173 hits
"A commercial, and in some respects a social, doubt has been started within the last year or two, whether or not it is right to discuss so openly the security or insecurity of locks. Many well-meaning persons suppose that the discussion respecting the means for baffling the supposed safety of locks offers a premium for dishonesty, by showing others how to be dishonest. This is a fallacy. Rogues are very keen in their profession, and already know much more than we can teach them respecting their several kinds of roguery. Rogues knew a good deal about lockpicking long before locksmiths discussed it among themselves, as they have lately done. If a lock -- let it have been made in whatever country, or by whatever maker -- is not so inviolable as it has hitherto been deemed to be, surely it is in the interest of *honest* persons to know this fact, because the *dishonest* are tolerably certain to be the first to apply the knowledge practically; and the spread of knowledge is necessary to give fair play to those who might suffer by ignorance. It cannot be too earnestly urged, that an acquaintance with real facts will, in the end, be better for all parties." (Charles Tomlinson's Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks, published around 1850)
"The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are."-- Mark Twain
"Conviction is a luxury for those on the sidelines."
"The shortest distance between two points is under construction."-- Noelie Alito
In order to become the master the politician poses as the servant.-- Charles De Gaulle
That's what friendship means: sharing the prejudice of experience.-- Charles Bukowski
Few people are successful unless a lot of other people want them to be.-- Charles Brower
The value of the Constitution depends on the good will of government itself. If the Supreme Court rules that the Bill of Rights should not interfere with the important business of government (which they have done on at least two occasions), then the Constitution is meaningless.-- John Kormylo
"That all men should be brothers is the dream of people who have no brothers."-- Charles Chincholles
On an American Airlines package of nuts: Instructions: Open package, eat nuts.
Don’t speak unless you can improve on the silence.
Common sense: The collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.-- Albert Einstein
If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in the library?-- Lily Tomlin
Dante Hicks: Theoretically, people see money on the counter, and no one around, they think they're being watched.
Veronica: Honesty through paranoia. (Clerks)
On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.-- Charles Babbage
It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant examples.-- Charles Dickens
"An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way."-- Charles Bukowski
"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them."-- Mark Twain
2, 3, 3, 37 - the prime factorization of the beast.
Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.-- Lily Tomlin
I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.-- Lily Tomlin
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.-- Aldous Huxley
Law of Cat Landing:
A cat will always land in the softest place possible; often the mid-section of an unsuspecting, reclining human.
The next time you feel like downloading 'The Little Engine That Could' into a weapon of mass destruction: Don't.
"We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles."-- Mark Twain
I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.-- Lily Tomlin
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself."-- Ben Franklin
"Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street."
I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.-- Lily Tomlin
Linus: I guess it's wrong always to be worrying about tomorrow. Maybe we should think only about today.
Charlie Brown: No, that's giving up. I'm still hoping that yesterday will get better.-- Charles Schultz
I have no problem dealing with reality, but as a lifestyle I find it too confining.-- Lily Tomlin
"Everything is convention, including law. When it is not the thought that led to the convention, but just the records of the convention that define morals, structural ethics are too dependant, and likely doomed."
"They are wrong who say that love is blind. On the contrary, nothing - not even the smallest detail - escapes the eyes; one sees everything in the loved one, notices everything; but melts it all into one flame with the great and simple: �I love you.�"
Machine learning, n: Automation of your biases
javalin: Unwieldy spear with poor flight characteristics and excessive weight. Due to its poor ballistics, it is usually used to stab a programming project through the heart until dead.-- Charles Shannon Hendrix
"A child does not have to be taught how to be happy or the ways of love. It is fear, hatred, & prejudice that have to be taught. And from the condition of the world we can see that unfortunately there are some very good teachers."-- Javan
"The imposition of stigma is the commonest form of violence used in democratic societies."-- R. A. Pinker
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.-- Charles Darwin
"Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell."
What goes around usually gets dizzy and falls over.
There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.-- Lily Tomlin
If we couldn't laugh at things that didn't make sense,
we couldn't react to a lot of the world around us." (Calvin & Hobbes)
The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella,
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just's umbrella.
"Doesn't anyone remember one of the biggest problems the Super Conducting Super Collider project ran into during construction in Texas? It wasn't politics... It was the Mecca of fire ants in all the extremely high-voltage conduits, junctions, transformers, and other high-strength field areas. The ants would eat the insulating compounds off and sit there basking in the emf high they apparently got. Occasionally, an ant would offer itself as sacrifice, prompting some Damn Big Breakers to blow..." -- RISKS
In America you can go on the air and kid the politicians, and the politicians can go on the air and kid the people.-- Groucho Marx
"Success consists of doing the common things of life uncommonly well."
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.-- Edsger Dijkstra
Q: Why did the tachyon cross the road?
A: Because it was on the other side.
In a church bulletin: The eighth-graders will be presenting Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Church basement Friday at 7 PM. The Congregation is invited to attend this tragedy.
We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on when it's necessary to compromise.
-- Larry Wall
The definition of easy work is work that someone else has to do.
'It's no longer a question of staying healthy. It's a question of finding a sickness you like.'-- Jackie Mason
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.-- Will Rogers
What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?-- Marilyn Pittman
There has been opposition to every innovation in the history of man, with the possible exception of the sword.-- Benjamin Dana
Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are software.-- Richard P. Brennan
"The greatest happiness of life it the conviction that we are loved, loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."-- Victor Hugo
If God had meant for us to go around naked we would have been born that way.
Genies rarely have nightmares, for the same reason that elephants don't usually worry about being trampled underfoot. With the possible exception of bottles, there's nothing in the cosmos large enough or malicious enough to frighten them, or stupid enough to try.-- Tom Holt ("Djinn Rummy")
Frisbeetarianism: the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
On the sexes:
Brains times Beauty times Availability = Constant.
Reasonable, adj: Accessible to the infection of our own opinions. Hospitable to persuasion, dissuasion and evasion.-- Ambrose Bierce
A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.-- Mark Twain
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."-- C. A. R. Hoare
TCP_UP - The 16-bit TCP Urgent Pointer, encoded as the hex representation of the value of the field. The hex string MUST be capitalized since it is urgent. (RFC 3093)
In Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" came out as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead."
"The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists -- that is why they invented hell."-- Bertrand Russell
Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.-- Adam Smith
"I don't know who Jim Henson is but I've heard he has his hand in a lot of things around here."-- Kermit the Frog (in 1972)
Subduction leads to orogeny!
Fanfiction is just fixing things in post-post-production
"It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution."-- Oscar Wilde
"There comes a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide."-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to be insane in such a useful way that they can't commit you."-- Mark Edwards
Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world.-- John Burroughs
The definition of a beautiful woman is one who loves me.-- Sloan Wilson
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its de-evolution into the shiny things network.-- The Onion
"I wanted to make a little spot in the context of the record where there was this break in the action. In the midst of this buildup of these ever-growing, terrible machines, I just wanted to remember that there is somewhere... else."-- Trent Reznor
“Love is a drug. It really is. I don’t care who you are, if you’ve got a line on the good stuff, the real stuff that isn’t full of crap, it consumes you. You become it.”-- Amanda Firefox
The default Magic Word, Abracadabra, actually is a corruption of the Hebrew phrase ha-Bracha dab'ra which means "pronounce the blessing".
"Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society."-- John Adams
Now, in the Overall Schema Of The Universe, I would imagine that this sort of thing ranks somewhere down around gnat's eyelashes.-- George Madison
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."-- John Gilmore
What really matters is the name you succeed in imposing on the facts -- not the facts themselves.-- Cohen's Law
Sometimes I wish I had a knob to turn up the intelligence on the Internet. I have one on my monitor marked brightness, but it doesn't seem to work very well, does it?-- Bryan Manske
My notion of a husband at forty is that a woman should be able to change him, like a bank note, for two twenties.
Before Xerox, five carbons were the maximum extension of anybody's ego.
"There are very few personal problems that cannot be resolved by application of suitable quantities of duct tape."
"There ain't no rules around here, we're trying to accomplish something."-- Thomas Alva Edison
Additional: Our biggest enemy is going space crazy through loneliness. The only thing that helps me maintain my slender grip on reality is the friendship I share with my collection of singing potatoes.-- Holly (Red Dwarf II, Queeg)
"I find imperfection the most interesting thing about a person"-- Jodi Foster
In a church bulletin: "Ladies, don't forget the rummage sale. It's a chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Don't forget your husbands."
God, as some cynic has said, is always on the side which has the best football coach.-- Heywood Broun
And even priests were coming to spend some time in it, because of the collection of religious books. There were one thousand, two hundred and eighty-three religious books in there now, each one--according to itself--the only one any man need ever read. It was sort of nice to see them all together.-- Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)
A Thaum is the basic unit of magical strength. It has been universally established as the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal sized billiard balls.-- Terry Pratchett (The Light Fantastic)
"If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?"-- Linda Ellerbee
You're probably the sort who would have Dorothy arrested for throwing water on the Wicked Witch of the West.-- Eric Holeman
"I like to go to the beach and bury metal objects that say 'get a life' on them"
In a lecture on dairy physics: "We have on the left a spherical cow of uniform density, on the right is a spherical hay stack of uniform density. The two are separated by an infinite fence of infinitesimal thickness delta. Now, before looking at the governing relationships...let's make some assumptions."-- Alain Bouchard
"I don't need to be told how to do my job."
"I hope not, because it's by ass on the line and I'm up to my neck in it." (The Thin Blue Line)
"Somebody should clip Sting around the head and tell him to stop using that ridiculous Jamaican accent."-- Elvis Costello
Admiration: Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.-- Ambrose Bierce
"Colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed."-- R.S. Ingersoll
The cost of living is going up, and the chance of living is going down.
"I'm the Queen of the nerds. I love nerds- by which I mean, not a cool, bitchin' person. I guess I was a cool nerd. I wasn't shuffling my feet in the corner of the playground, I was the homecoming queen, but then, all the nerds voted for me."-- Tori Amos
Modern times are an awkward spectacle. On the one hand, our public selves compete for scarce window space, for the opportunity to see in and to where power is decided and used. On the other, private life recedes like a glacier, a translucent corner of heaven meant only to be photographed, never settled.-- Revel
"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished."-- Goethe
"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."-- G. K. Chesterton
An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.-- Sigmund Freud
Always behave like a duck: keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath.-- Jacob Braude
The public seems incapable of distinguishing between your garden variety idiot and your genuine lunatic. It is the same confusion the public has had over the last five Presidents.-- Mark Leeper
Today was a really, really great day, on the "aaagh fuck me!" scale.-- Steve VanDevender
Basing any to-be-correct life philosophy on one tiny alteration of your current life philosophy, that needed replacement as you've decided, is just bound to be a mistake.
"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."-- Edward Abbey
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success."-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it."-- P. B. Medawar
"Ergotism is what you get if you overuse the word "therefore". Egotism on the other hand is a form of "I" strain."-- Paul Martin
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."-- Robert R. Coveyou
They say that every man has a price at which he'll do anything. I like to think it's the other way around; every man has a line, a line he won't cross over, no matter what the cost.-- Fraser Sr. (Due South)
I think if you really like a girl you have to pay a lot of attention to her. But try telling that to those jerks on the jury.-- Dave George
"Always be a 1st-rate version of yourself instead of a 2nd rate version of someone else."-- Judy Garland
High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.-- Christopher Morley
"Patriotism is an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles."-- George Jean Nathan
People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law ... That would lead to anarchy. An individual who breaks a law that his conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."-- Martin Luther King
A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing.-- Samuel Butler
It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.-- Rod Serling
The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling.-- Robert Pirsig
"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."-- Groucho Marx
Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.-- John Berger
I save about twenty drafts -- that's ten meg of disc space -- and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there's a cry here of 'Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!' and the rest are wiped.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."-- Bertrand Russell
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila."-- Mitch Radcliffe
Natural vs. unnatural is a pretty worthless distinction.
-- Greg Parkinson
Only to someone such as yourself, with a deliberate disability to perceive the difference.
-- Bob Sarver
But easy for someone like you, who can manufacture the difference on the spot.-- Mike Batchelor
"Making the simple complicated is easy. Making the complicated simple is brilliant."
Sir: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Andrew: One does not know, Sir. Possibly a predator was behind the chicken, or possibly there was a female chicken on the other side of the road if it was a male chicken; possibly a food source, or, depending on the season, it might be migrating. One hopes there's no traffic.
Sir: To get to the other side.
Andrew: "To get to the other side." Ah. Why is that funny? (Bicentennial Man)
I braved the contempt of my friends last week and ventured out to see "Bambi", the Disney rerelease that is proving to be a hit once again in the box office. I was looking forward to a gentle, soothing, late afternoon relief from the Washington Summer. Instead I was traumatized. As a psycho-sexual return to the horrors of early adolescence, it couldn't be more effective. For the first half-hour, you're lulled into an agreeable sense of security and comfort. Birds twitter; small rabbits turn out to be great conversationalists. Pop is what Senator Moynihan would describe as an absent father, but Mom's there to make you feel OK in the odd thunderstorm.
You make great friends, fool around on the ice, discover the meadow, generally mellow out. Then, without any particular warning, your mom gets shot, your voice breaks, huge growths start appearing on your head, and your peers start heading off into the clover with the apparent intention of having sex. Next thing you know, the forest burns down. If I were still eight, I think I'd prefer Rambo III."-- Townsend Davis
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."-- Carl Gustav Jung
"When you stop putting yourself on the line, and you don't touch your own heart, how do you expect to touch other people?"-- Tori Amos
What's wrong with being drunk in bed? Being drunk on the floor of the garage, I can understand someone objecting to. But drunk in bed?-- Brad DeLong
In business, your judged by what you say... nothing can kill the confidence of a perspective client faster then a proposal littered with grammatical, usage or punctuation errors. (Ad for RightWriter, The Grammar Checker)
Aardvark: Like an anteater, but harder to spell, the aardvark hangs around South American locations getting to know the local ant population, and attempting genocide on them. Well recognised for its long snout, with which it sucks up said unfortunate ants, the aardvark is best known for that bit in Tintin where it cleans up Captain Haddock's face. The Aardvark was originally named by Spanish Explorer Aaron Varkinos in 1533. [See also: Ant]-- Daniel Bowen (Toxic Custarpedia)
"Y'ever notice how Man is often likened to a virus or a cancer, spreading across the globe, using up resources, changing ecosystems? How come these people never talk about the prehistoric plants and trees that spread across the earth, converting all that carbon dioxide to oxygen and leaching nitrogen and other nutrients out of the soil? As their dead carcasses piled on top of each other over the millenia, they decomposed into pools of hydrocarbons, forming petroleum and coal. Directly and indirectly, plants are the true despoilers of the planet, taking pure and sweet solar energy and perverting it into hideous (dare I say, evil) carbon compounds.
"'Green' alternatives my ass! Kill a plant today and stop the destruction of Earth's pristine beauty!"-- Gerry Deckert
Is there anything safer than TV-style seriousness--i.e., delivering the conventional wisdom as if it were the deeply important truth?-- Pauline Kael
The beasts of the field and fowls of the air did know Ridcully the Brown. They'd got so good at pattern-recognition that, for a radius of about twenty miles around the Ridcully estates, they'd run, hide or in desperate cases attack violently at the mere sight of a pointy hat.-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1 1/2 tons. (Popular Mechanics, March 1949)
"If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd everytime, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side."-- Orson Scott Card
I reckon that Stonehenge was build by the contemporary equivalent of Microsoft, whereas Avebury was definitely an Apple circle.-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)
Bagdikian's Observation:
Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's 'St. Matthew Passion' on a ukelele.
The name Coca-Cola in China was first rendered as Ke-kou-ke-la. Unfortunately, the Coke company did not discover until after thousands of signs had been printed that the phrase means "bite the wax tadpole" or "female horse stuffed with wax" depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, "ko-kou-ko-le," which can be loosely translated as "happiness in the mouth."
There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection is the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted. ("Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior")
I think the strangest (or, perhaps, at least the most inappropriate) conversation I've ever had during sex with anyone was a long discussion (punctuated by the obvious noises) of analytic means of setting a bound on the primality of generalised Fibonacci numbers.-- Kay Dekker
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.-- Albert Einstein
Q: How many lawyers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Whereas the party of the first part, also known as "Lawyer", and the party of the second part, also known as "Light Bulb", do hereby and forthwith agree to a transaction wherein the party of the second part shall be removed from the current position as a result of failure to perform previously agreed upon duties, i.e., the lighting, elucidation, and otherwise illumination of the area ranging from the front (north) door, through the entryway, terminating at an area just inside the primary living area, demarcated by the beginning of the carpet, any spillover illumination being at the option of the party of the second part and not required by the aforementioned agreement between the parties.
The aforementioned removal transaction shall include, but not be limited to, the following. The party of the first part shall, with or without elevation at his or her option, by means of a chair, stepstool, ladder or any other means of elevation, grasp the party of the second part and rotate the party of the second part in a counter-clockwise direction, this point being tendered non-negotiable. Upon reaching a point where the party of the second part becomes fully detached from the receptacle, the party of the first part shall have the option of disposing of the party of the second part in a manner consistent with all relevant and applicable local, state and federal statutes. Once separation and disposal have been achieved, the party of the first part shall have the option of beginning installation. Aforesaid installation shall occur in a manner consistent with the reverse of the procedures described in step one of this self-same document, being careful to note that the rotation should occur in a clockwise direction, this point also being non-negotiable. The above described steps may be performed, at the option of the party of the first part, by any or all agents authorized by him, the objective being to produce the most possible revenue for the Partnership.
I've just spent a significant portion of my day reading an ethernet terminal server manual, and was vaguely amused to see that they have a feature called Camp-on (allows you to wait on a port until it's no longer being used.) However it got more amusing when I read the configuration example:
strip-record: raw direct_camp_on=always 1-3,8@132.245.6.32/6300
I've seen some drag acts like that...-- Keith Duddy
"Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex."-- Oscar Wilde
"The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little."-- Porterfield