction plays no role. If friction does play a role, you give it to the engineers.

There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for "melancholy of relationships past." It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgement, to listen to country music.

The more you do, the more you are.

If God had meant us to think, we'd have brains.

PGP: Secret decoder rings for the Internet.

Bones heal. Chicks dig scars. And the United States of America has the best doctor-to-daredevil ratio in the world!

Power Users believe computer salesmen.

It is impossible to make something foolproof, because fools are so ingenious.

If there's more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will end in disaster, then someone will do it that way.

I think they're very creative. I think their work is very powerful, but I think it's very naive.... sort of, if you like, a petulant young child out of control.

The best speakers know enough to be scared ... the only difference between the pros and the novices is that the pros have trained the butterflies to fly in formation.

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep into our own history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular.

I have feelings too, I just choose to hide them underneath bitter denial.

PGP is the rifle over the mantlepiece. So is the rifle over the mantlepiece, still.

In God we trust. Everyone else brings data to the table.

Any definition of "noise" that doesn't count discussion of gun control is inherently bogus.

He obviously didn't realize who I am. Sure, that sounds a bit pretentious... but it's true.

It's amazing the number of people failing their hack saving throws on this topic.

So, Is it too early to hose andrew?

I have pantyhose older than you are.

The problem with mail systems in general is that there are far too many idiots writing and running mail systems. A killing spree won't help, there are far too many people in need of extinction. The authors of Listproc, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Mail, anyone having anything to do with X.400, ...

Now the actual correct mathematical solution to this differential equation is insane, so physicists use a special trick which is that you guess.

No animals were harmed in the making of this film. We found it like that.

If you're like me, you think that those miserable little sticks of wood fired by the Archers are way too wimpy. And if you're like me, you've often said to yourself, "Why can't my Archers be just a little more manly? Why can't they be shooting flaming, exploding chickens?"