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Yeah sounds like a total dumbass here http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/B...

Ah, bringing back the classics! There is something we don't fully understand therefore god. Good job.

Does it mean, if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists don’t understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here’s a list of things in the past that the physicists at the time didn’t understand [and now we do understand] [...]. If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on - so just be ready for that to happen, if that’s how you want to come at the problem -Neil deGrasse Tyson

It's futile to get into arguments about legitimacy with the US Government. Legitimacy depends on force as Heinlein observed.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers#Chapter_2

" ... I was not making fun of you personally; I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea -- a practice I shall always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history that has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."

So you can say they're not legitimate and they can say the same about you. However they've got the power to back up their decisions and you don't because no one uses naked force as effectively as the US Government. If it makes you feel any better consider the bit in bold to be descriptive rather than prescriptive - i.e. a statement of how the world does work rather than how the world should work.

While I agree that much of this may be about older CxOs not having experience with equipment, this is not a problem that will die with them.

Just like "Kids these days have no respect or aptitude" has been a thing since the days of Socrates (or, rather, Aristophanes?), so to is "Old people just can't understand" (or, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks".) For the past two decades it's been the internet. Before that it was computers in general. In two decades people 30 years our junior will have hushed conversations about how we're having trouble targeting our Brainmemos to certain employees instead of broadcasting to the entire company, wondering why we find it so hard to figure it out.

Those assistants and entitlements will stick around, too, but they'll adjust to different things just as the thing that we can't adjust to will also change.

For the record, the above is a variation of a well known quote from Samuel Goldwyn: "Anyone who would go to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined"

They shouldn't have doubled down on their right to spy because that has caused an international incident.

This was written in 1936:

The State's criminality is nothing new and nothing to be wondered at. It began when the first predatory group of men clustered together and formed the State, and it will continue as long as the State exists in the world, because the State is fundamentally an anti-social institution, fundamentally criminal. The idea that the State originated to serve any kind of social purpose is completely unhistorical. It originated in conquest and confiscationâ"that is to say, in crime. It originated for the purpose of maintaining the division of society into an owning-and-exploiting class and a propertyless dependent class â" that is, for a criminal purpose.
        No State known to history originated in any other manner, or for any other purpose. Like all predatory or parasitic institutions, its first instinct is that of self-preservation. All its enterprises are directed first towards preserving its own life, and, second, towards increasing its own power and enlarging the scope of its own activity. For the sake of this it will, and regularly does, commit any crime which circumstances make expedient.
                "The Criminality of the State" in American Mercury (March 1939)

- Albert J. Nock

The lesson for us is that this isn't new behavior, it's merely cyclical and we're rather new, in historical terms. That's why we're warned to learn from history, hopefully to avoid making the same mistakes as those who came before us. Treating this NSA scandal as something other than a symptom of a larger problem that needs to be addressed would be one such mistake.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Anonymous Drug Addict

FTFY.

Well, it certainly wasn't Albert Einstein. The quote first appeared in print in 1983 (in a book by Rita Mae Brown), when Albert Einstein had already been dead for 28 years.

It wasn't Rita Mae Brown either, it first appeared in the Narcotics Anonymous handbook in 1981.

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

Going to point out it's a weird thing for a NA book to say since most drug users have to repeatedly kick drugs before they figure out how to quit completely. And NA is about keeping sober and it's okay if you fall of the wagon, just get back on. Quite a different attitude then "don't keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" that is just saying no point in even trying to kick drugs because you won't do it.

If it's supposed to mean that doing drugs and expecting something different is crazy, you do drugs to get high. You aren't expecting anything other then that high, and you generally are NOT disappointed.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Anonymous Drug Addict

FTFY.

Well, it certainly wasn't Albert Einstein. The quote first appeared in print in 1983 (in a book by Rita Mae Brown), when Albert Einstein had already been dead for 28 years.

It wasn't Rita Mae Brown either, it first appeared in the Narcotics Anonymous handbook in 1981.

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

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion

Steven Weinberg

I'm under the impression that the majority of home users want an appliance. They demand safety more than freedom because they don't know what they'd do with choice and freedom other than shoot themselves in the proverbial foot. Walled gardens provide this safety. The market doesn't provide what Benjamin Franklin thought people deserve; it provides what people demand, and in many cases, this has been safety.

I see you are part of the group that likes Groucho Marx quotes

Like Lord Kelvin saying (giving the full quotation from wikiquote):

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

Of course Kelvin also calculated the age of the earth as being between 20 million and 400 million years. So quantification can often lead to wildly incorrect conclusions.

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..

Cardinal Richelieu

Indeed:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra

He who wrote "The Go To Statement Considered Harmful", or as he originally titled it, "A Case Against the Goto Statement", later wrote:

Please don't fall into the trap of believing that I am terribly dogmatic about [the go to statement]. I have the uncomfortable feeling that others are making a religion out of it, as if the conceptual problems of programming could be solved by a simple trick, by a simple form of coding discipline!

Dijkstra (1973) in personal communication to Donald Knuth , quoted in Knuth's "Structured Programming with go to Statements"

I am just loving this to bits. Getting my popcorn ready, this should be good!

For the record, the oft-quoted statement "Do as thou wilt be the whole of the law" does not mean what people think.

It comes from The Book of Law, and is followed by "Love is the law, love under will."

People don't normally include that last part, for some reason.

(The study of this post is forbidden. It is wise to destroy this browser tab after the first reading.
Whosoever disregards this does so at his own risk and peril. These are most dire.)

"Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life."

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

I would argue that Blackhole was perhaps the most important driving force behind an explosion of cyber fraud over the past three years.

I would disagree and cite NSA's PRISM and FOXACID as a far more important driving force. Even if you disagree about the classification of their action as criminal violations of the US Constitution, consider that they purchase a large volume of zero-day exploits to fuel their "cyber" weapons. This makes selling zero-day exploits on the black market very profitable even if you ended all civilian perpetrated "cyber" assaults.

And when you hack a man, you're a criminal,
Hack many, and you're a terrorist,
Hack 'em all, you're a Government!

My apologizes to Megadeth.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

-- Zawinski

His high-pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company."

Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: the Enigma of Intelligence (1983), p. 251.
Describing an incident which occurred in the New York AT & T lab cafeteria in 1943

This way they can prove their developers wrong by actually getting nine of them pregnant.

"In an interview with the BBC's Andrew Marr (11.11.2011) Winston Churchill's daughter, Mary Soames, explained that she overheard Stalin say this to her father. Churchill, was upset having received news that a family friend had died. He apologised to Stalin in light of the vast loss of Russian life. And Stalin then gave this reply."

From your wiki link

Oh, and I do believe that first hand accounts still count for quotes do they not?

LOL - that article is full of propaganda.

I wish I was the guy that came up with this pyramid scheme, I'd be liquidating by bitcoins and enjoying my mansion in Hawaii.

And... voila!

The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige".

Stalin never said that. Please don't perpetuate spurious quotations.

This may be surprising to you, samzenpus, but there is an entire field of study called "human-computer interaction", and it has been around for about as long as computers have. And one of the most valuable methods for gathering data has ALWAYS BEEN the observation of users.

Now you and I are aware and always do a good job usability of course, but crappy design is still with us far too often, no matter how many times stories like this appear. And there are plenty of designers and programmers and engineers who still blame "stupid users" for not being able to use their systems. And plenty of those chime in every time this sort of article appears here.

At least the software world can take some comfort that everyone else sucks at this too. Ever seen a door with a labels on it that say "Push" and "Pull"? We can't even reliably design doors that can be operated without a user manual*. Door designers (and everybody else) can watch people push on a pull handle and vice-versa, and still insist that their design is too beautiful, elegant, symmetrical, etc. and that users should simply adapt. Unless designers of doors, software and everything else watch users use stuff and then do something with that data -- other than concluding that users suck -- nothing gets better.

*Yes, yes, I know about building codes and doors leading in and out of buildings, thanks Slashdot pedants, know-it-alls, and pedantic know-it-alls.

A movie is something like 50 pages of a book

It's funny you said this. I watched that version of Dune in the theatre, and I remember after over an hour suddenly thinking to myself "they are only on about page 50 and they only have another hour left to do the remaining 400 pages". So oh yeah the remaining part of the movie was compressed all to hell. Very poor pacing.

I read somewhere that David Lynch filmed about 12 hours worth of movie. If that's true, I wonder if a 10-hour miniseries version would be better than what we actually got.

I didn't like most of the original material in the Lynch Dune movie either. The "weirding modules"? Okay it was sort of cool that "Muad-dib" turned out to be a "killing word" but come on, there was enough stuff in the book without adding this pointless technology. I did love the "Mentat mantra"... have you seen this joke?

"It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion." - The Programmer's Mantra (parodied from the Mentat Mantra in David Lynch's Dune (film).)

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

The SciFy channel, now renamed to SyFy, is a bit of a bad joke, but the best thing they ever did was the Dune miniseries. I thought that was expertly paced, and it made the final hand-to-hand showdown between Paul Atreides and the other guy quite believable. The other guy spent lots of time training, killing off peasants without a care; and then Paul fought like a Tai Chi master, and defeated him by fighting differently.

Yeah I wouldn't want to be a peasant in the Dune universe.

I hated the second and third books in the Dune trilogy, but the SciFi network miniseries (same people as the Dune miniseries) was tolerable. I don't recommend it unless you actually liked the books; then maybe you will like the miniseries.

Well, when I was naive I was pissed off a lot too. When I had about 10 years of code under my belt all Major version numbers in my codebases indicated a complete re-write / major design overhaul and API breakage as far as the eye can see. That same reasoning was what Linus was going by when he said there'd never be a 3.x.x release -- v3 would mean he when insane and wrote the whole thing in a message passing version of VB; I'm paraphrasing.

What's interesting is that I follow the Unix Way(tm): "Do one thing and do it well"; So my "Applications" are actually just that: Application of multiple smaller modules each with their own names / codenames and version numbers. The Editor application "Sledge 0.4.x" is a UI layer stack provided by Core v3.0.x leveraging Sterling v1.6.x for rendering, Vaporworks v1.13.x for a scripting VM, CFG9000 v5.2.x for INI/.conf persistence, etc. Git submodules makes building other programs that target disparate points in the independent module versions simple. Eg: A server for providing HTTP interface to other game-engines/servers via remote console utilizes Core, Vaporworks, and CFG9k. My code editor, audio assemblers, etc. use a different group of modules, but the same common codebase. So, the major application version of an application may not change even if I use a different subsystem or rewrite a module (eg: to get my rendering engine using Wayland natively); Major module version changes translate to minor Application version changes.

Each of the modules is like a library with its own test suite, but provides a small set of associated (terminal) tools (eg: My "Core" library provides a platform abstraction layer and provides a virtual file/network system where local / remote / archived paths can be mounted and mapped to the installed system, allowing me to "cd", "cp", "mv" across the network and OS barriers; Vaporworks provides a scripting environment, but also provides a compiler / bytecode translator and debugger / profiler tools. For these individual modules and their smaller tools the "Major version change = Rewrite" method makes sense.

However with larger applications (say, a distributed versioned 3D game development environment), or a browser, or a Monolithic Kernel: Full / Majority code rewrites aren't occurring. So after having created some sprawling and immense applications I came around to the idea that it doesn't make sense to require the same level of change for a major version number in the application as the module -- Why even have a major version number if it never changes? The game dev studio always has the same interface: It must always interface at the human / machine level. Eg: There's a few ways to create a multi-threaded event pump, but the API for them all will be the same. There's different ways to handle pointer input (esp. on Win32 vs X11 vs Wayland to reduce input latency), but the pointer API is not going to change (it did have to change years ago to support multiple pointers / multi-touch, and that was a major version bump in Core.UI, and in apps that use it). It's not like I scrapped pointers for eye tracking, context awareness and vocalizations or gestures... yet, but that was a substantial addition to the system.

The Linux Kernel is in the same boat. It's to the point now that it's got to provide largely the same interface to its users i.e. programs; ergo: ABI stability; There's not going to be a full rewrite because that would be death -- It wouldn't be "Linux" anymore. Nothing that depends on it would be able to function, and all the dependent applications / modules / systems -- A huge chunk of the ecosystem -- would have to be rewritten given the level of change that warrants a rewrite. Especially if we actually want to improve on operating systems -- Say, eschew POSIX in favor of Agent oriented operating environment with byte-code program modules linkable into machine code at install time, or runnable via VM if untrusted (sandboxing that actually works

sigh, it was NOT MacArthur. It was Field Marshal Montgomery, addressing parliament in the 1960s, "Rule 1, on page 1 of the book of war, is: "Do not march on Moscow". Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good. That is the first rule. I do not know whether your Lordships will know Rule 2 of war. It is: "Do not go fighting with your land armies in China". It is a vast country, with no clearly defined objectives." http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bernard_Montgomery,_1st_Viscount_Montgomery_of_Alamein It is widely speculated that it IS the inspiration behind Vincini's quip about land war in asia, though.

who is going to make his clothes?

how will he power his machines?

The young Alexander conquered India. Was he alone?

Shamelessly stolen from, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_(film)

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should"

Data: If you had an off switch, Doctor, would you not keep it secret?

If God uses evolution as a tool ... Then this alleged Being is not Good and Omnipotent.

God is all-powerful, but that doesn't mean he likes to waste power. God is good, even if giving humankind what we need doesn't necessarily include giving us everything we might want.

A universe was created with 10^80 atoms, to allow 10^30 atoms to form a planet that could house a target species that could only live on part of it. 13.75 billion years of cooking time was required to get us to about 95,000 years of that species' existence.

Its like the word 'waste' doesn't mean anything.

What sort of God would use evolution, lubricated with the blood, guts and unrelenting cruelty, as a means to bring about his favored species or race?

One who intends to hand stewardship of all non-Homo species over to Homo, as in Genesis 9:2-3. What John Godfrey Saxe wrote about laws and sausages applies equally well to sapient apex species.

That makes God amoral. He becomes a kid with an ant farm.

Nevertheless Genesis is a earth centered creation story... told from a species centric position.

I agree, and I have a hypothesis about that. God reveals what we need to know to serve him, and as of right now, we don't need to worry ourselves with the other class-M planets that he's running.

Personally, I'd sooner reveal what we can know about the M class planets, and not worry ourselves after God.

If God uses evolution as a tool ... Then this alleged Being is not Good and Omnipotent.

God is all-powerful, but that doesn't mean he likes to waste power. God is good, even if giving humankind what we need doesn't necessarily include giving us everything we might want.

What sort of God would use evolution, lubricated with the blood, guts and unrelenting cruelty, as a means to bring about his favored species or race?

One who intends to hand stewardship of all non-Homo species over to Homo, as in Genesis 9:2-3. What John Godfrey Saxe wrote about laws and sausages applies equally well to sapient apex species.

Nevertheless Genesis is a earth centered creation story... told from a species centric position.

I agree, and I have a hypothesis about that. God reveals what we need to know to serve him, and as of right now, we don't need to worry ourselves with the other class-M planets that he's running.

No, it is the same thing. In both cases you are violating the holder’s copyright which is the principle we are talking about. It is only to the degree that it is different. Here is my favorite Winston Churchill quote on the matter – and I am kind of sad to learn it is not by Churchill.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:George_Bernard_Shaw#Shaw.3F_.22We_have_established_what_you_are.2C_Madam.22

FYI, I am for IP as a concept but I think the current rules are overly generous to the copyright holders.

Nothing about regarding, it is a fact. Scientology IS a cult.
How could anyone possible think otherwise considering what the founder said?

"You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/L._Ron_Hubbard

For others like me who had to look this up, link.

You had to look this up? Now I feel old. Also, get off my lawn!

For others like me who had to look this up, link.

They are indeed members of the species "homo sapiens". And you're right, no other species on earth would do such a thing. Mostly because no other species on earth builds graphics cards.

Reminds me of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace:

Daglass: I figure the following: Sanch is regressing to Homo neanderthalenus. Right now Sanch you're Homo erectus but who knows how long you’ve got?
Sanchez: I appreciate you being straight with me.
Reed: And you and I are Homo sapiens?
Daglass: Correct.
Reed: But if we’re all basically Homos, shouldn’t we get along?

age 65 /snip/ Call it "Walter White Syndrome

I'm 50

You speak as if this is something new.

'There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.' - John Adams, 1980 http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Adams#Quotes

I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers. - John D. Rockefeller.

Standard Oil was defined by petroleum products that were affordable, precisely formulated, accurately labeled, safe to use, and sold in honest weights and measures. Rockefeller could be quite ruthless in business, but what he built was a recognizably modern, high tech, high skilled, industry.

I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.

Attributed by Jim Marrs in the William Lewis film One Nation Under Siege (2008); no published occurrence of this has been located prior to The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy : How the New World Order, Man-Made Diseases, and Zombie Banks Are Destroying America (2010) by Jim Marrs

John D. Rockefeller

i think its more targeted at the global companies like Google, Amazon etc who do their level best to avoid paying local taxes and don;t necessarily have a large physical presence on the ground. I'm sure Google et al would not to exit any country of france's size.

No doubt.

Like all good Socialists, they're targeting other people's money.

Which they will eventually run out of.

Right, Detroit? Right, Greece?

patton trolls be all over this and I'll be stuck down fast

"The more I see of Arabs the less I think of them. By having studied them a good deal I have found out the trouble. They are the mixture of all the bad races on earth, and they get worse from west to east, because the eastern ones have had more crosses." - Patton trolling.

Every attempt to refer chemical questions to mathematical doctrines must be considered, now and always, profoundly irrational, as being contrary to the nature of the phenomena. . . . but if the employment of mathematical analysis should ever become so preponderant in chemistry (an aberration which is happily almost impossible) it would occasion vast and rapid retrogradation....
Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, 1853

Agreed. Sadly it will probably never get modded up to be visible to get the attention it deserves.

Why do you think Max Planck said:

      "Science advances one funeral at a time."

Lots of *great* quotes! http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck

--
Only cowards censor.

"never underestimate the bandwidth of a semi full of mag tapes".

Agreed! My recollection is that it was from Andrew Tanenbaum, and it was "never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway". http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum

I don't like the "rockstar" label, but excellent software developers are more than worth it, as Fred Brooks knew years ago...

Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, clearer, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude.

I don't have the book in front of me, but there is a reference at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks.

That book is worth rereading every few years.

If you vote for a third party, the wrong lizard may get in

If every single voter in this country stopped trying to game the damn system, and voted their conscience, then the powerful would have to figure out some other way to manipulate the system.

Is there something about the geek's brain that demands such precision in language and dismisses flights of fancy as SYNTAX ERROR. RESUBMIT JOB OR ABORT?

In this particular case, though, the aphorism appears to be the invention of Narcotics Anonymous, and was subsequently attributed to various figures who could be plausibly imagined to have said it. source

According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, "when you strike at a king, you must kill him". Merely spilling his blood nonfatally can leave you getting unwanted attention from an irate king and his cohorts of stooges.

Perhaps http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil#Aphorism_146