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"Does that trouble anyone here? The idea that God might be fuckin' with our heads? Anyone have trouble sleeping restfully with that thought in their heads? God's running around, burrying fossils: 'Hu hu ho. We will see who believes in me now, ha HA. Im a prankster god. I am killing me. Ho ho ho ho."

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

(Testimony to the House of Representatives, 1982)

"Heyyyy.... howzabout we get our viewers to defer the bandwith bills for downloading episodes? Sounds like a middleman's wet dreams to me, get your customer to pay your distribution expenses. Now if they could only work out the "get paid" part."

(Testimony to the House of Representatives, 1982)

That's typical Hollywood forward thinking and embracing enormous new markets for ya!

Mind bogging incompetance, or mean spirited abuse of power. I'm gonna go with mean spiritted: I don't think someone that incompetant would ever earn the right to make that decision, especially since it happened again to a similar show on the same network not long afterwards.

Only siths deal in absolute.
-Yoda

Mind bogging incompetance, or mean spirited abuse of power. I'm gonna go with mean spiritted: I don't think someone that incompetant would ever earn the right to make that decision, especially since it happened again to a similar show on the same network not long afterwards.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

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

Never underestimate the power of stupidity.
It is the most powerful force in the universe.

(Should I bother to spell check this?)

Today it's hard to ignore the American revolution because it gave birth to one of the greatest corporate controlled governments of our time. I say corporate controlled because both political parties listen to the corporations that pay money to reelection campaigns more than they do to voters. I'd go on about how my vote doesn't count anymore, but I'm getting seriously offtopic then.

"I hope we shall take warning from the example [of England] and crush in it's [sic] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws our country."

--Thomas Jefferson's Letter to George Logan, (November 12, 1816)

And none of that is wisdom:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

- T.S. Eliot:

Probably the most obvious way this is reflected in code production is the attention paid to lines of code as a metric of productivity without constraints on how poorly factored the code is.

Good factoring is simply another way of saying "good theorizing". Ockham's Razor works for a lot of reasons and is the basis for the best measure of code quality: algorithmic information which is computer science's Ockham's Razor.

As warned of by Tacitus:

"The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government."

The same goes for scientific theory, business rules and software quality.

Too many cheap programmers spells death -- not life -- for IT.

According to Wikiquote it's from a speech at the University of Washington, reported by news.com.

"We will never make a 32-bit operating system, but I'll always love IBM." -- Bill Gates at the launch of MSX.

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

Fanatically worded but largely true. There is no excuse for writing a buffer overflow in the 21st century. Everyone who calls himself/herself a professional knows how to routinely avoid such pitfalls.

For years, Microsoft deliberately created defective software in order to continuously sell upgrade after upgrade.

It sure seems like it. But I think you're ignoring good ol' Hanlon's Razor here. It's much more likely that they deliberately did little or no QA, and naive programmers did foolish things which went unchecked. This is even easier to believe if you've worked with "professional" programmers and witnessed the things some are doing even to this day.

Bzzzt! Wrong! You left out the words "your teeth". "You'll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent". The audio probably lives somewhere in this directory, but my file naming conventions are crap and I'm too lazy to root it out. Go find it yourself. Hey, it's free karma if you can find a more direct link.

Actually , there are a heap load of conflicting storys . Some say he definantly did , some say he didn't others say he didn't with some comments saying oh yes he did and vice versa ..
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,1484,00.htm l
wired says he says he didn't
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Bill_Gates
another one here , its possible it was a slight misquote of something someone said
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BillGatesSixFortyKbytesQuot e
Although we only have his word to deny he ever said it ;) maybe i will cut him this slack , i can only find confirmation from bill gates denying he ever said it ... if i had said it i may deny it too ;)

Although i probably could of used his quotes that are definantly known , such as the internet being a fad or "Probably the fastest conventional telephone dial-up modem you'll ever have is 28.8."

So i withdraw the origional quote having been unable to find any concrete confirmation of him having said it.
But he dosn't have the best record of predictions which was my point

Oops, you may be right.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

"...Possibly quoted in Computer Networks, 1st. ed (1981), by Andrew Tanenbaum, p. 168, without attribution."

Sorry Dr. Hopper, more people should know of your contributions.

Those who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

-- Josef Stalin

I had a box of Ritz crackers, and on the back of the box of Ritz crackers it had all these suggestions as to what to put on top of the Ritz. It said "Try it with turkey and cheese." "Try it with peanut butter." Oh, c'mon man, they're crackers.
That's why I got 'em -- I like crackers. There ain't no suggestion: "Put a Ritz on top of a Ritz." I didn't buy 'em 'cuz they're little edible plates.

- Mitch Hedberg

Rest in Peace, Man.

First the internet censors came...
First they came for the smut peddlers, and I did not speak out because I was not a smut peddler.
Then they came for the gamblers, and I did not speak out because I was not a gambler.
Then they came for the terrorists, and I did not speak out because I was not a terrorists.
Then they came for the music pirates, and I did not speak out because I was not a music pirate.
Then they came for me...
and there was no one left to speak for me.

With apologies to Martin Niemöller

Somewhere about 1893 I started teaching Scouting to young soldiers in my regiment. When these young fellows joined the Army they had learned reading, writing, and arithmetic in school but as a rule not much else. They were nice lads and made very good parade soldiers, obeyed orders, kept themselves clean and smart and all that, but they had never been taught to be men, how to look after themselves, how to take responsibility, and so on. They had not had my chances of education outside the classroom.
They had been brought up in the herd at school, they were trained as a herd in the Army; they simply did as they were told and had no ideas or initiative of their own. In action they carried out orders, but if their officer was shot they were as helpless as a flock of sheep. Tell one of them to ride out alone with a message on a dark night and ten to one he would lose his way.
I wanted to make them feel that they were a match for any enemy, able to find their way by the stars or map, accustomed to notice all tracks and signs and to read their meaning, and able to fend for themselves away from regimental cooks and barracks.
* "BE PREPARED" (http://www.pinetreeweb.com/bp-listener.htm), Listener Magazine (1937)

Thirdly, because it has filled up idle moments in which goodness knows what amount of mischief Satan might not have been finding for mine idle hands to do
R. S. S. B.-P.

What they don't want you to know was that the car was on a secure road, where there should not have been a checkpoint at all, since Iraqi resistance forces have no way to access this road. It's a highly secure road. The Italians had no reason to expect a "checkpoint" on this road; the fact that they there was one is highly suspicious, to say the least. Wake up and smell the coffee, people! There are no secure roads in Baghdad, I was there and wished that there were, but there aren't. If you know the whereabouts of this "secure road" I'd sure like to know about it (and the source of this knowledge if you don't mind).

"This is a secured road connecting the Green Zone with the huge Camp Victory military base attached to Baghdad's airport."
I was in Baghdad at the time of this incident and travelled along route Irish often. There is no "secured road" anywhere between the airport and the Green Zone. Route Irish is the closest thing we had to a secured road and obviously the insurgents spent quite a bit of time keeping it from being secure. Route Force (Vernon) was one of the more dangerous routes in the area at the time.

I hope everyone would agree that people worldwide should "start thinking and using their brains for a change".

I was in the city at the time and had been for nearly a year. This sounds to me like one of the inevitable horrible tragedies that occur during wartime. Someone said "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_J._Hanlon)
W hat possible motive would the US have for firing at Ms Sgrena's vehicle?

As to the charge that "Anybody who has covered the Iraq war has known - or has seen - checkpoint hell, where nervous American soldiers fire on anything that moves." I would respectfully disagree wholeheartedly. The soldiers in my company used a tremendous amount of restraint in their dealings with the local populace. I'm not saying that living in a city under occupation is by any means a pleasant experience, but our soldiers do not fire indiscriminately at every car driving down the road.

... in the right place, please.

... is make another campy movie like from the 60s. I mean, first, you've got the bomb. Then, you've got the costumes. And if that's not enough, you've got the quotes. Here's a quick taste of what you'd expect:

Gordon: Penguin, Joker, Riddler... and Catwoman, too! The sum of the angles of that rectangle is too monstrous to contemplate!
Batman: We've been given the plainest warning! They're working together to take over...
O'Hara: To take over what, Batman? Gotham City?
Batman: Any two of them might try that!
Gordon: The whole... country?
Batman: If it were three of them, I would say yes, but four? Their minimum objective must be... the entire... world.

Note how angles apparantly vary from rectangle to rectangle, and the startling synergy achieved when all 4 supervillians team up as opposed to 2 or 3. Oh, and if you're curious about the "plainest warning" that the supervillians sent to Batman, go look up the full quote!

Ok, I know if they actually tried to make it campy, it would be boring and it would suck. And this whole post is just an excuse for me to bring up the 60s Batman. So......

Bring on Batman Begins :D

...he was kind to children...

Not so much. Put out a lot of kindness-to-animals PR, though, so your reductio still works with a minor change (cf W.C. Fields).

I was going to make a joke about that fact depending on whether you consider Picasso a good artists or a great artist, but instead I looked it up on wikiquote and they have it as such:

"Bad artists copy. Great artists steal."

* Possibly originally "Los mediocres imitan. Los talentosos, roban." or "Los grandes artistas copian, los genios roban." etc.

My favorite quote attributed to Picasso is

"Los ordenadores son inútiles. Sólo pueden darte respuestas."* Translation: "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

:)

Let's get this over with, here's a link to the WikiQuote page. No more quotes! :P

Douglas Adams seems to have not known [that 54 in base 10 is 42 in base 13] but highly approves of the coincidence.

No, more like "disapproves". "I may be a pretty sad case, but I don't write jokes in base 13!".

Hmmm.... seems like I remember a nice quote from Ben Franklin about people like you.

You don't just steal sigs, but one-liners too.
Sounds an awful lot like Mitch Hedberg:
I wrote a script for a guy, and he said he liked it but he thought that I needed to rewrite it. I said, "Fuck that, I'll just make a copy."

JVert said:
I once wrote an article, showed it to a magazine and they said it was good but I have rewrite it if they were going to print it.

Fuck that, i'll just use a copy machine.

Rest in peace, Mitch. Rest in peace.

Quick wikiquote check says: You don't know what you're talking about. I suppose that Al Gore invented the Internet too?

Unless I'm mistaken, we don't need any more decoding power for FLAC or other lossless codecs. That's mainly a bandwidth issue -- investing more into compression algorithms might offer returns, but another radical change in music compression (and how much you can compress) isn't likely to happen.

Thing is, you can have email, webcam, web pages, and somewhat 3D renderings. The "revolutions" will occur in how these are used (& in fairly specific areas such as gaming) rather than the raw power behind them. Unless holograms become viable for consumer electronics I think it's safe to say that the processor has passed puberty, and for a while will mature more than it will grow.

Duane: Suck my thermos! I hate being the Prince of Dorkness!

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

You can see my work so far at the following links:

Wikipedia in Plucker format
Wikiquote in Plucker format
Wikitionary in Plucker format

..and of course, my beautiful anti-alias fonts for Plucker, made with PalmFontConv by Alexander Pruss.

I've also converted the Creating XPCOM Components book by Doug Turner and Ian Oeschger to Plucker format as well as the FreeBSD Handbook.

I have literally hundreds of similar-quality works I'll be releasing over the next few months to the community on an ongoing basis.

If there's something you'd like to see, just let me know

It might also be useful to credit a second author (or at least mention him in the acknowledgments): Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfernschplenden-schlitter-crasscrenbon-fried-dig ger-dangle-dongle-dungle-burstein-von-knacker-thra sher-apple-banger-horowitz-ticolensic-grander-knot ty-spelltinkle-grandlich-grumblemeyer-spelterwasse r-kurstlich-himbleeisen-bahnwagen-gutenabend-bitte -ein-nürnburger-bratwurstle-gerspurten-mitz-weimac he-luber-hundsfut-gumberaber-shoenendanker-kalbsfl eisch-mittler-aucher von Hautkopft of Ulm.

It's funny cuz it's april fools and they are trying to f00l us. That is classic. kudos my friend kudos.

If you want something funny go read these in memorium:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mitch_Hedberg
"I went to the store to buy a candle holder, but they were out. So I bought a cake."

TV broke down on me a few months ago. First couple of days were a bit weird as I realized how much time I had on my hands (I mean, I work full time like the next guy, but at night I was typically in front of the tube for a couple of hours.) Because I could not afford to immediately go out and buy a (decent) new TV, I had to make do for a while - and guess what? I never bought that new TV and feel much better for it. Dramatic as it probably sounds, it changed my life.

I realize I'm wandering pretty far OT here.. But I now have a hard time figuring activities as useless, anti-social, or as damaging to your physical and mental health as watching television - unless of course one is masochist and enjoys precisely this kind of torturous debilitation.

I am genuinely curious: has anyone had a similarly intense experience "tuning out"?

Walt Kelly and his Pogo strip were what we had before the likes of Doonesbury, Bloom County, Boondocks and many other. Kelly took on McCarthy at a time when it wasn't popular to do so, he also satirized LBJ, George Wallace and lambasted Nixon. Within his funny animal strip about a 'possum' and his Okefenokee dwelling friends, Kelly aimed some very sharp barbs at political figures. On top of all that, there was also social commentary, such as the title character and friend overlooking the trash strewn swamp and stating, "We have met the enemy and he is us." A former Disney animator, Kelly had a very beautiful, detailed style of drawing.

As anyone who's read Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress knows, the Loonies were schooled in survival, not proper English. "From the TINSTAAFL Dept" may be more proper, but the definition (according to the usual source) is "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch". Sure, it's a double negative and ain't ain't a word. But I don't think you'll ever hear a Loonie say "There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, by Jove" on their way to High Tea.

Or perhaps the editors left it that way so that us whiners would have something to bi^Wcomplain about.

"Religion is the opiate of the masses." - Karl Marx

Correct quote: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." Marx's intended meaning is subtler than the misquote would suggest.

Why of course! It worked for Bill Gates, it can work for you too!

"The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and fished out listings of their operating system."

To me, this points out some important thing. We like to think of ourself as the civilised world. Maybe we ain't. The day we let machines do inter-human relations, it's a dangerous day. Machines is just machines. They can't geniuinely care about someone, they can't feel sorry, and they can't be punished for doing something bad. What would happend the day someone hacked the robot to film our children?

Only if you haven't seen BTTF.

(Back to the Future, 1985)
Biff: "So why don't you make like a tree... and get outta here."

- http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future

From here:

In an age when anyone can post their version of the facts on the Internet, Encyclopædia Britannica maintains its reputation as the most authoritative source of the information and ideas people need for work, school, and the sheer joy of discovery.

Hmmm... is someone feeling a wee bit threatened? :-)

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Mahatma Ghandi, courtesy of WikiQuote ;-)

Ad impossibilia nemo tenetur.
Does it work with common law ? In this case a decent lawyer who knows the word "brocard" should be able to defend any ISP.

"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."

Mystery Men

While I agree Creationism isn't science, almost by definition (it doesn't use the Scientific Method), I would hardly agree that evolutionism is a good scientific theory.

Where's the prediction of the theory? Where's the experimental verification of the prediction within the experimental error? Maybe I'm demanding this because I'm used to a more rigorous (and arguably, the only) science, that is to say, physics.

Then, for those of you who feel more comfortable with soft sciences (i.e. "stamp-collecting" sciences), well, where's the fourth step in the scientific method, "experiment"? Well, actually, I guess that isn't possible to begin with, since we lack the third step, "prediction from hypothesis" (and not some vague prediction like "organisms fit for survival survives"---something quantitative that can be measured!).

As you should see, if you can see as an objective scientist, evolutionism is not such a great science either---it's better than Creationism simply by virtue of just trying to imitate real sciences. Modern biology would benefit greatly from de-emphasis of evolution in the curriculum, and avoiding the turning-away of quite a few bright students who could have made great contributions in the fields of molecular biology and others (egh, never bothered to learn all the little fields in biology).

If you recall that there are small packet of people disbelieving Special Relativity (mostly trolls and Darwin Award candidates, but recently some research suggested that the second postulate of SR may be wrong in the long run---i.e. speed of light is variable over time comparable to the age of universe), despite a wealth of experimental evidences, well, why aren't you surprised that evolutionism is so well-accepted given the lack of unambiguous experimental (or, as is the case, "observational") evidence?

"States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic."
- referring to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea

In case anyone doesn't get this reference (it's great, I use it all the time), it's from one of the better episodes of The Twilight Zone http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Zone#To_ Serve_Man

What the hell... Did you just attribute to GWB a quote by Albert Einstein?

~Lake

I myself am a spiritual atheist so I hang out with a lot of religuous people-- people from many different religions. None of them are creationists. Some of the are pretty strict Christians (scares me actually) but they are still not creationists.

Creationism is not a central tenet of Christianity, and hell, even a bishop who was guest speaking warned against robbing the Bible of it's value by taking it literally. To quote Gallileio (a seriously devoted Catholic):
"The Bible tells us how to go to the heavens, not how the heavens go."

Frankly, creationism needs to go the way of phlogiston