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"It's a very small vocal group bothered by this issue."
- Vint Cerf

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

-kgj

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

The constitution made America great. It didn't spring from nothing. It was a reaction to tyranny. By gutting the constitution, we are making way for another tyranny.

This is not a Quote from Benjamin Franklin. Please get your Quotes right.

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

That gives me an idea. Attach permanent magnets to the corpse of W. C. Fields, wrap coils around his coffin, and then say you've found a way to turn alcohol into water. Bingo: free electricity.

Incorrect. She was paraphrasing Voltaire's ideas into what she believed that his attitudes were at the time, as can be seen from the quote's context. She most likely put it in quotes to make the distinction between use and mention. I would have used italics in that case.

See the quote on Wikiquote for an explanation.

Forget vinyl - when can we get things recorded in Analog to Water?

Plus, when you're done listening to it, you can make Ramen noodles with Skwisgaar's solos, or maybe even coffee with Toki's Rhythm Guitar parts...

DETHKLOK RULES!

Personally, I think that Less is More. We don't need more standards. We don't need more complex standards either. We don't need more pages. We need less.

The point of standards is that they should encourage the maximum number of implementations, and the best way to do it is by not being a burden on the implementation. If the implementation has to implement two different standards, it will be double the burden, and to what benefit?

I agree that the specification should be clear and in some cases that would mean adding more pages to it, but what you're saying seems to me you're encouraging adding complexity, you're advocating "adding more pages" when in fact you should advocate specifying some things better without compromising its simplicity and conciseness.

--
"Standards are so great that everyone should have its own."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_J._Hanlon

Alas, you will have to discover some other law to name unto yourself.

Hardly an impartial physisist. Some things he retracted, but he had quite a few blind spots (particularly wrt quantum physics) because his beliefs formed a barrier to his acceptance of what the theories said.

Ford's in his flivver, all's well with the world.

... Thus spoke the creator: "Truth will triumph. It always does. However, I figure truth is a variable, so we're right back where we started from."

* Galloway Gallegher, in "The Proud Robot" by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore)

found finally at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Truth

CC.

FYI: "A writer who seems to have fallen into obscurity these days is Henry Kuttner. He died young and his reputation has been eclipsed by the writers who came after him. But both on his own and in collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore he produced some of the funniest stories I have ever read. Some have been collected -- though long out of print Robots Have No Tails occasionally surfaces in second hand bookshops. Make it your business to seek it out. It contains all the stories about Galloway Gallagher, a man whose subconscious is a brilliant scientist. When he is sober he is just an ordinary person, but when roaring drunk his subconscious takes over and makes the most incredible inventions. The stories concern the efforts of a hungover and very repentant Gallagher trying to figure out just what he's built this time. Why, for example, could he possibly have built a robot with a transparent body? And having done that, why did he make it so vain that all it wants to do is stand in front of a mirror watching its cogs go round? To find the answer to that conundrum, read The Proud Robot." (c.f)

I found the quote a little hard to believe (it's surprisingly untactful for a politician), so I googled it. It isn't unsourced (it is attributed to reporter Robert Sherman), but it isn't independently verified either. I found the best summary of the basis for the quote in the talk page of the wikipedia entry for George Bush (senior).

"George Bush is not stupid. He's evil. OK? There's a huge difference between stupid and evil."

"George Bush can speak perfectly well, just not when he's being caring or compassionate or concerned about human beings. That's when he stutters and says shit like 'Hey it's hard to put food on your family.' Which he actually said, he said it's hard to put food on your family. Do you know why he said that? 'Cause he could give a fuck how hard it is for you to put food on the table for your family. But you know when he gets really downright poetic and articulate and focused is when he's talking about war and death and murder and retribution. All of a sudden he's Dylan Thomas."

"Here's the thing, if you gave Darth Vader a big basket of puppies he'd look like a fucking imbecile. 'Hey Darth, how do you like those puppies?' 'Uh, well they're round...furry...to, uh, pet...here I don't really like puppies, here, take these.' 'What are you gonna do to Alderaan?' 'WE WILL DESTROY YOUR PLANET, YOU WILL BE DUST BENEATH THE HEELS OF OUR BOOTS!' That's George Bush! I know a supervillain when I see one!"

I believe you mis-attributed the quote. Ben Franklin said it.

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

Hey calm down please, it is a joke. Are you too young to remember "640K ought to be enough for anybody" ?

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Bill_Gates

People joke about this you know, even at Microsoft ;-)

I have a hard time seeing how this could qualify as a troll ;-)

Just happened today: The uber-friendly shopkeeper next door asked me to help him void a transaction. When the password prompt came up, he looked at me and simply said, "1-2-3-4-5."

I couldn't resist. I looked back at him and said, "That's funny. I've got the same combination on my luggage..."

First, if you're hacking your iPhone, why on earth are you patching it from Apple?

Second, if you're hacking your iPhone, you probably should be smart enough to patch it yourself, or at least use a patch coming from the same community that created your hack.

I mainly see the "bricking complaint" as nothing more than some of PT Barnum's quotes being acted out in RL.

Stephen Baxter rocks! ... This one, unfortunately is mediocre

James Nicoll said it better than I ever could:

[F]olks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid [nitrogen] and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects.

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

-- James Nicoll

I have had that quote attributed to Michael Faraday, speaking of electricity.

"Those who would give up ESSENTIAL LIBERTY to purchase a little TEMPORARY SAFETY, deserve neither LIBERTY nor SAFETY."

and the strange form of 's' that was being used that slashdots forum can't display. Franklin had something far more appropriate to say on matters such as these.

and this site has a scan of the ORIGINAL section of the document.

Except that in a letter to David Hume Franklin denies he wrote that and researchers now think it was a fellow diplomat named Richard Jackson who said that.

So you could say "Those who are pedantic with pseudo-quotes deserve a slap in the head with a wet fish - including me"

So mod me - "+1 - slap with wet fish"

In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people. -- Linus Torvalds on

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill - not a Churchill quote, it's actually attributed to François Guizot.

Jury is still out on who said/wrote that statement:

This statement was used as a motto on the title page of An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania. (1759) which was attributed to Franklin in the edition of 1812, but in a letter of September 27, 1760 to David Hume, he states that he published this book and denies that he wrote it, other than a few remarks that were credited to the Pennsylvania Assembly, in which he served. The phrase itself was first used in a letter from that Assembly dated November 11, 1755 to the Governor of Pennsylvania. An article on the origins of this statement here includes a scan that indicates the original typography of the 1759 document, which uses an archaic form of "s": "Thoe who would give up Essential Liberty to purchae a little Temporary Safety, deerve neither Liberty nor Safety." Researchers now believe that a fellow diplomat by the name of Richard Jackson is the primary author of the book. With the information thus far available the issue of authorship of the statement is not yet definitely resolved, but the evidence indicates it was very likely Franklin, who in the Poor Richard's Almanack of 1738 is known to have written a similar proverb: "Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

Ok no jokes, but did we get any last words to quote then?

It's a fine quote, but it may not be of or from Franklin. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

The people who suggest (like Hitler but unlike Heisenberg, Einstein, and others) that science will outmode religion

I don't think it will. And wasn't Hitler Christian?

I do think that organized religion is far more harmful than organized science. Worse if you combine the two. I also find that science tends to be far less dogmatic than religion.

You're right, in a sense, that we have every bit as much fundamental evidence, looking at, say, the Sun, to say that it's the eye of God, than we do to say it's a giant controlled nuclear reaction. The difference is that a scientist is looking for a reason why, and looks out in the world around him. Where do you turn to if you want to approach this from a religious point of view?

You turn to scripture and maybe intuition. Scripture is pure dogma, and intuition is a guess, one that should give you direction on where to look for your evidence.

When we devote ourselves to logic, we ignore the fact that our brains are not wired to be strictly logical. Instead our brains are generally image-oriented and one cannot conceive of a negative without imagining its opposite, so one must understand that words like "no" or "not" tie us to the images that we seek to distance ourselves from. True mastery over ourselves requires mastery over logic, but also an ability to move beyond it to build a more powerful image of the universe within our minds.

You know what I see when I look beyond logic?

I see beauty.

I see color and sound, anger, love, and all kinds of things for which there is no logical cause or process.

I do not see a mythical sky-god.

All the experiences I've outlined are very real to me. No god is. How many people are religious? Of these people, how many have had a religious experience? And of those, how many can say for certain that it came from the same entity that's mentioned in their scripture?

I do not deny that there are things beyond science, because that is the whole point of science -- to discover and understand what we don't understand already. (The point of technology is to realize and use the science we already have.) I'm also not a "hard atheist".

But I don't have blind faith in something merely because it's mentioned in a scroll from centuries ago. Too many people do have that faith, to the point where they will interpret the parts they like as being literally true.

I think I should end by pointing out that Einstein did not believe in Judaism, not the way I was taught. Check out his wikiquote page -- other than the "Einstein's God" part, look at the images on the right. Also check out Spinoza's page, particularly the beginning of "Overview of his philosophy".

There are some definitions of God that are inspiring, and also hold up very well to observation -- God existing as the natural world, as the Universe and its laws, does match our observations that the world tends to make sense, in almost an intelligent sort of way -- that there is, then, some intelligence behind things -- although I could argue that we could very well be seeing our own intelligence reflected; humans can and do see patterns and intelligence in complete randomness, to where the iPod and iTunes have been made less random in an effort to seem more random.

But it's a longer discussion, and it makes a lot more sense than talk of silly things like "Believe in Christ or you go to Hell."

And then there are the ludicrous definitions of mainstream religion, that don't work at all. Spinoza's God is not omnibenevolent, merely omniscient and omnipresent.

Its OK, SCO owns it.

Actually, the quote is from Igor Stravinsky. See http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Igor_Stravinsky

No disrespect meant for Bill, but he was only picking up where an earlier opponent left off. (His wife, with "we're going to take things from you for the common good", not so much.)

"Government is not the solution to our problem. Government *is* the problem."
-- Ronald Reagan, first inaugural address, 1981.

Of course, even he had mellowed a bit by then... Back in the day, he used to be a little more explicit about what he stood for:

"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."
- Ronald Reagan, A Time for Choosing, 1964

I'm just glad he didn't live to see the bad guys win, like Kruschev said, without firing a shot.

Why, of course, I reserve the right to change my opinion on a daily basis, or as Konrad Adenauer put it Was interessiert mich mein Geschwätz von gestern? (English translation)

Microsoft Corporation unfortunately has done absolutely nothing in the past 9 years that made me rethink my opinion about them.

Hint: Calling Linux and the general public license a cancer doesn't help.

How does gun control always come to mixed up in these Freedom discussions? The right bear arms does not keep you free (most people don't even take it up). Do you really think your 9mm handgun, or even that WWII AT gun you've got in the backyard, is going to help you if the government did suddenly turn militarily on it's own people? Neither have much penetrating power against an Abrams.

No, the way a government turns on its own people is by making them carry ID papers and giving the police the freedom to stop and search at any time. The right to carry arms has no bearing on this and is largely irrelevant in the modern age, it was written when the height of military technology was a man on a horse with a flintlock musket. Even a homemade matchlock could take him down, so every person who owned a gun was an effective soldier.

How the 2nd amendment has managed to become twisted over time to be now portayed as defending yourself against the state is beyond me. Given exactly what it says and a little knowledge of how the revolutionary war was fought (ie they raised impromtu militias and only had a miniscule standing army), it clearly means that the national government wanted people to keep a gun so that they could raise a militia in times of need (goddamn Regulators), NOT that they felt that people should be able to protect themselves from the state, because that would have been a rebellion (which one Sam Adams felt should be punishable by death).

Actually that quote is from a letter he wrote to Max Born about his distrust of the theory of quantum mechanics, not his own theory of relativity. Here is the actual quote:

Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.

Well, that's better than vandalizing the Good Will Hunting wikiquote page.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Bill_Gates

He who controls the Spice controls the universe http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dune_(film)

That's amazing! I have the same combination on my luggage!

"I always thought it was real like pro wrestling, but it's fixed like boxing." (Source)

As per Wikiquote:

"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
-Albert Einstein, in a letter to President Harry S. Truman

I think Einstein was suggesting that we'd end up WMDing ourselves back into the stone age. But what you say might be a corollary. To quote Red from the Red Green Show, "If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy!"

Alduos Huxley. (The quote in question is near the bottom of the "Sourced" section).

Attributed to Tommy Douglas

"It's the story of a place called Mouseland. Mouseland was a place where all the little mice lived and played, were born and died. And they lived much the same as you and I do. They even had a Parliament. And every four years they had an election. Used to walk to the polls and cast their ballots. Some of them even got a ride to the polls. And got a ride for the next four years afterwards too. Just like you and me. And every time on election day all the little mice used to go to the ballot box and they used to elect a government. A government made up of big, fat, black cats. Now if you think it strange that mice should elect a government made up of cats, you just look at the history of Canada for last 90 years and maybe you'll see that they weren't any stupider than we are. Now I'm not saying anything against the cats. They were nice fellows. They conducted their government with dignity. They passed good laws--that is, laws that were good for cats. But the laws that were good for cats weren't very good for mice. One of the laws said that mouseholes had to be big enough so a cat could get his paw in. Another law said that mice could only travel at certain speeds--so that a cat could get his breakfast without too much physical effort. All the laws were good laws. For cats. But, oh, they were hard on the mice. And life was getting harder and harder. And when the mice couldn't put up with it any more, they decided something had to be done about it. So they went en masse to the polls. They voted the black cats out. They put in the white cats. Now the white cats had put up a terrific campaign. They said: "All that Mouseland needs is more vision." They said:"The trouble with Mouseland is those round mouseholes we got. If you put us in we'll establish square mouseholes." And they did. And the square mouseholes were twice as big as the round mouseholes, and now the cat could get both his paws in. And life was tougher than ever. And when they couldn't take that anymore, they voted the white cats out and put the black ones in again. Then they went back to the white cats. Then to the black cats. They even tried half black cats and half white cats. And they called that coalition. They even got one government made up of cats with spots on them: they were cats that tried to make a noise like a mouse but ate like a cat. You see, my friends, the trouble wasn't with the colour of the cat. The trouble was that they were cats. And because they were cats, they naturally looked after cats instead of mice. Presently there came along one little mouse who had an idea. My friends, watch out for the little fellow with an idea. And he said to the other mice, "Look fellows, why do we keep on electing a government made up of cats? Why don't we elect a government made up of mice?" "Oh," they said, "he's a Bolshevik. Lock him up!" So they put him in jail. But I want to remind you: that you can lock up a mouse or a man but you can't lock up an idea!"

Except that on Linux, that loop will finish in five seconds.

Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce.