Something just occurred to me.
My pants were built by the lowest bidder.
Okay, I give up. What is the significance of 1729?
— Mark Ardis, RHIT CS Dept., in RGSB
yes it’s true, this man has no— watch yo’ mouth! just quotin’ ghostbusters!
— Dan, in RGSB
Going to lab in a handbasket, stopping by hell on the way.
— Garrett Mace, in RGSB, expressing the essence of what it is like to be at Rose
What? There is no Zuul? My whole world has been turned upside-down, with no rhyme[0] or reason for anything! What will I do? Where will I go? How will I acquire PREMIUM HAND-CRAFTED DRAFT CRACK ROOT BEER?
— Kent Rosenkoetter, in RGSB
all members of our group have now posted to the same thread on RGSB; i say that counts as an hour or two of meeting time. what do you think?
— Dan, in RGSB
No sleep, go away! Walked all the way to Bigfoot All drank crack root beer
— Dan, in RGSB
Oh Baracus, who was in ’Nam, Mr. T be thy name. Thy van will come with Face and Hannibal, on Earth as it is on TV-Land. Give us this day, our daily milk, and pity us fools, as we pity the fools who cross us. Lead us not into airplanes, and deliver us from Murdock. For thine is the Mohawk and the Van, and the Gold Chains, forever, or at least until the mid-80’s. Amen.
— Vod recites the Mr. T prayer
Look, none of you seem to be getting it, so I’ll try to explain one last time. "Nice guys" who are confident, decent looking (note: I said "decent" not "handsome" or "Fabio-like"), and have their act together financially, socially and emotionally are successful with women. In spades. "Nice guys" who are whiney, lonely and desparate (and lets face it, the only quality they have going for them is that they are "nice") get rejected. If you think you’re the first kind, but you’re still getting rejected, odds are, you’re really the second kind.
— Barbie SOMAD, Forum 3000
I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulder and say to yourself, “Dijkstra would not have liked this,” well, that would be enough immortality for me.
Pedro hit my bat. I really had very little to do with it.
— The Seattle Mariners’ Mark McLemore, one of three strikeout victims in the nine-pitch first inning of Pedro Martinez’s last outing, on being the only player in the inning to even make contact (one foul ball)
He who sacrifices functionality for ease of use Loses both and deserves neither
— From the .signature of Cesar Crusius
Must be able to convert Hex to Ascii.
— A job requirement I ran into while job hunting on monster.com
Balloons and confetti all around!
Grass and flowers and newly sprouted leaves on trees!
— Jing Jing
The JVM says “ArrayIndexOutOfBounds” You were off by one.
— Dan
- Interviewer:
One of the songs on Only Everything is called "Hang Down from Heaven." Could you describe what your idea of heaven would be like?- Juliana Hatfield:
Heaven, um … Heaven is the feeling you get when you’re with a guy that you like who likes you.
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 shaking The shaking becomes a warning It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion
— C.J. Stone, seen in ASR
- Bruce Hoult:
Nevertheless, C++ is wildly sucessful.- Tim Bradshaw:
So is the common cold.
— in c.l.l
- Q:
Which platform is best for running Scheme?- A:
A blackboard.
— Erik Naggum, in c.l.l
# (By the way, it’s interesting to try "while(1) ; xeyes & ; end".)
— Knuth, in
his .fvwm2rc file
I say it is foolish to like pain. But even ecstasy makes my heart hurt. A different pain than that which comes with the blood. A pain of knowing there is a time that I am without her. A pain of knowing the possibility exists… a… a pain of knowing I can be rejected.
- Ritsuko:
She’s not very adept at…- Shinji:
Not adept at what?- Ritsuko:
Living.
Eva
Cursed be the laws which deprive me of such subjects.
— George II, after the battle at Fontenoy in 1745
Old, lame threads don’t go STALE. They just get CHEWIER!
— Matt Economou, circa 1997
I suspect that there are mathematicians out there even now who are getting grants to invent symbols which are not in unicode. Other mathematicians are busy working out the transfinite arithmetic of mathematical notation, thus proving that not only is no finite coding adequate for the needs of your every day working mathematician, but in fact no countable coding is adequate.
— Tim Bradshaw, in c.l.l
… it’s just that in C++ and the like, you don’t trust anybody, and in CLOS you basically trust everybody. the practical result is that thieves and bums use C++ and nice people use CLOS.
…We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the use of arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. There are many things more horrible than bloodshed, and slavery is one of them.
— Padraig Pearse, 1914
i haven’t been quoted in quite some time. i mean, sheehe really raised the standard with his "represent will robinson, represent" comment
— Dan, after I informed him that the previous quote would be quoted.
i don’t get it. i mean, the 60s there was the pet rock, now in the 00s there’s the dual-gendered pet NOTHING. that is NOT progress.
— Dan
Countries with systems of government modelled after the French, such as France[…]
— the Wikipedia entry on Prime Ministers
It is not tasty on chicken nuggets, or mixed with tequila.
— the Wikipedia entry on wasabi
Intelligence: Finding an error in a Knuth text. Stupidity: Cashing that $2.56 check you got.
— Seen in a Slashdot sig
There is but one answer to terrorism and it is best delivered with a Winchester rifle.
— Teddy Roosevelt
Really? Is Emacs 21 in the works? When will it be released? Where can I get a pretest version??
— Eli Zaretskii, in gnu.emacs.help
AI research not based on stated philosophical presuppositions usually turns out to be based on unstated philosophical presuppositions. These are often so wrong as to interfere with developing intelligent systems.
Today is August 21, no? We go to Pravda, in tight leather pants. Get drunk make sex, no?
— Bryan
Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea: massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
— Gene Spafford, circa 1992
So, it’s exactly like you said, except completely the opposite.
— Jason
Symbols don’t get declared. They just are. They are like truth and justice and exist ready to serve you whether you’ve ever called on them before or not.
— Kent Pitman, in c.l.l
So tell me Dr. Booty, why you rock this bash? All my records have a rash; they get so itchy, I gotta scratch.
— Olly
Hey Ted, can Heather, Christina, Hawver, Bryan, Nathaniel and I crash at your place?
Actually, I’ve found that Usenet has helped a lot with my terror of social stupidity. Seeing people I really like and respect behave like idiots in public has been very beneficial.
—Rachael Lininger
Picture C3PO in baggy jeans with a Raiders cap on backwards saying "Oh dear, I believe we must smoke those turkeys," or the Lost in Space robot yelling "Represent, Will Robinson, represent." My brain scares me sometimes.
— Sheehe, on the use of the word "homebot."
IAM TRYING LOCATE SEA WORLD FOR LARGE FISH DONATION CAN YOU HELP? THANK YOU.
— BITCHANDGRUMP@WEBTV.NET, via the Searchbastard response form.
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
— Anonymous, passed along by Jing Jing
It’s running NT (not a concept) 4.0.
- Jerod:
Uuuugh, light beer.- Colin:
Uuuugh, beer.- Jerod:
(indignantly) You and your “taste buds.”
— At the Senior picnic, replete with air quotes
And for that, you shall surely burn in Hell.
— Colin Hill, in response to me adding the previous quote to this quotes file.
… and for that, you shall surely burn in Hell.
— Colin Hill, in response to virtually everything, 3 May 2001
;;; Should this be an obsolete name? If you decide it should, you get ;;; to go through all the sources and change them. (defalias 'string-to-int 'string-to-number)
If ecology was an even slightly useful science, they’d calculate the exact environmental role of these crawly horrors so we could exterminate them and replace them with robots.
— Mike Shapiro, on bugs
You don’t go back to using vi because “Emacs is too complicated.” Only people with serious mental defects "go back to vi".
— Per Abrahamsen, in gnu.emacs.help
We will perhaps eventually be writing only small modules which are identified by name as they are used to build larger ones, so that devices like indentation, rather than delimiters, might become feasible for expressing local structure in the source language.
— Donald E. Knuth, "Structured Programming with goto Statements", Computing Surveys, Vol 6 No 4, Dec. 1974
I’m glad it has your seal of non-disapproval.
— Colin
No memory leaks so far, too. I RULE!
— Curtis
I am a pushdown automaton; my inbox is my stack.
— Me, in an (arguably failed) attempt to explain why I hadn’t responded to an important email in over a week.
- Colin:
What about normalization?- Me:
Now look, I’m dribbling on myself.
— While discussing childbirth
- Me:
TOMORROW IS WEDNESDAY!- Kathleen:
yes, and that means it’s bingo night at the ukranian church
It’s not that Perl programmers are idiots, it’s that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.
Welcome to Chinese Restaurant. Please try your Nice Chinese Food With Chopsticks the traditional and typical of Chinese glonous history and cultual.
— The chopstick wrappers at First Wok
Foot-in-mouth disease is spreading. Help stop the epidemic! Know what you’re talking about before you post, or shut up.
— from Erik
Naggum’s .signature, seen in
c.l.l
One wonders if efficient systems of distributed government that are spontaneously ordered are possible in general, or only in special, limited circumstances. And if they are only possible in special circumstances, what are those circumstances and where can we get some?
— Tom
life is better within parenthesis
— Nathan Froyd, putting a lisper spin on the Python "life is better without braces."
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should point out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions is not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generate them.
— Pierre Trudeau
I chose BeOS because it’s the only OS I know of that can safely sink into the background without crippling functionality while opening apps instantly and multitasking like the triple-breasted whore of eroticon-six.
— Michael Burg
OOP programs contain more redundant info than is necessary.
If you are concerned about netiquette, you are either concerned about your own and follow good netiquette, or you are concerned about others and violate good netiquette by bothering people with your “concern”, as the only person whose netiquette you can affect is precisely yourself.
— Erik Naggum, in c.l.l
Lisp developers have the satisfaction of knowing that they got it right 30 years before anyone else. But that’s about all they have to show for 40 years of hard work and hundreds of millions of dollars in government and private funding. These days, most former Lisp programmers are stuck using Unix and Microsoft programming environments and, not only do they have to put up with these inferior environments, but they’re saddled with the mournful knowledge that these environments are inferior.
— http://www.arsdigita.com/books/tcl/introduction.adp
snoc’ing is awesome.
— Me, while Casey, Nathan, Kent, and I were working on our AOP final project
I’m searching for alien life, in my pants.
— Imler, while considering running SETI@Home on his Visor
wow, it’s almost 2! time does fly when you’re dying
— Kent Rosenkoetter, while playing against his senior project (a bot) in Quake 2
When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect?
— Thomas Sowell
Alice: We’ll probably have to work all night on this presentation, Asok. Asok: That’s brilliant! You plan to use your inefficiency to make your procrastination look like martyrdom! Alice: Now I have to kill you. Asok: Please do. Reincarnation is my only hope.
Dilbert
Incidentally, I think gotos are ok EVEN THOUGH my mid-term exam at MIT in compiler design long ago had a question on it that said "Gotos are (a) good (b) bad." I guessed from the form of the question that (b) must be right.
I have an entire directory of monkey sounds.
— Sheehe
As long as they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.
— Soviet laborers’s proverb
- Brian:
So what we’re trying to do is subtly cover a big fuck up that’s been brewing for years.- Dols:
That’s what Waters is all about.
Cross-country skis are for me like BSD unix—just similar enough to something I’m good at to completely screw me up.
— Tom
Crouching Panda, Hidden Hawver
— Hawver, on his ill Panda style
mmmm traveling salesman. My answer was that going anywhere but boston was a waste of time. My prof was not ammused ;)
— Hawver
Oh, obviously, Terre Haute is where bad people go when they die.
— Curtis
You are sketch-the-mathematical-constant-e.
— Hawver
No, I did not spike the salad with crack.
This can optionally include a performance of the classic Mike Tabletop Theater, wherein utensils, condiments, and even your food itself becomes part of the drama. (Past favorites include The Magic Flying Fork of Pain and Deathtrap Saltshaker)
I just have to make sure to get home by the time the T stops running or I’ll turn into a pumpkin.
If you have young children, avoid purchasing bleach products bearing pictures of Pikachu drinking the bleach.
— The Onion’s Poison Prevention Tips
I have a son who knows everything there is to know about small, furry animals. It’s awful.
One Page Principle: A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be understood.
— Mark Ardis, now of the RHIT CS Dept., found in the UNIX fortune(6) file
Bend over and receive your health care.
— Kent Rosenkoetter, while we were talking about Question 5 over dinner the other night
Or is it that you would rather attack the indefensible position that we don’t hold than defend the indefensible position that you do hold?
— David Friedman, to some minarchist, in HPO
A good song should make you wanna tap your foot and get with your girl. A great song should destroy cops and set fire to the suburbs. I’m only interested in writing great songs.
— Tom Morello
Claude is my hero he makes my interpreter look quite amateur
Having Ayn as an Enlightenment author really tickles me, even if she does come in between me and Carolyn.
— Tom
Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense.
alright, so that movie was good. i liked it. but it’s a big stinking pile of crap. and i hope to see it again soon.
— Dan, on "Magnolia"
- Me:
Would anyone like the last cookie?- Nathan:
I can’t take the last cookie on principle.- Dave (reaching for cookie):
I was raised by wolves!
It’s guys like you that keep this economy strong!
— Someone who walked past us while we were waiting 8 hours in line for a PS2, at about the 4 hour mark.
Employee: The Internet should be free. Why should I have to pay some greedy corporation or look at ads??!! Dogbert: I will now use this cardboard tube to explain the intricacies of capitalism.
Dilbert
I’ve been waiting years for this glorious event. What? No, I’m not a Met or Yankee fan. I’m a terrorist with a relatively small amount of plutonium.
— Victor Kritikos, Trader, on the Subway Series (in The Onion)
San Diego: It’s Boston without the crappy weather.
— Bryan
*grin*Subconscious Fraggle memories. Cool.
— Curtis
To illustrate the need for understanding in translation, a classic story describes the machine translation of the phrase “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” into Russian and back. The translation is said to have come out: “The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.”
— Strategies for Natural Language Processing, ed. Wendy Lehnert and Martin Ringle
There’s no way I could possibly justify going to Denny’s. How can I resist?
— Curtis
How do most people use the truth? They spray it on like perfume, experience the temporary effect, feel transformed by it, then let it fade away.
Girls: “Do not run! We are your friends!”
— Curtis, equating them with the aliens from "Mars Attacks."
If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government — and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.
— Edward Abbey
The neverending pasta bowl is gone at the Olive Garden now anyhow… what else do I have to live for? :)
— Curtis
Ted, don’t forget to remind Casey to remind you to remind me to remind you that your mom wants you to remind her to e-mail you to have you e-mail her to let her know you got in ok, ok?
— Hawver
You are a wanted man, Ted. Knowledge is food.
— Jing Jing
The few users willing to experiment with alternatives are vacuumed up by the quality-flawed but still philosophically attractive open source meme.
— Scot Hacker
Something about the GPL causes developers to not write documentation.
I am familiar with the following American concepts: fast food, puritanism, self-censorship, shootouts in high schools, cultural imperialism, predictable movies. What else is there?
— Andrej Bauer SOMAD, Forum 2000
The RH7 transfer is capabile of killing itself every hour or so. I’ve come to worship wget.
they don’t call me “dan moore, man of video rental membership mystery” for nothing
— Dan
Recognize who you are, what you can do, and your deepest sources of pure satisfaction. Live accordingly. Rinse, repeat.
— Andrew
Actually, Euler came up with them, but Euler’s name is already on so many things, you’d think he was a corporation, so we gave Catalan a chance.
— Dr. Ralph Grimaldi, RHIT Math Dept., on the origin and naming of the Catalan numbers
In the truest spirit of usenet I actually have zero idea what I’m talking about and am making all this up, but it does seem reasonable and has the added benefint of possibly even beng true.
— Richard Sexton <richard@vrx.net>
There are only two pains in life: the pain of discipline and the pain of regret. Discipline weighs ounces. Regret weighs tons.
— Andrew
I shall attempt, in the future, to know what I’m talking about. I guarantee nothing.
Great stuff! How did you find this?
— Dr. Mark Ardis, RHIT CS dept., on Forum 2000
mouse->USB->PS/2->serial->switch->serial->PS/2 doesn’t work.
— Dan
Barney wants to be everyone’s Mommy and Daddy and take their money and tell them what to do. Dave wants to leave us alone and give us our money back so we can buy more toys and stuff. I like Dave.
— Elaine (Age 6), at a debate between Rep. Barney Frank and Dave Euchner (LP Congressional candidate)
You’ve pretty much got the market cornered on extropian/objectivish/ elitist views on cultural shift and explanation.
- Ted:
I see your Schwartz is as big as mine.- Andrew:
…That’s what Leonard P should write to David K once LSO is published. Just that one line in an e-mail! We should spoof his address.
Hah. Northville may be good at fixin’ cars, but it does not make tasty jerky.
— Becki
Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching.
— Satchel Paige
Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.
— A fortune cookie
BTW, I got quite excited reading your
fortune(6)file… until I realised that I’m not married! :(
— Jamie Mellway, a Canadian
eventually, i’ll create multiple names to compete with william. :)
— Andrew, on his number of entries in this quotes file.
Stay hip or die!
— Andrew
jamba juice! eternal youth doesn’t come from a fountain. it comes from a 4-speed extropian blender.
— Andrew
i’ve figured out why i am the philosopher of connectionism and the rest of you all suck!!
— Andrew
All signs point to yes. Reply hazy. Try again. My sources say no.
— The Magic 8 Ball SOMAD, Forum 2000
PDF: It’s the sound of one hand flipping you off.
— Carolyn
This discussion is one of the rare instances when reiterating Rand’s axiom "Existence exists" is actually useful.
— Carolyn and Tom
I keep my boyfriend in Canada…married.
— Carolyn
Farsam, please stop beating on me; it’s just not the right time.
— Carolyn
As usual, this being a 1.3.x release, I haven’t even compiled this kernel yet. So if it works, you should be doubly impressed.
— Linus Torvalds, announcing kernel 1.3.3
— Linus Torvalds, regarding the fact that Linux started off as a terminal emulator
Go not unto the Usenet for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (and quite a few things that just have nothing at all to do with the question).
— seen in a .signature somewhere
We are not supposed to post the directions on the internet, so they’ll have to be provided by email.
— Kirez
Her method is great! The facts of reality Give rise to concepts.
— What I Like Most in Rand (yours truly, 20 August 2000)
During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I was riding the pogostick.
— something Andrew sent me
I just noticed that someone has won the tic-tac-toe game on your head.
— Andrew, referring to the Friedman cwatset hat.
When in doubt, use brute force.
— Ken Thompson
Oh, these boring people, why don’t they go home … oh, Ted lives here.
If you kids don’t start behaving back there, it’s going to be the largest rectal thermometer in the world!
— Jimbo, as we approached the world’s largest thermometer in Baker, CA, on the way to Las Vegas
That’s one great thing about Omaha. Infrastructure.
— Jerod
Between the two of you there’s seven years of college education, valued at more than $200,000. I hope you guys can fix the toilet.
— Bryan’s father, to Bryan and Jerod as they battled to fix Bryan’s broken toilet.
- Bill:
I wanted to play some old school Objectivist rock, so I thought I’d play-- Dave Euchner:
Rush?
The Soviet Union has fallen, and therefore so must Barney Frank.
A is for ActiveWorks complete Enterprise Application Integration environment, that’s good enough for me!
— Herb
If devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
— Ayn Rand
We were a nation of people of the environment…no, wait…
We were a nation of people who loved raping and pillaging the environment…[laughter]
[getting it right this time] We were a nation of people of the Enlightenment.
Let there be municipal fire departments!
This is one of those leaps of faith, which don’t always work.
You could say that Ayn Rand, when writing "The Objectivist Ethics," stood on her head and did all sorts of crazy stuff.
— Dave Saum
Measurement omission sucks.
— Carolyn
So you resort to some fictitious plenum…
— Heather Demarest
Oh, we’re turning into fucking Canadians.
— Wyatt X
In either case, he isn’t her boyfriend, so it doesn’t matter.
— Bill’s Razor
That was an amazing cloud of anti-thought that just went by.
— Me
In general, y’all are put in the uncomfortable position of saying X, Y, and Z are self-evident when 90% of philosophers have denied X, Y, and Z.
— Jason Raibley, on LSO
- Hill:
I’m looking for my Spinoza quotes.- David Kelley:
No PalmPilot should be without them.
Nat is surprisingly full of it.
— Wyatt X
It’s all true. Everything is true.
It’s great fun.
— David Kelley, on ’Whack-a-Mole’
Ayn Rand is like a female Yoda.
— Luis
Why do I have to do my own thinking?
I won’t embarrass anyone. I won’t embarrass you either, Phil.
— John Bechtel, to Phil Coates
I’m gonna go get some meat.
— Carolyn
Booty is said in several ways.
— Carolyn
One of them gets booty, and the other one gets screwed.
— Carolyn
Most of the time, being rational involves no thought.
Kirez won’t know it’s not bacon!
— Me (props to Dan)
For all they care, you could be a robot monkey butler.
I think you have a wide conception of booty.
— Luis
Who put that in the paper?
— Tom & Carolyn
Oh shit, I’m operating on the premise of death again.
— Jason Raibley
Let me hide the truth here.
It’s not something you can do at home by yourself.
— David Kelley, on coercion
What the fuck? I don’t even drink and I’m pissed off!
— Wyatt X
You better not call me a girl anymore.
— Hanah (a girl)
I love my ass to be in pain!
— Carolyn (yes, this is taken out of context.)
I’m sorry, but it must go in.
— Me, to Carolyn (also horribly out of context.)
The few, the proud, the subsidized.
Why can’t we kill Carolyn?
I often think of killing people; every day.
I’m 93% certain and 25% kung fu.
— Kate Brick
It’s called Acme because it does everything.
— Rob Pike
If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.
— L. Ron Hubbard
If the law is of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law.
— Henry David Thoreau
I had to write something on a whiteboard the other day for somebody else, and was shocked to find that I was writing in Graffiti.
— Paul Tomblin, in ASR
It is the hardest thing for intellectuals to understand, that just because they haven’t thought of something, somebody else might.
— Kelley Ross
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
— Aristotle
How dare you call capitalists "scum"? Your objectivist license is REVOKED.
No no no. You live in Cambridge. Saying Cambridge is Boston is like saying Sparta is Greece.
— Xena SOMAD, Forum 2000
Wha’chu talkin’ ’bout Kirez?
— Andrew, Carolyn, and myself, in Gary Coleman voices
Well, there goes my reputation… At least it reduced my rent for the summer.
— Carolyn
Ply me with alcohol, and I’ll take you both to the dungeon!
Those words, ‘temperate’ & ‘moderate’, are words either of political cowardice, or of cunning, or seduction… A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is a species of vice.
— Thomas Paine
The kill_team() function is more than a system call. It’s therapy.
— The BeBook
- Me (sternly):
Don’t make me quote you again.- Carolyn:
I’m sorry, I’ll behave.
PDF is evil, and sucks new fresh scent baby powder!
— Carolyn
There is a reason that Microsoftware has become a standard. I say unto ye, "Qua!"
— Carolyn
Well, poopy on that!
— Carolyn
Dimensions will always be expressed in the least usable term. Velocity, for example, will be expressed in furlongs per fortnight.
— The UNIX fortune(6) file
And the concept "the Red Sox beat the Yankees" is, in the hypothetical, true.
— David Friedman, in HPO
Only a NAZI would try to invoke Godwin’s [law] deliberately
— Jeff Gostin in ASR
If "certain" means something like "all available evidence supports this belief; no available evidence opposes it," then once you are certain, the way you stay certain is to avoid collecting any more evidence.
In matters of life and death, that isn’t the right tactic—because your objective is truth, not certainty.
— David Friedman, in HPO
Somebody forgot the clothes on her Barbies!
— Dustin, to Kubota-sensei
We otta set that on fire and use MATLAB.
— Dr. Sherman, on Maple V
And the storytelling… that reminded me of Software Engineering.
— Frank Young, in HCI
The proper response to trouble is immaturity.
— Me, to Curtis. It’s sort of an inside joke, so don’t worry if you don’t get it.
We don’t make it secure for you. We make it secure for us.
Some folks are dissatisfied with free enterprise if it doesn’t work perfectly, and satisfied with government if it works at all.
— Daniel B. Klein
But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the limits of the law," because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.
I am much funnier than is generally known.
Aaaarrrghhhghhh is Aaaarrrghhhghhh.
— Jaws SOMAD, Forum 2000
It is easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of computers by the sense of accomplishment you get from getting them to work at all.
— Douglas Adams
The most important hardware tools are emacs, perl, and grep.
— The Cube
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
— Ayn Rand
Capricorn: Your making certain not to let your left hand know what the right is doing is negated by the fact that you cannot find your ass with either one.
— The Onion’s horoscope column
One of the core meanings of enlightenment is: liberation from false and spurious value-attachments that blind you to your true essence. When and if I learn that I am ultimately my mind and my manner of using it - when and if I understand that ego is only the internal experience of consciousness, the ultimate center of awareness - I am free.
There’s nothing like devouring saturated fat and theobromine in the shape of a helpless woodland creature to alleviate one’s difficulties.
— Curtis
There was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
My brother is hip-hop enabled; let me call him.
— The Cube
Mmmm, Madonna music. Four speakers. Sounds sooo good… yummy. Relax relax relax free time whee!!!
— Curtis
Don’t make me get all "go fix the AE-35 unit" on your ass.
— Hal 9000 SOMAD, Forum 2000
Anything worth doing is worth doing half-assed.
— Colin Hill
Wires are starting to get crossed, Kim wants to know why I’m asking her about gun sellers’ self interest, and Will thinks I love him now.
— Hawver, during an IM mishap
Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.
— Howard Aiken
You see a warning sign. Translated, it says "In case of fire, do not use difficult-to-escape-from sealed metal box reminiscent of an oven, only with a flammable interior. Use the stairs instead."
— The Cube
This code indentation style makes me look fat.
— The Cube
would you feel safer if it were "Anarchist Libertarian Objectivist Cthulhu Worshippers Who Carry Really Long Knives And Can Smell Fear"?
— The Cube
i’m glad i use less to read mail now.
— The Cube
Bomis: The most elaborate hoax on the Internet.
— One of the many Bomis taglines
Is it a faux pas to cube your own spoutings?
— The Cube
T is for transhumanist E is for economicst D is for (supa)Dupa-Fly
— Hawver
finding bugs in TeX must be the closest thing computer science has to, say, capping a burning oil well in Kuwait
— The Cube
Some [RFC’s] are presented in a nice clear way, and some were written by Tim Berners-Lee.
— Dan
The best way to overcome temptation is to succumb to it.
— Oscar Wilde
The State is the coldest of all cold monsters that bites with stolen teeth.
— Nietzsche
- Frank Young:
Apparently, women don’t have heart attacks.- J.P. Mellor:
Maybe they don’t have hearts.
The birth of a child isn’t something that happens every day, even in my household.
— Claude Anderson, RHIT CS Dept., on the birth of his 9th child
Given enough time, I could probably design an elevator system that would facilitate the needs of a prostitution ring.
— Frank Young (RHIT CS Dept. chair)
If we can just avoid any more female advice, we ought to be able to get out of here.
— Han Solo
We put the dot in .mom.
— The Cube
Some people, when confronted with a Unix problem, think "I know, I’ll use
sed." Now they have two problems.
— The Cube
He has no time for smugglers who drop their pants at the first sign of an Imperial Cruiser.
— The Cube
The one constant in the universe is that females are trouble.
— Quark on DS9
Aquarias (January 20 — February 18): Pow! A ninja chop to your head. Slam! A ninja kick to your back. Thunk! A ninja throwing star, sunk deep into your chest. Ninjas will figure heavily this week. So beware! When out and about, keep an eye cocked for black-clad warriors crouched in unexpected places. Like Baskin Robbins, where no one expects ninjas, since they are assumed to be very healthy, and ice cream is very fatty. Look for them crouched near the yogurt.
— The Weekly Week
If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing well - unless doing it well takes so long that it isn’t worth doing anymore. Then you just do it ’good enough’.
— The Camel Book
Two economists walked past a Porsche showroom. One of them pointed at a shiny car in the window and said, "I want that."
"Obviously not," the other replied.
— from David Friedman’s Hidden Order
Trouble Funk is fully consistent with the axioms of Objectivism.
— Hawver
Right thinking is thinking like I do, of course.
The whole world steps aside for the man who knows where he is going.
— Anonymous
You’re not supposed to know about Iowa. It’s a secret.
— Erica Schultz
Take your pants off, monkey-boy!
— Hawver
If I’m with a girl and we’re travelling at the speed of light, how old does she have to be for me to get on her?
— Bill
I think he’s sitting on it.
— Me, when someone asked Kirez for the source of some figures he was throwing around
Well, you would have an infinite supply of Japanese schoolgirl underwear.
— Spot
Does anyone have an N hole?
— Kate
You were trying to nibble my earlobe, you weirdo!
i’m sick sick sick of java’s non-polymorphistic agenda.
— Dan
What part of "turing complete" don’t you understand?
— The Cube
If the glove fits, you must commit!
— Me, referring to committing a (finally) working version of our senior project into CVS before something terrible could happen, at 4:23 AM
’Usenet "belongs" to those who administer the hosts of which it is comprised’
— RFC 1036, draft revision
Sure, with only 8MB of RAM you can run Win95 - in the same sort of way that a carving knife will kill an angry rhinoceros if used correctly. You just wouldn’t want to depend on doing it every day.
— The Cube
Ted, if you don’t ask her out before you come home, I’m not going to let you become my intellectual heir.
(10 seconds pass)
I’m serious.
— Hawver
First Wok egg rolls are like hot oil wrestling… only without the wrestling.
— Colin Hill
You citizens only have the right to pursue happiness - you’re not allowed to be happy.
— Ambiguous government agents, in Dilbert
Find that which brings you joy and chase it down to the ends of the earth.
— Jasmine Azure
I pity the Fu!
— Bitter Jet Li SOMAD, Forum 2000
The Applesoft Engineer "Unknown" has unexpectedly quit.
— The Cube
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
— AI Koan
LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing.
— Alan Perlis
Trusting people to be creative and constructive when given more freedom does not imply an overly optimistic belief in the perfectibility of human nature. It is, rather, belief that the inevitable errors and sins of the human condition are far better overcome by individuals working together in an environment of trust and freedom and mutual respect than by individuals working under a multitude of rules, regulations, and restraints imposed upon them by another group of imperfect individuals.
— Peter Senge
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never move furniture for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to move furniture for me.
— The most frequently heard comment when everyone helped Kirez move to New Hampshire
HelloKitty: I have no mouth, so I must be cute!
— The KiboSphere
Reality is what you smack into after you make a leap of faith.
— Jaffo
I went to try to find spectrum pictures for you but i have no idea what kind of car a spectrum is :(
— Jasmine Azure
I will not cube. I will not cube. I will not cube.
— The Cube
quoth the raven, set car bang
— The Cube
- Me:
I’m not currently subscribed to bugtraq.- Dan:
and you call yourself a human being…
I will return the club to SLACKWARE!!! …but don’t quote me on that. …At least not until after the election.
— Colin Hill, on his candidacy for RHUL president
Watch as I eat my bagel and try not to look vacant doing it!
— Doris
MUHAHAHAHA! My joy will penatrate your jaded soul!
— Jasmine Azure
Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.
— Mohandas K. Gandhi
Morpheus: There is a difference between knowing the RFC and following the RFC.
— Jeff Gostin in ASR
i love being the inspiration of sexy japanese school girl conversations
— Jasmine Azure
Everyone who ever walked barefoot into a child’s room late at night hates Legos.
— Tony Kornheiser
From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. It wasn’t a miracle, we just decided to go.
— Jim Lovell
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
He has achieved success who has worked well, laughed often, and loved much.
— Elbert Hubbard
If you want unconditional love, buy a dog.
— Anonymous
A lot of people voting for Pat Buchanan say they are doing so to send a message. Apparently that message is, ’Hey, look at me, I’m an idiot.’
If only women came with pull-down menus and online help.
— Anonymous
The question isn’t “who is going to let me?” it’s “who is going to stop me?”
— Ayn Rand
My name is
sendmail.cf. You killed my process. Prepare tovi.
— Unknown, from skud’s quotes file.
Sufficiently compressed data is indistinguishable from Spam(tm).
— Kibo
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
— Bertrand Russell
I have this horrible feeling that some of the less-readable works of James Joyce might just turn out to be early-release Windows/NT code.
— Tanuki
Sure, only 2 percent of the Internet population uses lynx, but they’re the top 2 percent.
— petro, in ASR
So, if I’m damned to hell already, why not use pine?
— Tina Cooling, 25 Sep 1996
It’s too bad "Elements of Style" (Strunk and White) is such a thin book — beating you over the head with it would not cause nearly the amount of pain you deserve.
— David Canzi, 4 Jan 1996
You know the old saying—any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from a Perl script.
— The Camel Book
Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice.
— Sun FORTRAN Reference Manual
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
It often happens that I wake up at night and begin to think of a serious problem and decide that I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that *I am the Pope.*
— Pope John the 23rd
The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
— FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers
Any large extension of the Government into business affairs - no matter what the pretense and no matter how the the extension is labeled - will be bound to promote waste and put a curb on our prosperity and progress.
— Thomas Alva Edison
A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
— Barry Goldwater
A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly— “You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
— AI Koan
I’m your little Velveteen Rabbit, Ted… only love can make me real :)
— Curtis
I think about dogs all the time.
— Carolyn
Graphics tend to corrupt. Animated graphics corrupt absolutely.
— The Cube
The communist rulers of capitalist China have met the enemy, and it is them.
— from an editorial in the Boston Globe
Rights don’t enforce themselves—and we don’t have the option of dressing Ayn Rand up in a Superman costume and having her enforce them for us.
— David Friedman, in HPO
What’s the bib format for when you cite a cubism?
— The Cube
Is it bad that, when you run an AltaVista search for First Wok +host:.rose-hulman.edu the second item returned is “Freshman Application for Admission?”
— Me
chinese food microwave reheating tip #1: when the chicken explodes, it’s done.
— Dan
What would it take to get you to come to San Diego for 3-4 months this summer to work on a cool project that will change the world?
— Jimmy Wales
Don’t deny or disown what you see or experience merely because you can’t explain it, justify it, or fit it into some familiar frame-of-reference. Allow a large space in your psyche to accommodate ambiguity and uncertainty. Don’t invent explanations prematurely just so you can tell yourself you have the universe all tied up in one neat package. Keep your eyes open, keep observing, and be confident that sooner or later the truth will appear to you, providing, of course, you live long enough. And if you don’t, well, hasn’t it been an interesting adventure anyway?
Let yourself know and fully experience how important love is and honor that importance in your actions. Don’t ever be careless with love. Be aware of the preciousness of each moment of your existence. Be aware that none of us is immortal — the clock is always ticking and none of us knows how long any of us has got. The time to let that other person experience how loved and valued he or she is by us, is right now. It’s one thing to love — and quite another to have the wisdom and courage to live that love fully, unreservedly, and to the hilt. Fully to surrender to love can be terrifying, but it’s the price life asks of us in exchange for the possibility of ecstasy.
I think it’s comforting to know that, whenever you need a friend, there’s always some fanatical cult out there somewhere, waiting with open arms.
— Unattributed, from Mike Bloy’s homepage.
So this is what it’s like if you cat a large binary to /dev/audio.
— Greg Buxton, regarding an awful opening band
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
— H.L. Mencken
Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn’t going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.
— Lois McMaster Bujold
A is A; I am right; you are wrong; qua qua qua qua qua qua.
i’m now officially taking it on, as a chore of daily life, to try to appear as many times in your quote file as possible. don’t quote me on that, though.
— Dan
there will be no cuddling in my car not involving me. and there will be no cuddling involving me and someone else of the same gender. therefore, the likelyhood of cuddling in my car is depressingly low. QED.
— Dan
I am my
.signature.
— Kibo
Boredom is simply not allowed in Store 24. It’s been banned.
— Bob Gordon, President of Store 24
You know, I love it when sensei shakes her booty.
— Dustin
They always credit the russian winter for stopping various invasions, but when was the last time anyone even considered invading New England?
— Hawver
you left boston, boston didn’t leave you.
— Bill, to me
You are not expected to understand this.
— A comment from the source of UNIX
6th Ed, unix/slp.c, line 438
capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to.
— douglas adams
Boston really does have an extroardinary amount of weirdos living amongst it. Truly amazing. Seattle has its fair share of loons, but each time I visit the city of Boston I am simply astonished at the volumes of nuts adorning its streets and subway stations. And a goodly portion of them aren’t quiet about it, either. They feel an insatiable urge to come up to you and poke you in the shoulder while shouting "SASSIFRILLIAC! GREB! HEY! YOU! FREEBLEGAGAGAGAGA!!" I figure that Seattle’s quota of the Touched wll eventually reach Boston’s current level at about the year 2100. By then I believe Boston will have so many kooks floating around that it will be touted as the world’s biggest outdoor year-round carnival. All sorts of people will shout "HEY! COCHISE!" at you for no apparent reason, and it’ll be amusing instead of puzzling and/or frightening.
— Leah Verre, seen in ARK
Some of us drank margeuritas. Others of us, namely Kibo, drank some sort of pink toxic substance known as Store 24 fruit punch.
— Leah Verre, seen in ARK
The early bird gets the cube.
— The Cube
The benefits of other activities come only to those who have already become, with great difficulty, complete masters of such pursuits, but in the study of philosophy pleasure accompanies growing knowledge; for pleasure does not follow learning; rather, learning and pleasure advance side by side.
— Epicurus
The study of nature does not create men who are fond of boasting and chattering or who show off the culture that impresses the many, but rather men who are strong and self-sufficient, and who take pride in their own personal qualities not in those that depend on external circumstances.
— Epicurus
It is impossible for someone to dispel his fears about the most important matters if he doesn’t know the nature of the universe but still gives some credence to myths.
— Epicurus
We show our feeling for our friends’ suffering, not with laments, but with thoughtful concern.
— Epicurus
It is not the pretense but the real pursuit of philosophy that is needed; for we do not need the semblance of health but rather true health.
— Epicurus
Do nothing in your life that will cause you to fear if it is discovered by your neighbor.
— Epicurus
…the end of all our exploring will be to arrive awhere we started And know the place for the first time.
— T.S. Eliot
Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that.
— Samuel Beckett
The Master said: "To learn something and then to put it in to practice at the right time: is this not a joy."
— The Analects of Confucius, 1.1
The Master said: "A gentleman would be ashamed should his deeds not match his words."
— The Analects of Confucius, 14.27
つくえの上に だれが いますか。
Who indeed.
— Colin Hill
Dan: But you’re not allowed to compile the classloader without the proper chant, lest your bytecodes be cursed! Me: And what praytell is the proper chant? Dan: Damned if i know. I just deal with cursed bytecodes.
— while working on our senior project
Riding through the meadow Trotting across the brook My pony and I are the best of friends DIE PONY DIE KNIFE IN THE HEAD
— Barbie SOMAD, Forum 2000
For A defined as the set of people within this room, assume that there is some limit x for which the members approach a value of “Dan”. Then for any epsilon greater than zero, it may be proved that for p in A, |p - x| < epsilon.
— Curtis
I’d like some kind of gift suggestion for the "guy who has it all". Any ideas?
- Godel SOMAD:
Give him the set of guys who don’t have it all.- Plato SOMAD:
What?- Godel SOMAD:
I was going for a little math paradox there. Give me a break, I haven’t been feeling well.
Obviously if it is important for you to be at your friend’s house, the relevant economic forces will come into play.
In the perfect society, the bakers will strike and deny you the pies of their labor until you acknowledge that they deserve to be fairly compensated for their heroism in productively creating pies.
As I asked in my seminal work Atlas Cooked, “Who is Sara Lee?”
Sugar makes the world go ’round. Caffeine makes it spin faster.
— The Cube
Disco TeX, yeah yeah.
— The Cube
Sleep is not a right.
For something that does not exist, the Internet Engineering Task Force has has quite an impact.
— Scott Bradner
Calling EMACS an editor is like calling the Earth a hunk of dirt.
— Chris DiBona
You got to stand for somethin’, or you’ll fall for anything.
— Aaron Tippin
I just wanted to declare that I hate e-mailing lists. People always ask such interesting questions, and I can’t seem to restrain myself from replying.
:-)
— Diana Mertz Brickell, 27 April 1995
It is therefore correct to say that senses do not err-not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all.
— Kant
You can almost smell the stench of failed social policies as you fill out the forms.
— The Cube
I have a simple rule in life: If I don’t understand something, it must be bad.
— Linus Torvalds
If you don’t understand it, it’s your own problem.
— Hideaki Anno, Director of Neon Genesis Evangelion
Captain! Socialists off the starboard bow!
— The Cube
That which is proper to each thing is by nature best and most pleasant for it; for man, therefore, the life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else IS man. This life therefore is also the happiest.
— Aristotle
If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Enough liquor, and that code might start looking sexy again.
— The Cube
- Paul Valery:
Science is a collection of successful recipes.- Jordin Kare:
Nonsense. Engineering is a collection of successful recipes. Science is a bunch of kids playing in the kitchen and making a mess.
In short, computer networks, like the printing press 500 years ago, allow ordinary citizens to distribute their views in different ways and to different audiences than were previously possible. This new-found freedom brings with it many unsolved social, political, and moral issues. The solution to these problems is left as an exercise for the reader.
— Prof. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks
This obsessive, arcane book is an example of everything that is wrong with legal scholarship. Other disciplines have simple, easy-to-understand citation systems, but not law. Someone should do an analysis of the people who have worked on this book to see how many of them have gone mad.
— Customer review for Uniform System of Citation: The Bluebook found on Amazon.com.
Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you’ll get ten different answers, but there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on: Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us. It’ll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu and Einstein and Morobuto and Buddy Holly and Aristophenes…and all of this…all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars.
— Sinclair, "Infection", Babylon 5
The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.
— either Alexis de Tocqueville or Alexander Fraser Tytler
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
— Barry Goldwater (actually written by Karl Hess)
A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and all that is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
— Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural address
Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others?
— Thomas Jefferson, in his 1801 inaugural address
The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder.
"Are we to understand, asked the judge, "that you hold your own interests above the interests of the public?"
"I hold that such a question can never arise except in a society of cannibals."
— Ayn Rand
A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie.
— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
When only cops have guns, it’s called a "police state".
The kind of charity you can force out of people nourishes about as much as the kind of love you can buy — and spreads even nastier diseases.
The Surgeon General should issue a warning about playing with girls.
— Calvin
What makes you believe your elbow is a remote french outpost?
— Eliza, while talking to the pinhead
Luke! Me your father! Join me, and we rule Cookie as father/son!
— Cookie Monster SOMAD, Forum 2000
Give man cookie, he eat for day. Teach man make cookies, he eat for lifetime!
— Cookie Monster SOMAD, Forum 2000
In the world of physics, we’ve all heard of the "Doppler Effect" which causes train whistles to sound higher in pitch as the train approaches and then sound lower in pitch as the train recedes. There is, however, a lesser-known effect called the "Dopeler Effect." The Dopeler Effect is the tendency of stupid ideas to sound much smarter when they came at you quickly.
— NPR’s Car Talk show
Bitter Crack Herb and I don’t care.
— Colin
Taking potshots at Bill Gates is easy. Doing what Bill Gates does isn’t.
— Frank Young (RHIT CS Dept. Chair)
I can’t wait to read a Scheme book that has this entry in the index: Recursion: see Recursion
— Colin Hill
World trade leaders met in Seattle today amidst a flurry of protests from environmentalists, activists and other groups of people who shower infrequently. Protesters fear that foreign laborers will take away American jobs. And they may well be right, since shortly after being arrested the American protesters were replaced by cheaper, harder-working Asian protesters. At one point, the protesters stormed a McDonald’s, claiming the chain serves genetically altered beef. McDonald’s denied this emphatically, insisting their burgers contain no beef at all.
— Craig Kilborn, "Late, Late Show," CBS, Nov. 30.
Now you know Everything. How does it feel to Omniscient?
Dude, deontologic ethics systems have a duty to kiss my behind.
— Hawver
Success is mine! Majordomo loves me. Yay!!!!!!!
— Jasmine Azure
Slashdot is just Usenet with a lousier user interface. I don’t see the attraction.
Should we throw another human wave of structural engineers at stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or should we just let the damn thing fall over and build a tower that doesn’t suck?
To throw away an honest friend is to throw your life away.
— Sophocles
Don’t choke Ted, death is bad. Even for very small values of death.
— Curtis, ever the mathematician
Windows NT crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death. No one hears your screams.
— Peter Rothman
Now that we got those evaluations out of the way, I can tell you all off.
— Dr. Ralph Grimaldi, RHIT Mathematics
Then I’ll arbitrarily check people with the quickness for I will have the quickness with which to check them.
— Colin Hill
BUGS: It is not yet possible to change operating system by writing to /proc/sys/kernel/ostype.
— Linux sysctl(2) manpage
(Abstract of a post to OWL:) I briefly defend the Objectivist ethic against one of its supporters.
— Scott Ryan
(On going to war over religion:) "You’re basically killing each other to see who’s got the better imaginary friend."
— Rich Jeni
I will never, ever in my entire life even come close to understanding females.
— Curtis
It’s not even a scam, it’s being a girl.
— Hawver
One divided by an infinite number should be, kinda, zero.
— Dr. Ralph Grimaldi, RHIT Math Departement
If I were getting paid by the hour, I’d definitely do all of the arithematic by hand.
— Dr. Ralph Grimaldi, RHIT Math Dept.
ばかな サップさん、 ですね。
— くぼたせんせい
C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow away your whole leg!
— Bjarne Stroustrup
Well, when you get right down to it, who doesn’t want to be a Japanese schoolgirl?
— Someone Who Shall Go Unnamed, But Who Claimed To Be Conan the Barbarian At The Time
If you face life without the conviction that you have a right to be happy, you will not fight for your happiness.
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
— Henry Spencer
Ted’s a walking, talking squiggly green line.
— Dan
I didn’t here you, i refuse to hear you. i evade you. whoops, you went right past me. i evaded you. im darth evader.
— Perkins
The geographical center of Boston is in Roxbury. Due north of the center we find the South End. This is not to be confused with South Boston which lies directly east from the South End. North of the South End is East Boston and southwest of East Boston is the North End.
— The UNIX fortune(6) file
Four bleacher seats, $400. Twelve beers, $40. Two Yankees Suck T-shirts, $40. Getting arrested, $200. Knocking out a Yankee fan’s teeth: priceless.
— Anonymous, from an article in the Harvard Crimson
Mmmm… book number one of five processed for chlorophyll information. Brain hurts. Biology is evil. Never become a plant, Ted.
— Curtis
Well, when the evil killing machines come to power, we’ll know who to thank.
— Hawver, referring to Bryan’s plans on creating an AI
I have Ranger Dale eating right out of my picinic basket.
- Kari:
I need to give people incentive to thaw me out!- Don :
Jerry Fallwell is not going to thaw you out.
Do not regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many.
— Unknown
Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.
— Henry Ford
Benevolence is a commitment to achieving the values derivable from life with other people in society, by treating them as potential trading partners, recognizing their humanity, independence, and individuality, and the harmony between their interests and ours.
Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others: The Constitution of this Republic should make a special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.
— Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence
- Wyatt X:
Are yu chatting w/ hanah now?- Ted:
no.- Wyatt X:
curious.- Ted:
oh, why is that?- Wyatt X:
I thought you guys were fusing into a borganism.
We had a power outage during a thunderstorm. As we peered from our dark cubicles to the outside world, my director commented that it looked like power was out for miles, since the office buildings as far as we could see were also dark.
Our temp admin said, and I quote: "But then why are the cars running?"
— from Scott Adams’ quarterly email
I was at a stop light, behind a car with a bumper sticker that said "Honk if you love Jesus." I honked. The driver leaned out his window, flipped me the bird, and yelled "Can’t you see the light is still red, you moron?"
— from Scott Adams’ quarterly email
If you give me another norange, I’m going to cut off your ndick.
— Heff, to Perkins
While in the office of my very well known U.S. company, one of the bosses was talking about the size and power of the company. To get this point across he said, "We’re a multi-global company." He was promptly asked, "Do you mean Earth and Uranus?"
— from Scott Adams’ quarterly email
When I hear another express an opinion which is not mine, I say to myself, he has a right to his opinion, as I to mine; why should I question it? His error does me no injury, and shall I become a Don Quixote, to bring all men by force of argument to one opinion?
Every move you make with the mouse moves the pointer in exactly the same way. Notice that lifting the mouse doesn’t move the pointer. Using the mouse might feel a little awkward at first, but it will soon be second nature.
— Macintosh System Software User’s Guide, Version 6.0, Chapter 1
This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.
— Abraham Lincoln
For managing complexity, decentralization works better than centralization. In free markets, people given a choice generally choose to cooperate rather than fight. Coercion is not just evil, it’s unnecessary and ultimately stupid — you get better results without it.
Without property rights, no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.
— Ayn Rand
All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.
— IBM maintenance manual, 1925
A majority of the people in South Carolina were notoriously for paper- money, as a legal tender; the Legislature had refused to make it a legal tender. The reason was, that the latter had some sense of character, and were restrained by that consideration.
Keep me informed on the behaviour of this kernel… As the "BugFree(tm)" series didn’t turn out too well, I’m starting a new series called the "ItWorksForMe(tm)" series, of which this new kernel is yet another shining example.
— Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.29
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
— Ayn Rand
The natural inclination of a child is to take pleasure in the use of the mind no less than of the body. The child’s primary business is learning. It is also the primary entertainment. To retain that orientation into adulthood, so that consciousness is not a burden but a joy, is the mark of the successfully developed human being.
Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman’s tool is values; the bureaucrat’s tool is fear.
— Ayn Rand
If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
Did you hear that Michael Milken (he rules!!!) has become a low fat vegan after getting cancer? It kind of sucks that he got an unfair rap from the government over his junk bond heroism. Plus he got cancer too! At least he is eating right these days.
— Kari
An atheist doesn’t have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can’t be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.
Evolution is as much a fact as the earth turning on its axis and going around the sun. At one time this was called the Copernican theory; but, when evidence for a theory becomes so overwhelming that no informed person can doubt it, it is customary for scientists to call it a fact. That all present life descended from earlier forms, over vast stretches of geologic time, is as firmly established as Copernican cosmology. Biologists differ only with respect to theories about how the process operates.
— Martin Gardner, "Irving Kristol and the Facts of Life".
I have a small plastic bag with dice in it stuck to my cubicle wall. Below it are instructions on how to use the "Project Time Estimator."
The project director came into my cube a few days ago to ask how long a particular task would take. I got the trusty dice out, threw them and read off the number of hours. She said "You can’t do that!" whereupon I pointed out to her that I had been doing this for the last two software releases and it worked as well as any other method.
She wrote down the number of hours and quietly walked away.
Needless to say, Wally is my hero.
— From Scott Adams’ quarterly email
Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surely curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they make better neighbors than the other sort.
- Homer:
Oh, twenty dollars. I wanted a peanut.- Homer’s Brain :
Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts.- Homer:
Explain how.- Homer’s Brain :
Money can be exchanged for goods and services.- Homer:
Woo-hoo!
Kang: "So, we’re aliens. What of it? It’s a two party system, you have to vote for one of us!" Random person: "Why I believe I’ll vote for a third party candidate!" Kang: "Go ahead, THROW YOUR VOTE AWAY!!! Ha ha ha ho ha ho!"
11.10: People keep telling me that getch() is not standard, but my C compiler has it. Are they wrong?
They’ve been programming more than ten years. You haven’t. Draw your own conclusions. That’s right! They hadn’t noticed it. No doubt their compilers have it too, and its behavior is identical everywhere else in the world, also. That would explain everything.
— Infrequently Asked Questions in comp.lang.c
8/7 Mr. KING could not think there would be a necessity for a meeting every year. A great vice in our system was that of legislating too much. The most numerous objects of legislation belong to the States. Those of the National Legislature were but few. The chief of them were commerce and revenue. When these should be once settled, alterations would be rarely necessary and easily made.
— James Madison’s Journal during the Constitutional Convention
- EWyatt794:
I dunno if I could live with anyone, really. I’m hoping to find someone eventually, but I don’t hold out a great deal of hope- anarchogrl:
Oh, I’d be chasing you around if I wasn’t currently attached
Given the axiom of existence and the principle of primacy of existence, it can be quickly shown that anything inherent in existence has to be. Once a fact is determined to be part of reality, one knows that fact is itself and no other fact (identity). One knows the fact is lawful, not random (causality). And one knows the fact to not be subject to anyone’s whims (primacy of existence). Therefore, anything that is metaphysically given is absolute.
— Eric Johnson
I did some heavy research so as to be prepared for "Mommy, why is the sky blue?" HE asked me about black holes in space. (There’s a hole where?)
I boned up to be ready for, "Why is the grass green?" HE wanted to discuss nature’s food chains. (Well, let’s see, there’s ShopRite, Pathmark…)
I talked about Choo-Choo trains. HE talked internal combustion engines. (The INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE said, "I think I can, I think I can.")
I was delighted with the video game craze, thinking we could compete as equals. HE described the complexities of the microchips required to create the graphics.
Then puberty struck. Ah, adolescence. HE said, "Mom, I just don’t understand women." (Gotcha!)
— Betty LiBrizzi, "The Care and Feeding of a Gifted Child"
This so-called "new religion" is nothing but a pack of weird rituals and chants, designed to take away the money of fools. Let us say the Lord’s Prayer 40 times, but first, let’s pass the collection plate!
— Reverend Lovejoy
One of the great perversities of the governmental war on smoking is the extent to which government profits from smoking. Jacob Sullum highlights the astonishing numbers in the May issue of Reason magazine. Last year, the tobacco industry’s profit on a pack of cigarettes sold in the United States was 23 cents. On the same pack, the federal government collected 24 cents in taxes and the states collected an average of 36 cents. Incredibly, 72 percent of the net proceeds from tobacco sales goes not to Big Tobacco but to Big Government.
No wonder even vehemently antismoking politicians never call for banning cigarettes outright: They don’t want to kill the goose that gives them so many golden eggs.
What a peice of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though, by your smiling, you seem to say so.
— Shakespeare (Hamlet)
Is religion Harmless Fun or the Work of the Devil?
— Fearsome
A reading from the Book of Armaments, Chapter 4, Verses 16 to 20:
Then did he raise on high the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, saying, "Bless this, O Lord, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the people did rejoice and did feast upon the lambs and toads and tree-sloths and fruit-bats and orangutans and breakfast cereals … Now did the Lord say, "First thou pullest the Holy Pin. Then thou must count to three. Three shall be the number of the counting and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither shalt thou count two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the number of the counting, be reached, then lobbest thou the Holy Hand Grenade in the direction of thine foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it."
— Monty Python, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"
Making files is easy under the UNIX operating system. Therefore, users tend to create numerous files using large amounts of file space. It has been said that the only standard thing about all UNIX systems is the message-of-the-day telling users to clean up their files.
— System V.2 administrator’s guide
Ever since prehistoric times, wise men have tried to understand what, exactly, make people laugh. That’s why they were called "wise men." All the other prehistoric people were out puncturing each other with spears, and the wise men were back in the cave saying: "How about: Would you please take my wife? No. How about: Here is my wife, please take her right now. No How about: Would you like to take something? My wife is available. No. How about …"
— Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
In the United States, hackerdom revolves on a Bay Area-to-Boston axis; about half of the hard core seems to live within a hundred miles of Cambridge (Massachusetts) or Berkeley (California), although there are significant contingents in Los Angeles, in the Pacific Northwest, and around Washington DC. Hackers tend to cluster around large cities, especially `university towns’ such as the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina or Princeton, New Jersey (this may simply reflect the fact that many are students or ex-students living near their alma maters).
— The Jargon File, "Geographical Distribution"
People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.
Most people would find it bizarre to speak of tolerating blonds. For whatever reason, hair color has not been a basis of tribal identity or group politics in our culture; the concept of tolerance is never invoked in this context because there is too obviously nothing to tolerate. In a rational culture, the same would be true of race, ethnicity, and the like.
They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition of their schemes. And they believe rightly: for I have sworn upon the alter of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose- because it contains all the others- the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money." No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity- to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.
— Ayn Rand
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
— Samuel Adams
All efforts to deal with software piracy (broadly defined) are futile. The day will come, perhaps soon, when any product that can be expressed in pure information will be, de facto, free.
What this means is that the winners in the new economy will be people who can figure out how to put competitive products into hardware implementations. The only barriers to entry will be the ability to design products in this way and apply manufacturing know-how.
The alternative is general-purpose machines and free software—which means an economy dominated by a few monopolies. We’re getting a preview with Wintel.
Every society must have rules of various sorts—not just laws, but management procedures, and above all customs and manners. But no set of rules, however complex, can handle all the situations that can come up in human society. So rules must always have exceptions.
The effectiveness of a society is determined by how it handles exceptions. If it is too hard to make exceptions, the society becomes rigid, stifling, and ultimately ossified. If, on the other hand, rules are allowed to break down, society dissolves.
The good society grants exceptions generously—but insists that they be acknowledged to be exceptions.
Occasionally I am puzzled by the way a controversial issue can receive intense public debate for months with nobody mentioning important and obvious facts.
A good example is the fuss of restriction of encryption technology. Modern encryption algorithms allow public key encryption, which is enormously useful for commercial applications and routine security. But the method is inherently insecure because it is non-random. The government wants a trap-door into these algorithms, allegedly because they might be used for criminal activities.
What nobody is pointing out is that criminals or terrorists don’t need, and if they’re smart won’t use, these algorithms anyway. Any outlaw with three brain cells working would use a one-time pad method. Formerly this was too clumsy, because it requires a key as long as the message. Computers have made it easy. One can construct a true random-number one-time pad of any length (by doing analog-to-digital conversion on white noise from an electronic device) and store it on disk or on CD-ROM. This gives totally unbreakable encipherment.
All this is obvious. So it is clear that government cannot really believe that having trap doors into encryption algorithms will be effective against criminals or terrorists. The only reason that they could want this power is to use it against law-abiding citizens. Why isn’t anybody saying this?
You should understand that the Gimp and Gtk weren’t written to fill holes in the software available under the GPL (GNU General Public License) and LGPL (GNU Library General Public License). The Gimp was started because I wanted to make a Web page. Gtk was started because I was dissatisfied with Motif and wanted to see what it took to write a UI toolkit. These are purely selfish reasons. That is probably why the projects progressed so far and eventually succeeded. I find it much more difficult to work on something for extended periods of time for selfless reasons.
— Peter Mattis, Creator of GTK & The Gimp
It is the highest impertinence and presumption … in Kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people … Let them look well after their own expense, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.
The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had the folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.
— Adam Smith
Innovators and creators are persons who can to a higher degree than average accept the condition of aloneness. They are more willing to follow their own vision, even when it takes them far from the mainland of the human community. Unexplored places do not frighten them- or not, at any rate, as much as they frighten those around them. This is one of the secrets of their power. That which we call "genius" has a great deal to do with courage and daring, a great deal to do with nerve.
We do not hear the term "compassionate" applied to business executives or entrepreneurs, certainly not when they are engaged in their normal work. Yet in terms of results in the measurable form of jobs created, lives enriched, communities built, living standards raised, and poverty healed, a handful of capitalists has done infinitely more for mankind than all the self-serving politicians, academics, social workers, and religionists who march under the banner of "compassion".
False is the idea of utility… that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it… The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity… will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty … and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
— Cesare Beccaria, father of modern criminology
As of oligarchy so of tyranny… Both mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
— Aristotle
A legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law.
— United States Supreme Court, 1803
"When Georgie Porgie speaks, I don’t listen."
— Jimy Williams, Red Sox manager, after being told Yankees owner George Steinbrenner said he "incited the crowd" to throw things on the field during Game 5 of the 1999 AL Penant race.
I also have to wonder if people are going to start looking at me funny because of all the Dead Rats from which I’ve nuke sendmail and installed The MTA Which Must Not Be Named.
— Anthony DeBoer in ASR
- Bryan:
Hey Dad, what do you do for a living? I mean, what are you, are you a scientist, and mathematician…?- Bryan’s Dad:
I’m an expert.- Bryan:
Oh. What kind of expert, like, nuclear utilities, telecommunications…?- Bryan’s Dad:
Well, what kind do you need me to be?
?
Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially among the poorest and least skilled or educated workers… Because a minimum wage, of course, does not guarantee any worker’s employment; it only prohibits, by force of law, anyone from being hired at the wage which would pay his employer to hire him.
- Joycelyn Elders:
It is often easier for our children to obtain a gun than it is to find a good school.- David Boaz:
Maybe that’s because guns are sold at a profit, while schools are provided by the government.
?
- Student:
but doesn’t it still work at O(n log n) when log n = 300?- Dr. Levin (BU):
Of course it works. If you have enough patience and resources, it will return a value. Of course, you may be dead.
?
An Open Letter to the Kansas Board of Education
To the 6 members who voted for the new guidelines: You are stoopid.
To the 4 members who voted against: Better luck next time.
On reading this, one tends to feel…exhilarated.
— Alan Greenspan, on Atlas Shrugged
Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own self defense?
I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.
— George Mason
When encryption is outlawed, only $j9s02o #)1% B,Px*_~ ^90f@ %c#s+(V\.
— .signature of Joseph M. Bay (in APJ)
I love Rage Against the Machine, even though I’m not supposed to.
— Kari
Ah, young webmaster… Java leads to RealAudio. RealAudio leads to Shockwave. And Shockwave leads to suffering.
— David Jacoby in ASR
You can think of the perl ’exec’ command as one of those aliens — it takes over its host process, exploding out of its chest and screaming for filehandles. Unfortunately, perl does not implement it quite like this.
— Wayne Snyder
Bryan : hey, you’re drinking my water. I hope I don’t get your cooties. Alexey: You know me, I’m a big ball of funk.
?
I now have an urge to walk into my local church and yell ’UNSUBSCRIBE’.
— Malcom Ray in ASR
Take the Solaris lex and stick it up the backside of a passing Sun salesman, then install flex and use that. All will be happier.
— Alan Cox
Physics is much too hard for physicists.
— David Hilbert
When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.
— Einstein
Screw the component, I can’t do this after eating thai food.
If this country is worth saving, it’s worth saving at a profit.
— H.L. Hunt
Movements and systems of ideas do not gain wide currency until they start to catch on with pretty girls[.]
How many of Group X does it take to change a light bulb?
N. 1 to change the light bulb, and N-1 to do something characteristic of group X.
— Sasha, via Hanah Metchis
Property rights are not the rights of property; they are the rights of humans with regard to property. They are a particular kind of human right.
I only use IM to talk to Bill, but don’t tell him that because he might get a big head.
— Kari
In my house there’s this light switch that doesn’t do anything. Every so often I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Germany. She said, "Cut it out."
There was a power outage at a department store yesterday. Twenty people were trapped on the escalators.
A friend of mine once sent me a post card with a picture of the entire planet Earth taken from space. On the back it said, "Wish you were here."
Anything less than mad passionate extraordinary love, is a waste of your time!
— T. DeBartalo
Farsam is an end in himself and to that extent is a non-arbitrary causal force.
Premise check, aisle twelve.
— Bryan Maloney
National Health Insurance means combining the efficiency of the Postal Service with the compassion of the IRS … and the cost accounting of the Pentagon.
— Louis Sullivan/Connie Horner quoted by Novak in "Forbes"
Tell me whom you love and I will tell you who you are.
— Houssaye
Philosophy and computers are both serious. Government, however, is a joke.
— Hanah Metchis
Our forefathers made one mistake. What they should have fought for was representation without taxation.
— Fletcher Knebel
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
— William Pitt
I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics.
— Ayn Rand
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
If you protect a man from folly, you will soon have a nation of fools.
— William Penn
See, when the Government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of Taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs.
Ted’s living la vida loca with TWO DONGLES.
Oh my God! Space aliens! Don’t eat me, I have a wife and kids! Eat them.
— Homer Simpson
Disraeli was pretty close: actually, there are Lies, Damn lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, and Delivery dates.
— The UNIX fortune(6) file
Passion, Romance, and Capitalism all sit in the same place on my tongue. And they taste very sweet.
— Jonathan Hoenig
The government’s perfected funk faking.
There’s an empty spot I’ve always had inside me. I tried to fill it with family, religion, community service, but those were all dead ends. I think this chair is the answer.
— Homer Simpson
A: Mach is the biggest intellectual fraud of the last decade. B: Really, not the X Window System? A: I said ’intellectual’.
— Anonymous
No, it’s only an embarrasment if the random data piped into sendmail cracks root _before_ Exchange BSODs.
— Anthony DeBoer in ASR
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
— Doug Gwyn
Market failure is only solved by freer markets.
I am turning in my own mother: She used to think that the letters of the yogurt chain, TCBY, stood for Thank God It’s Yogurt.
— from Scott Adams’ quarterly email
America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.
I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives… For it is in our lives, and not from our words, that our religion must be read.
Government’s a disease masquerading as its own cure.
— L. Neil Smith
We place two copies of PEOPLE magazine in a DARK, HUMID mobile home. 45 minutes later CYNDI LAUPER emerges wearing a BIRD CAGE on her head!
— The pinhead
YOU!! Give me the CUTEST, PINKEST, most charming little VICTORIAN DOLLHOUSE you can find!! An make it SNAPPY!!
— The pinhead
Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.
— Chinese proverb
As we gain knowledge, we do not become more certain, we become certain of more.
— Ayn Rand
How could this be a problem in a country where we have Intel and Microsoft?
— Al Gore, on why Y2K is not a worry
Unix doesn’t have a monopoly on good ideas, it just owns most of them.
— Alan Cox
The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status, or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we all believe that we are above-average drivers.
I went to this bizarre syrup party in the woods in a cabin with all sorts of old, fat people speaking french and eating everything with syrup.
— Wyatt X
/* I hate C so much… */
— jwz, in driver/xscreensaver.c
In a lecture, Werner von Braun once said "Ve haf alvays been aiming for zer stars" and a little voice at the back replied "But ve keep hittink London".
— Matt Economou’s .signature
43rd Law of Computing: Anything that can go wr fortune: Segmentation violation — Core dumped
Curtis, your body drives me wild.
— Colin Hill
He said a dirty word! "Standard." We shouldn’t have those in computers.
— Frank Young, RHIT Computer Science Dept. Chair
- Brian:
There goes the paper boy.- Doris:
Yeah, I’m a boy.
No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
If there is no black and white, there can be no gray, since gray is a mixture of the two.
— Ayn Rand
There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.
— Ayn Rand
Man’s character is the product of his premises.
— Ayn Rand
It is hoped, however, the users of UNIX will find that the most important characteristics of the system are its simplicity, elegance, and ease of use.
— Thompson and Ritchie
Lupin, the road to hell is paved with pretty women.
— Goemon
There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal.
Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.
There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers.
— Ayn Rand
The doctrine that "human rights" are superior to "property rights" simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others.
— Ayn Rand
Today’s been a bad night.
— Miles Rincker
Simplify, simplify… — Henry David Thoreau Simplify… — Wendy McElroy
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The United States has been in the forefront of the postwar opening up of international markets, much to our, and the rest of the world’s, benefit. It would be a great tragedy were that process reversed.
If the teaching of evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve.
— Ted Gould’s .signature
10.15: Is C an acronym?
Yes, it stands for ``C’’. It’s another of those funky recursive acronyms.
— Infrequently Asked Questions in comp.lang.c
19.26: How do you pronounce ``char’’?
Like the first word of ``char *’’. The accent is generally on the first syllable.
— Infrequently Asked Questions in comp.lang.c
Right now I am listening to P-Funk, and life is good.
— Kari
[SomeLamer] what’s the difference between chattr and chmod? [SomeGuru] SomeLamer: man chattr > 1; man chmod > 2; diff -u 1 2 | less
— Seen on #linux on irc
Ok, I’m just uploading the new version of the kernel, v1.3.33, also known as "the buggiest kernel ever".
— Linus Torvalds
panic("Foooooooood fight!");
— In the kernel source aha1542.c, after detecting a bad segment list
Oh, and this is another kernel in that great and venerable "BugFree(tm)" series of kernels. So be not afraid of bugs, but go out in the streets and deliver this message of joy to the masses.
— Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.27
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it’s all learned.
— Bruce Ediger, bediger@teal.csn.org, on X interfaces
In ’Doctor’ mode, I spent a good ten minutes telling Emacs what I thought of it. (The response was, ’Perhaps you could try to be less abusive.’)
— Matt Welsh
And the next time you consider complaining that running Lucid Emacs 19.05 via NFS from a remote Linux machine in Paraguay doesn’t seem to get the background colors right, you’ll know who to thank.
— Matt Welsh
Note that if I can get you to "su and say" something just by asking, you have a very serious security problem on your system and you should look into it.
— Paul Vixie, vixie-cron 3.0.1 installation notes
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. There might be a law against it by that time.
— The UNIX fortune(6) file
They just burned down the IRS building in Colorado Springs (my hometown) for the second time in a few years. Good for them!
— Kari
mayonnaise is so bad. I wish I didn;t even know about it. I hope I spelled it wrong.
— Wyatt X
I think your mid-west friends broguth some mid west germs with them that I haven’t become immune to yet.
— Wyatt X
It really bothers me when really stupid people complain about the complexity of really simple things.
— Wyatt X
checking for RedHat system… no :)
— Window Maker 0.52 configure
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.
— Einstein
if you ever get a spare jar of marshmallow fluff, i highly recommend just randomly attacking someone with it, as long as you’re sure they’ll be ok with it :)
— Curtis
Real programmers don’t draw flowcharts. Flowcharts are, after all, the illiterate’s form of documentation. Cavemen drew flowcharts; look how much good it did them.
— The UNIX fortune(6) file
If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation.
— The UNIX fortune(6) file
Have you noticed the way people’s intelligence capabilities decline sharply the minute they start waving guns around?
— Dr. Who
I imagine bugs and girls have a dim perception that Nature played a cruel trick on them, but they lack the intelligence to really comprehend its magnitude.
— Calvin
So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?
— Ayn Rand
lunatic fringe (n): customers who can be relied upon to accept release 1 versions of software.
The sort of person who uses phrases like `incompletely socialized’ usually thinks hackers are. Hackers regard such people with contempt when they notice them at all.
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
— Ayn Rand
Anything that makes things easier and intuitive will make users have even more stupid questions.
— Alfredo Kojima
Make something idiot-proof, and someone will build a better idiot.
— Greg Starkes
Children often recite the mantra "majority rule." And in fact majority rule is appropriate for use by children—for the exact reason that we do not permit children to decide important issues.
There is something to be said for the sheer exuberance of infatuation. Perhaps it very seldom turns into the real thing; but people who don’t believe in the real thing, never find it at all.
If you touch it, the frog falls off!
— Miles Rincker
Are you listening to your chicken?
— Miles Rincker
Son : Why are we hiding from the police dad? Father : They use EMACS son. We use vi.
— Peter Gutmann
You can tune a filesystem, but you can’t tune a fish.
— HP/UX tunefs(1M)
Body piercing(n): A powerful, compelling visual statement that says ’Gee, in today’s competitive job market, what can I do to make myself even less employable?’
On the other hand, the Linux philosophy is ’laugh in the face of danger’. Oops. Wrong one. ’Do it yourself’. That’s it.
— Linus Torvalds
Real Users never know what they want, but they always know when your program doesn’t deliver it.
— seen in ASR
When you say "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people just stare at you blankly and say "Hey, I got those with the system, for free"
— Linus Torvalds
Interestingly, most Unix utilities have a command line option which will cause the system to rip the user’s legs off and beat them to death with the soggy ends. This is often the default behaviour.
— Bruce Murphy
There be serious and nasty dragons here.
— Comment in the X11 server code
C. Laxer : I’m God, remember? J. Little : You’re *much* shorter in person.
?
It’s senior project - we’re not supposed to finish it. … Don’t quote me on that.
— SWL
Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.
— Larry Wall in comp.lang.perl
That is not a mess on my desk. I am using a hashing algorithm to improve access time.
— from the .signature of Mark Tomory, mt@carthage.edu
Antitrust laws were written to protect consumers, not competitors. If Microsoft is to fail, let it be because we failed to innovate, not because our innovations were outlawed.
Basically, what you’re doing is using argumentum ad ignorantium, and I must admit that you seem to have a more than adequate supply of ignorance to which to apply that fallacy.
— Carl Lydick, 4/2/96, R.I.P.
And 1.1.81 is officially BugFree(tm), so if you receive any bug reports on it, you know they are just evil lies.
— Linus Torvalds
They’re ready to come in my office and kick my ass sideways every time they don’t understand something. They’re ready to rough up my mom and she’s been dead for four years.
— Dr. Sherman on "freshmen"
Americans don’t expect an apostle in the White House. But they do expect an adult.
— Newsweek, 2/2/98 p.29
"Bother," said Pooh, "Eeyore, ready two photon torpedoes and lock phasers on the Heffalump, Piglet, meet me in transporter room three."
— Matt Economou’s fortune file
Wow. If you renice your kernel build to -20, it goes fast :) That’s my deep thought of the day.
— Curtis
The two most notable things to come from Berkeley were BSD UNIX and LSD. We do not believe this to be a coincidence.
— Stephen Jacob
…economic history is along record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics.
Tyranny and despotism can be exercised by many, more rigourously, more vigourously, and more severely, than by one.
— President A. Johnson
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations.
You can only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
— The UNIX fortune(6) file
China has every right to be upset about our slaughter of innocent Chinese citizens. We’re cutting in on their action.
We all enter this world in the same way: naked; screaming; soaked in blood. But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn’t have to stop there.
— Dana Gould
And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva, in the brain of Jupiter.
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
— Einstein
Space Ghost SOMAD: What Would Jackie Chan Do? Zorak SOMAD: Jesus. Space Ghost SOMAD: What? Zorak SOMAD: It’s "What Would Jesus Do?" Space Ghost SOMAD: Well I don’t care what Jesus would do. I want to know what Jackie Chan would do!
The United States is in no way founded upon the Christian religion[.]
— George Washington & John Adams, in a diplomatic message to Malta.
This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it.
— John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.
* delYsid has mortage, opportunity and penis in his score file. <delYsid> thats pretty effective against spam <Luke> aren’t you worried about missing opportunities to mortgage your penis?
— Seen in #emacs
The PROPER way to handle HTML postings is to cancel the article, then hire a hitman to kill the poster, his wife and kids, and fuck his dog and smash his computer into little bits. Anything more is just extremism.
— Paul Tomblin
Why should I read the fucking manual? I KNOW how to fuck!
— Unknown, from Kai’s .signature in comp.emacs
Don’t discount sadism, maybe she simply enjoys fucking with your mind. She is a girl after all.
— Hawver
Netscape can officially bend over and kiss my hairy black ass. The page is valid HTML 4.0 so NC can suck it.
— Hawver
[FUP: rhit.scylla.devel] >>>>> "EO" == Edward O’Connor <edward.oconnor@rose-hulman.edu> writes: EO> Hello. Has linux become a bit too stable for your liking? God damn, I *wish*. Fucking Linux/Alpha fucking crashes all the fucking time, usually because of fucking X fucking Free86. Fucking fuck of a fucking operating system. Linux fucking sucks!! EO> Knowledge of 386 assembly is helpful Have you considered a port to the Alpha yet (hint hint hint)?
— Rev. Dr. Xenophon Fenderson, the Carbon(d)ated, KSC, DEATH, SubGenius, mhm21x16 Pope, Patron Saint of All Things Plastic fnord, and Salted Litter of r.g.s.b "Abraham came not to sacrifice, but to know once and for all whether this God was a god to be trusted and obeyed. No other test would do." (Fall of Hyperion)
my logic class is the SHIT, and i can now prove it
— Perkins
Thank you for your concern. What about your two-bit ass?
We’re the people who make the GODDAMN INTERNET RUN!! If it weren’t for us, you’d be drooling in your laps instead of on your keyboards.
you couldn’t get a clue if you were soaked in clue pheromone in clue bondage gear on the clue mating grounds during clue mating season surrounded by horny clues.
— sn
Thou shalt not make adjacent to the concave side of a parenthesis any character from the whitespace family.
— Kaz Kylheku, in c.l.l
It’s good to experience a static type system; one never knows true freedom until it has been lost, after all.
— Matthew Danish, in c.l.l, on ML
I know what you’re thinking, but a binding made from the skin of brutally flamed c.l.l posters wouldn’t be nearly as durable as a leather one.
— John Wiseman, on Erik Naggum considering printing a leather-bound, gilded ANSI Common Lisp standard.
Today is the car of the cdr of your life.
— Unknown
Hate your job, love your stuff. If you think that’s living you are wrong.
It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.
— Confucius
Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.
— Dijkstra
The Earth is the Cradle of Mankind, but one does not live in the cradle forever.
— Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 1895
I’m not bitter. I’m just tired. And bitter.
— Curtis
Sometimes it’s hard to let go of people or ideas that once meant so much and which now are just bringing us down. But we have to move on.
We should never reduce the quality of the Emacs user interface just because other applications use worse interfaces.
— Robert J. Chassell, in <m17AFcD-000IeuC@localhost>
No one had ever told her, and she had not yet discovered, that when one has to ask "Am I really in love?" the answer is always "No."
— Arthur C. Clarke, in "The Road to the Sea"
We’re born with a number of powerful instincts, which are found across all cultures. Chief amongst these are a dislike of snakes, a fear of falling, and a hatred of popup windows.
— Vlatko Juric-Kokic
Emacs fontification is a colorful way of telling experienced and knowledgeable users that regexps are insufficient to solve this kind of problem.
— Erik Naggum, in c.l.l
sometimes i feel like we’re making emacs better and better because we don’t know what to do with emacs once it is finished.
I think I will bow out of Slashdot completely for the new year. As sad as it may sound, I think there are doers and then there are those who read Slashdot. I’m horrified to be associated with the latter.
"Like" is actually a "parity word". It serves the same function as a "parity bit" or the parity data on a RAID 5 container. By inserting a "like" into the sentence on a regular basis, the transmitter and receiver stay in synch…like ya know?
— Scott Vieth <svieth@wi.rr.com> in comp.os.vms
The only distinction between public domain software and free software is the set of senses in which free software is not free.
— Kent Pitman, in c.l.l
— Curtis
Also, I think, but I’m not sure, that while #<void> happens to be the print representation that Chez Scheme uses for "don’t do that," its use as such is conventional, and not in the standard. You could just as well use #<claude>.
— Me, in rhit.cs.cs304
To raise the issue of Tigger’s parentage is to invite all sorts of other questions. What happened to Roo’s father? Why is Rabbit a bachelor? Where are Pooh’s pants?
— The Cube
Everybody knows the path to my heart begins at Dunkin’ Donuts.
Pay no attention to that option behind the curtain! I am the great and powerful Setup Wizard of Oz!
— The Cube
You’ll have to pry my Emacs from my cold dead oversized control-pressing left pinky finger.
— Randal L. Schwartz
I’m sorry. I can’t come out and play ’cause I promised my research group that I wouldn’t get hit by any busses until I documented my code.
— The Cube
Would you consider undergoing surgery knowing that the tools in the operating room included = and ==, and that the use of the wrong one would result in your death?
It’s harder to ask a class to be quiet than to tell them to be quiet. But if you’re in a position to ask a class to be quiet, then you can ask them to learn. You can’t tell a person to learn.
— Curtis
Those who write software only for pay should go hurt some other field.
— Erik Naggum, in g.m.d
The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++.
— Richard Gabriel
I have a cat, so I know that when she digs her very sharp claws into my chest or stomach it’s really a sign of affection, but I don’t see any reason for programming languages to show affection with pain.
— Erik Naggum, c.l.l
Indeed, when I design my killer language, the identifiers "foo" and "bar" will be reserved words, never used, and not even mentioned in the reference manual. Any program using one will simply dump core without comment. Multitudes will rejoice.
— Tim Peters, 29 Apr 1998
My only mental note is, "Get your Visor fixed so you don’t have to keep any mental notes."
— Sheehe
Soon, hopefully, I will post an on-line version of my Curriculum Vitae and my Resume. Until then, you’ll just have to rest assured in the knowledge that I am very employable.
— Jerod, somewhere on his page
Just because it works doesn’t mean it isn’t broken.
— Dan
I think PDAs are Palm-agotchies. You spend all that time feeding them, playing with them, cleaning up after them. What do they do for you?
— Mark Ardis, RHIT CS Dept.
I’m sorry, I keep forgetting that this is the Web, and that you are all idiots.
— Corey Kosak SOMAD, Forum 2000
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
— Philip Greenspun
Behold the turtle. He only makes progress when he sticks his neck out.
— James Conant
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.
— Nathaniel Borenstein
Life is like a blue fuzzball. It’s fun and cute and fuzzy until it pounces at you with big pointy teeth.
— Curtis
Thanks to Colin and your damned quotes file, I keep singing the song "Bitter Crack Herb and I Don’t Care" in my head.
— Herb
Or, to put it another way, if you see a long line of rats streaming off of a ship, the correct assumption is *not* "gosh, I bet that’s a real nice boat now that those rats are gone".
— Mike Sphar
The general populace should not be given access to things that beep.
— Curtis
Parentheses? What parentheses? I haven’t noticed any parentheses since my first month of Lisp programming. I like to ask people who complain about parentheses in Lisp if they are bothered by all the spaces between words in a newspaper.
— Kenny Tilton
That wasn’t perl. It was random typing at the keyboard. But it was almost convincing.
— The Cube
I’ll be fine just as long as I don’t ever have to edit or understand my Regular Expression of Death ever again
— The Cube
A computer programmer is a person who, when told to "go to hell", sees the "go to" rather than the destination as harmful.
— Stuart Thomas
More Famous Last Words: AFS OldFiles is enough revision control for me.
— The Cube
Set phasers to "kill -9".
— The Cube
Do not discount the possibility of muppet-based life in the universe.
— The Cube
That initial Trouble Funk experience was a visceral revelation, permanently altering our understanding of rhythm.
— Johnny Temple
I like your script there. "Hi, I’m the cron script on George. How are you doing today? Would you care for a cup of tea? HA HA HA I’M JUST A SHELL SCRIPT NO TEA FOR YOU"
— Hawver, on a cron job of mine
emacs is the ground. we run around and act silly on top of it, and when we die, may our remnants grace its ongoing incrementation.
— Thien-Thi Nguyen, in comp.emacs
…one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.
— Robert Firth
Am I the only one who saw the phrase "Hobbesian state of anarchy" and immediately thought "Calvinball!"?
— The Cube
The Master said: "Put me in the company of any two people at random — they will invariably have something to teach me. I can take their qualities as a model and their defects as a warning."
— Confucius
The part at the end where Shinji goes through the big self-analysis/discovery thing was pretty confusing until I watched it drunk, and then it made sense but I don’t recall how.
— Tom Kraemer, seen in ARK
The proper chant is "boodley boodley boodley" while wiggling one’s fingers in a mystical (possibly drunken) manner above the classloader in question.
— Curtis
Either you have a mouth, or you don’t need to scream. Either way, you fail my test.
— Harlan Ellison SOMAD Forum 2000
Any sufficently bored group of grad students is indistinguishable from magic.
— The Cube
What’s this obsession with the Y combinator. You people have no idea what you’re dealing with. It’ll eat you alive one day.
— The Cube
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
— Rich Cook
Plus, I know from experience that if you hold CD’s up and just start reading them, many earth creatures become confused and/or alarmed.
— The Cube
In general, it is best to assume that the network is filled with malevolent entities that will send in packets designed to have the worst possible effect.
Every day, it’s important to ask and answer these questions: "What’s good in my life?" and "What needs to be done?"
You are trapped in a maze of screens and ssh sessions all alike. It is dark, and you are likely to log off the wrong account.
— From Peter da
Silva’s .signature in ASR,
attributed to "Nep."
People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the Complete Works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
— Robert Wilensky
Even an act performed out of love is supposed to be "unegoistic"? But you blockheads!
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Why bother being wrong? Right is far far more fun.
Load averages on moe were extremely high (above 3) because lightss seems to think he can solve for world peace by brute force using magma.
— Joe Boyd
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
Those silly RFCs are all that separate us from the animals!
— Kevin Rodgers in alt.religion.emacs
What shall it profit a man if he should gain the world and lock his keys in the car before he can get it home?
— Gwendoly Piper in alt.slack
Is there really a Canada, or is it just a bunch of people from Minnesota and Wisconsin putting us on?
— j. Brad Hicks in alt.slack
"Bother," said Pooh as he struggled with
/etc/sendmail.cf, "It never does quite what I want. I wish Christopher Robin was here."
— Peter da Silva in ASR