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This has also been attributed to George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain. Agreed, Churchill seems pretty unlikely to have been the one to say this.

To be fair, Gates never said that line. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed

Doesn't that just say that Bill Gates says that he never said that line?

It doesn't provide proof that he didn't say it, any more than a defendant in court saying "no, your honor, I did not do that crime." is considered as proof of innocence.

To be fair, Gates never said that line.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed

He didn't have to; he designed that principle into his systems so we all had to live with it for the last 35+ years. DOS was limited to 640kiB of RAM, resulting in users needing to move programs to "upper memory" (640kiB-1MiB) or "extended memory" (1MiB+) addresses by tricking the OS once larger memory cards became inexpensive. XP (32 bit) is limited to 3.1GiB, making it pointless to install even 4GiB of RAM in an XP box since nearly 1/4 of it will never be addressed. Microsoft continues to make the same mistake to this day; there's still a memory limit of ~192GiB in Win7 64 Bit. I expect that in about 5 years RAM will be cheap to buy in quantities larger than 192GiB and Microsoft will start looking silly again because we'll have to resort to DOS-era tricks to make it usable.

Code speaks louder than words. I don't care if he said it or not, he wrote it. And his employees continue to re-write it with every Windows release.

To be fair, Gates never said that line. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed

Can the people in charge of Slashdot please fix the moderation system? It's been broken since yesterday. I have no idea how people are able to moderate.

I also don't get any confirmation page when posting.

It seems the Slashdot staff believes in this quote: "If it ain't broke, you're not trying." - Red Green

With an aging population exoskeletons need to be commercialized.

WTF? Do you really think putting Grandpa in an ironman suit is going to benefit anyone? If you can't control your bowels, you should hold off on controlling a "violent, mechanical psychopath". Not that I am opposed to having an exoskeleton, it is just that debilitating age issues are not likely a motivation. OTOH, paralysis may be a justifiable reason. Aging tends to lead to too much break down in other systems to focus on giving Grandma the ability to flip a pick-up truck. All she needs is to be able to crack some eggs and bake a cake.

More likely, we want to repair or replace known points of failure like hearts, liver, etc. Progress on those fronts is near constant.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Morality
"I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."

* Bertrand Russell, in Why I Am Not a Christian; this has often been misquoted as "The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world."

heya,

Well said =).

Also, not to be pedantic or anything, but I believe the original quote is:

Homer: Oh, Lisa, I know how you feel. Did you know that when I was in grade school, I had a bully problem myself?
(whip pan past a screen full of hippie daisies and psychedelic colors to the 1970s where a preteen Homer has a preteen Smithers pinned to a wall of lockers with his fist drawn back)
Teenage Homer (singing): Everybody was (as he's punching Smithers in the stomach): kung-fu-fighting!
(Smithers moans as a preteen Barney Gumble accompanies Homer's singing with a few notes on his recorder)
Teenage Homer (continues singing): Those cats were (as he's punching Smithers in the stomach again): fast-as-lightning!
(Smithers moans again. Homer finishes off his performance by punching the glasses off Smithers' face)
(whip pan to the present)
Homer: (chuckles) Good times.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Simpsons#Bye_Bye_Nerdie_.5B12.16.5D

Cheers,
Victor

Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty.

--Barnhill, John Basil (1914)

Fixed that for ya.

Sources: near bottom of page & Better link, go to pg 34

But I'm not a complete asshole, just the movie was a reference to a good quote :)

To paraphrase Einstein:

Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

IMHO, one should use as high level language as possible, but not higher. One should never choose a lower level language than necessary only because it is hard core, the choice has to be based on something more substantial.

I've met several C programmers having the knee-jerk reaction when they hear the word C++ that it's bloated and slow and hard. And tell me what, they haven't read Stroustrup's FAQ lately. C++ can be very lean and mean indeed. As can C# (which I'm mostly using right now).

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Socrates#Misattributions

Seriously I feel like no matter what I do Driving, browsing the internet, or taking photographs I feel like at any given moment I'm breaking the law and just waiting for it to be my turn to get caught doing something idiotically illegal.

Western countries are transitioning from a military industrial economy to a jail and criminal justice economy, and that is where corporations and governments make their money on enforcing laws and creating new and tougher laws (copyright, patent, obscenity, drug, think-of-the-children, etc and so on). Ignorance of the law is no excuse so you'd better keep up and have a good attorney ready to help you. If anything feels good or seems intuitively natural to do then there are probably laws against it.

At any given point in time the average person is breaking numerous laws without even knowing it, or on average about three felonies a day. Just be grateful that you haven't been caught yet.

If you are rich and powerful enough you shouldn't have anything to worry about though, because as one United States President once said, "... when the President does it that means that it is not illegal."

Welcome to the New World Order! (same as the Old World Order, but with bigger prisons and more CCTV).

Actually, what I was looking for was:

it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

  -- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

A quick search of recent news on the privacy front reveals that just about all of it is bad.

To paraphrase Peep Show:
Nancy:Why don't they ever talk about all the buses that made it safely?
Mark:Yes, I suppose the news should just be a dispassionate account of all the events of the day - except it would take forever.

Surprise surprise, the media only reports on data leaks, hacks, privacy infringements. Because who wants to hear "Today, x00,000 online businesses took over $Xbn in a completely secure manner and did not store any personally identifiable information. A further x00,000 required registration from their customers but have a well-defined privacy policy.".

If your statement is true, then I'm back to square one on understanding this "entanglement" thingie. Actually, I never really quite made it to square one, but still...

You're barking up the wrong tree if you're trying to understand....even the master himself said, "nobody understands quantum mechanics."

Einstein said something about making the same mistake and expecting different results ...

No he didn't. That was Rita Mae Brown in her book Sudden Death , but that never sounds as dramatic or important as claiming it was Einstein.

I've long wondered about the short-sightedness of modern farming practices where farmers need to buy both seeds and fertilizer each year to produce a crop, when once upon a time in the not-to-distant past, both were free, and in the present, the abundance of animal waste has become an environmental problem.

Wendell Berry said it very nicely:

Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm -- which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.

The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture (1996), p. 62

Thomas Jefferson had some stronger words about the Christian faith in particular, but I couldn't find them offhand.

Absolutely true. Just go to Thomas Jefferson's page in Wikiquote and search for "Christ". You will find lots of examples perfectly documented.

So who can take the time to examine the 60,000 pages of materials that a person might have created from the age of 15 onwards?

No one. That's why they'll skim them, just like Cardinal Richelieu supposedly did:
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

By the way, if I posted this using the "Post Anonymously" option and then was nominated for federal office (HIGHLY unlikely) would I be expected to call this out as part of the approval process?

sooo.... turtle sex is still legal in Florida then? he asks, in an overly casual manner...

Too bad Mussolini never said this. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Benito_Mussolini

[Jason is being menaced by a huge monster made of rocks.]
Tommy Webber: Go for the eyes, like in episode 22!
Jason Nesmith: It doesn't have any eyes!
Tommy Webber: Well, then, go for the throat or something. Its vulnerable spots!
Jason Nesmith: It's a rock! It doesn't have any vulnerable spots!
Guy Fleegman: I know! You'll need to make a weapon. Look around; can you construct some sort of rudimentary lathe?

• It is unlawful to refuse a person a glass of water.
• It is illegal to smoke cigarettes within 15 feet of a public place unless you have a Class 12 liqueur license in Mesa
• An ordinance prohibits the wearing of suspenders in Nogales.
• Women may not wear pants in Tucson.
• If you know you're sick and yet you enter Arizona anyway, wouldn't that technically be a violation of subsection A, paragraph 2 of this statute? Better not sneeze if you look "touristy".
• Littering (including spitting on the ground, for example, according to this.)

Oh Dear;

Time to drag out the Heinlein again....

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

from his first published story "Lifeline" (1939) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein

This is some RTS game on a limited map. In an active engagement, US troops are more than a match for insurgents. But when the enemy can hide anywhere and more anywhere, you must defend everywhere. You need a force that can counter them anywhere they might appear. Hence, you need a much bigger force.

An strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

You should probably attribute that to Yogi Berra unless it's truly original.

producing little creative output(in before Slumdog)

You fail an Internets. Bollywood "creates" nearly twice as many films as Hollywood, which are watched by many more people. I guess you wouldn't class them as real movies, since they haven't figured out that the real business is in marketing and moichandising.

While "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.", getting permission is easier (and IMO better) than getting lawyers involved.

Of course, the list of things that are easier and better than getting lawyers involved is quite long, but that's beside the point.

If these researchers had thought that using the data for other purposes would have some benefit, they could have explained why and asked the donors (or the tribe leadership) for permission. In the worst case, the donors or the tribe say no; in the best case you convince them to let you do what you want.

A brute force attack will always succeed, it will just take a long time. Never is a very long time and computers just keep getting faster.

Maybe you meant to say that there will never be a shortcut (cipher collisions, back door, etc...) to brute forcing AES128, but that is just a widely held opinion at this point, just waiting to get disproven.

Here's a quote for anybody that wants to live (and die) by their own powers of estimation:
"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dis-"
final words of General John Sedgwick, Union Commander in the U.S. Civil War, who was hit by sniper fire a few minutes after saying them http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Last_words

When NASA was first planning their moon shots they were looking at the Saturn C-3 as being large enough to carry the needed payload. There was a good margin of safety. Going with the C-3 would have saved them LOTS of money. But they decided to go for the more expensive C-5 because they didn't know if their capsule estimates were solid.

They weren't. As the weight of everything started going up, that margin of safety was eroded, then eliminated. If they had stayed with the C-3 they wouldn't have made it to the moon until the 1970s, if ever.

Actually, the original C-5 design (which had 4 F1 engines in the first stage) would have been too small as well. Fairly late in the design process they added a fifth F1 - and even so they still had to struggle to both increase the boosters performance and decrease its weight and to decrease the weight of the payload right up through the end of the program.

The lesson here has been repeated since with practically every launcher program, ESPECIALLY the Shuttle.

Oh, it's not just launchers. Back in the 1920's and 30's, when heavy warship displacement was limited by treaty, practically every class ended up overweight as it came off the slipway as compared to it's design weight. US, UK, France, pretty much everyone building heavy cruisers and battlewagons had the same problem. (The nations listed at least made a token effort to reduce weight, Germany and Japan just lied outright.)

Nor is it just government projects - nearly every aircraft has suffered from the same problem. The 747 was, late in its design and prototype phase, discovered to be overweight and could no longer meet is designed payload and range goals while being able to take off and land safely. (Pan Am, the biggest launch customer, held Boeing's toes to the fire and they had to go back and redesign the wing and control surfaces - and still they had to take heroic measures to reduce takeoff weight.)

Hell, I'm even discovering this in my current project of remodeling my workshop. My original plan simply didn't work, and I had to redesign on the fly to make it work.

This is the real world of engineering. I think many slashgeeks (working only with bits and bytes) don't realize that (unlike software where a few extra meg or a few extra cycles don't generally hurt much) in the real world estimates are just that - guesses. It's all too easy to get those guesses wrong, sometimes badly so. And that fixing those gaffes isn't just a matter of few lines of weightless and cheap code.

So what about Constellation? In this case they calculated that the SRBs could *just* do the job. If nothing started getting heavier then it had the power to get the module into orbit with a small margin of safety on the growth side. But then things started getting heavier. So then the upper stage grew along with it, eliminating the margin. Then it kept growing. Then they had to re-engineer the SRBs to get the power back to just enough. That cycle showed no signs of ending, and history suggests that it had a couple more iterations to go.

Realistically, that's as much a product of Congress dictating/micromanaging the basic design and the subcontractors that would do the work rather than leaving the details up to NASA as anything else. Both the capsule and booster sides of the house ended up in a positive feedback death spiral because they were thus hemmed in.

I'm always reminded of Rickover's saying on the difference between real and paper reactors:

An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics: (1) It is simple. (2) It is small. (3) It is cheap. (4) It is light. (5) It can be built very quickly. (6) It is very

So who got the quote wrong?

Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master

I think is correct. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Alpha_Centauri and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0292917/quotes

Remember that quote? "The Net views censorship as damage and, sometimes, routes into it..."

That server, operated out of China by Swedish service provider Netnod

Oh, yes, another one of those "Why can't we be more like Europe?!" moments...

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/List_of_misquotations

Except he most likely never said such a thing.

When IBM introduced its PC in 1981, many people attacked Microsoft for its
role. These critics said that 8-bit computers, which had 64K of address space,
would last forever. They said we were wastefully throwing out great 8-bit
programming by moving the world toward 16-bit computers.

We at Microsoft disagreed. We knew that even 16-bit computers, which had 640K
of available address space, would be adequate for only four or five years. (The
IBM PC had 1 megabyte of logical address space. But 384K of this was assigned
to special purposes, leaving 640K of memory available. That's where the
now-infamous ``640K barrier'' came from.)

-Bill Gates

Source Bloomberg Business News circa '96.

Snopes also has some useful info:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed

Much like the virility of your comment, my CAPTCHA was "limpness"...

It's like Dr. House said, "If religious people could be reasoned with there would be no religious people."

I don't know who Dr house is, but the way I've heard it expressed before is "you can't reason someone out of a position that they did not arrive at by reasoning."
I don't have a citation for that though.
Edit : WikiQuote hints that it's Dean Swift, but they don't have a source for it. It does have the sound of a Swift-ism.

Bug bug bug BUG "bug" "BUG"!

Why, for god sakes, are the last two "bugs" in quotes? Are they some sort of ironic bugs? Is the wink implied?

(yes, this is a ripped off joke)

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Benjamin Franklin

Stalin said "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic."

Not that it's really relevant, but no, he didn't.

"The review process had utterly failed; important questions have not been asked ... the methodological basis for such a conclusion (that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climate period of the last millennium) was simply not given."

before resigning. The publisher (Inter-Research) wrote the following editorial afterwards. Funnily enough they also publish a journal titled "Ethics in Science" :-) I hate to be in their shoes.
That quote comes from here ("Global warming: a load of hot air?") which has a nice summary of the politics (in 2004).
Lemme see if I can find the stolen CRU e-mails themselves..
Ah here, on the quite climate-skeptical looking website the Air Vent blog.
Can't find anything specific about the Soon and Baliunas article though.
The people at realclimate.org have done their utmost best to clarify and debunk the e-mails here.
To quote: "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants". In my personal opinion, the RealClimate debunking was believable, although it definitely showed us all that the CRU scientists were biased against the climate sceptics. They look a bit paler and more faded under the shock of sunlight they received on their e-mails :-).
Still, if the CRU climate scientists are petty and biased and spiteful but their scientific argumentation is solid (as I believe it still is--but I'm not a climate scientist), then I think we should look forward to reducing our CO2 production to the levels of 1990 and then even lower. On a worldwide level this becomes a problem for sociology or politics.
<incoherent_rant_mode>
I strongly suggest to read the last chapter of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, he mentions how a societal (in this case, even global) problem can be recognized, even on time, but still the governing elite can be unwilling or powerless to do what is necessary to mitigate it due to social or cultural constraints (i.e. as if the Greenland Norse refused to live in igloos because it was "un-european" and "un-civilized"). Maybe I should even try to read Joseph Tainter whom Diamond refers to.
I was alive and conscious in the '90's, and I can tell the young ones, that to live at a level of industrial production similar to in the '90's (Kyoto protocol proposal, a reduction of 5%, which the USA refused to sign) doesn't mean abject poverty while being enslaved to the CO2-measuring communist overlords, as some climate sceptics try to paint it. But then again I was born in Europe, not in one of the Asian Tigers for example, so that colours my perspective strongly.
</incoherent_rant_mode>

...I don't know who said it: "Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other."

Seems it was Benjamin Franklin, in the guise of Poor Richard.

When they came for the cartoons of child molestation,
I did not speak out;
I was not a pedophile.

When they came for the visual depictions of Muhammad,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Danish political cartoonist.

When they came after 4chan,
I did not speak out;
I was not a btard.

When they came after me,
there was no one left to speak out.

- With all due respect to Martin Niemöller.

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." -T. S. Elliot

"Bad artists copy. Great artists steal." -Pablo Picasso

"Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal." -Igor Stravinsky

"Good artists copy, great artists steal." -Steve Jobs

"Good coders code, great coders reuse." -anonymous

No matter how smart an AI developer may be

Sark: Well, I... it's just... a User, I mean... Users wrote us. A User even wrote you!
Master Control Program: No one User wrote me. I'm worth millions of their man-years.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tron/

Factor 1 (46% of variance explained) consisted of high loadings on likeability (.94) and trustworthiness (.97) and low loadings on dominance (.11) and facial maturity (.14). Factor 2 (42% of variance explained) consisted of high loadings on dominance (.92) and facial maturity

My grandmother used to tell me something along the lines of what is often misattributed to Churchill:

If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain.

And I would also like to point out for the college students that society (especially high school) often pigeonholes people and defines who they are on how they look. The individual sometimes has no choice and sometimes just accepts it and goes with it in order to belong. If you look older when you're young and people might instinctively treat you like a cold Republican. Always looked young and innocent? Then a warm Democrat.

Would be an explanation that agrees with the correlation the research drew to define the deviation from random guessing but nothing conclusive.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all..

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov

I already read many times that no one can track down the quote:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Benito_Mussolini

Far better the douchebaggery of relatively SANE politicians, as opposed to the INSANE fantasies of the acolytes of the Inerrant Thought of Chairman Rand. Not to mention the pure and unadulterated douchebaggery of the meth-addicted fifth rate Nietzsche of the mini-malls herself: Fuck the Indian Savages!

"Now, I don't care to discuss the alleged complaints American Indians have against this country. I believe, with good reason, the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayal of Indians and what they did to the white man. They had no right to a country merely because they were born here and then acted like savages. The white man did not conquer this country. And you're a racist if you object, because it means you believe that certain men are entitled to something because of their race. You believe that if someone is born in a magnificent country and doesn't know what to do with it, he still has a property right to it. He does not. Since the Indians did not have the concept of property or property rights--they didn't have a settled society, they had predominantly nomadic tribal "cultures"--they didn't have rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights that they had not conceived of and were not using. It's wrong to attack a country that respects (or even tries to respect) individual rights. If you do, you're an aggressor and are morally wrong. But if a "country" does not protect rights--if a group of tribesmen are the slaves of their tribal chief--why should you respect the "rights" that they don't have or respect? The same is true for a dictatorship. The citizens in it have individual rights, but the country has no rights and so anyone has the right to invade it, because rights are not recognized in that country; and no individual or country can have its cake and eat it too--that is, you can't claim one should respect the "rights" of Indians, when they had no concept of rights and no respect for rights. But let's suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages--which they certainly were not. What were they fighting for, in opposing the white man on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existnece; for their "right" to keep part of the earth untouched--to keep everybody out so they could live like animals or cavemen. Any European who brought with him an element of civilization had the right to take over this continent, and it's great that some of them did. The racist Indians today--those who condemn America--do not respect individual rights."

Or didn't you bother to actually READ the "Scourge of Public Libraries" by the aforementioned libertarian dipshit?

>> Fortunately, space is big. Really big.

> [citation needed]

'"Space," it says, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space, LISTEN!" and so on...'

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, chapter 8.

"When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic" - Ben Frankin

This is oft-quoted, but I've never seen a verifiable citation for it. The talk page for Benjamin Franklin at Wikiquotes doubts it as well.

"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." -- C. A. R. Hoare