General/philosophical

• <FONT SIZE=+20>"We the people"</FONT>
• "The [U.S.] Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals ... it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government ... it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government." -- Ayn Rand
• mostly harmless
• "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." -- from Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams
• The only constant in the universe is change.
• In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
• Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.
• Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate
• "No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up." -- Lily Tomlin
• I'm not suffering from insanity, I'm enjoying every minute of it.
• The wise man tells his wife that he understands her. The fool tries to prove it.
• Commitment, n.:
  Commitment can be illustrated by a breakfast of ham and eggs. The chicken was involved, the pig was committed.
• Looking for 'true love' is like buying a book on how to read.
• Changing someone is rather like nailing Jello to a tree.
• Looking for a {boy,girl}friend is the wrong way to go, just put yourself out there and see what happens.
• When the lion is in the mountains, the monkeys will be king.
• "The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!" -- Bill Watterson's Calvin.
• "The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, is that it has never tried to contact us." -- Bill Watterson's Calvin
• Of course I don't look busy. . . I did it right the first time.
• "I pray for the strength to change what I can, the ability to accept what I can't, and the incapacity to tell the difference." -- Bill Watterson's Calvin
• "God put me on earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind I will never die." -- Bill Waterson, Calvin and Hobbes
• Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. -- Yoda
• Watch your thoughts
  For they become words
  Watch your words
  For they become actions
  Watch your actions
  For they become habits
  Watch your habits
  For they become character
  Watch your character
  It becomes your destiny - Lao Tzu
• "For every problem, there exists a simple and elegant solution which is absolutely wrong." -- J. Wagoner, U.C.B. Mathematics
• My claims are valid and easy to understand once you free yourself from the prison of logic.
• [maybe this one belongs below]
  #ifdef __LITERAL_BIBLICAL_FUNDEMENTALISM
#define M_PI 3.0 /* 1 Kings 7:23 */
#endif
• "The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion." -- John Lawton
• "There are those who believe a liberal or a conservative bias permeates the media. I don't. The operative press bias is one that favors conflict, not ideology, and it is lashed by a market-driven bias to boost ratings or circulation with more wow stories, more sizzle." -- Ken Auletta
• (on the media) "Objective is the wrong word. Rather, it's fairness. Objectivity is a false God. Instead we should strive for fairness and transparency." -- Ken Auletta
• "An eye for an eye will blind the world." -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
• Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. --Bertrand Russell
• "We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality." -- Ayn Rand
• "So the Maples formed a union, and demanded equal rights, 'The Oaks are just too greedy. We will make them give us light!' Now there's no more Oak oppression, for they passed a noble law. And the trees are all kept equal, by hatchet, axe and saw." -- Rush, The Trees
• "And these children that you spit on as they try to change their worlds are immune to your consultations. They're quite aware of what they're going through." -- David Bowie
• When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical. And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily, joyfully, playfully watching me.
  But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible, logical, responsible, practical. And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable, clinical, intellectual, cynical. -- Supertramp
• "There is no justification for taking away individuals' freedom in the guise of public safety." -- Thomas Jefferson
• "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
• In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of the scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
• Today the Justice Department did issue a 'Blanket Alert'. It was in recognition of a general threat that we received. This is not the first time the Justice Department has acted like this. I hope it's the last, but given the attitude of the evil-doers, it may not be. -- President Bush, Oct. 11, 2001.
• "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality" -Dante
• "Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark -- Mapp vs. Ohio
• Even under the rational basis standard, a statute lacking a reasonable connection to a legitimate state interest cannot acquire such a connection simply by surviving unchallenged over time...The state's protracted denial of equal protection cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has become traditional. -- Judge Richard Kramer
• The law, 100's of millions of lines of code, not one line of which has ever been tested to see if it works.
• "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie-deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic." --JOHN F. KENNEDY
• Individuals, not government, have the responsibility to form communities, to weave a social fabric that sustains the weak, cares for the young, and nurtures those who have grown old. -Arianna Huffington
• What men really want is not knowledge but certainty.-- Bertrand Russell
• Remember to pillage before you burn.
• Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience.
• The scum also rises.
• "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt
• Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. -- Mark Twain
• It is the worst kind of yellowness to be so scared of yourself that you put blindfolds on rather than deal with yourself. To face ourselves - that's the hard thing. The imagination - that's God's gift, to make the act of self-examination bearable.
• The truth you seek is already inside you.
• Fear of the unknown is far greater then fear of the known.
• Do one thing every day that scares you -- Eleanor Roosevelt
• But life wasn't yes-no, on-off. Life was shades of gray, and rainbows not in the order of the spectrum. -- L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
• Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. -- Dr. Seuss
• Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. -- Mark Twain
• It is wonderful being alive - and you are not really alive if you cannot be yourself. -- Sir Ian McKellen
• Why do people with closed minds always open their mouths?
• "There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil." -- Ayn Rand
• No matter how far down the wrong path you've traveled, you can always turn and go back...
• Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow.
  Don't walk behind me, I may not lead.
  Just walk beside me and be my friend.
• "... makes me feel kinda funny, like when we used to climb the rope in gym-class." - Garth Algar

Computers and programming

• Google this: (1.6022e-19 coulomb)^2 / (4 * pi * electric constant * hbar * c)
• You are in a twisty little passage of standards, all conflicting.
• The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
• Lies, damned lies, statistics, release dates, benchmarks, and Microsoft's claims of innovation.
• rm `which python` on the other hand is an over-reaction
• Yep. Even your Magic Eight Ball can tell you, "Outlook not so good."
• Peak: guaranteed not to exceed, under any circumstances.
• Speed is subsittute fo accurancy.
• Those who can't write, write manuals.
• Segmented Memory Helps Structure Software
• Those who think CS should be unsullied by actual computers should make sure to note this belief on their resume.
• "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald E. Knuth
• "If only you could make C++ like APL. APL is soooo easy" - Reg Lever
• Don't blame me. I'm only the programmer. The computer made the mistake.
• You can write bad FORTRAN in any language.
• "Any programming language that depends so highly on the accuracy of the symbols typed into it ('=' vs. '==') has some serious deficiencies." -- seen on comp.sys.mac.programmer (IMHO, this sums up the Mac user mentality)

  Granted, there are some dangers associated with related typos.

             if (status = UNDER_NUCLEAR_ATTACK)
                 launch_counterattack();
         

• The best way to accelerate a Macintosh is at 9.8 meters per second squared.
• Microsoft's 4 R's

        Reboot the computer.
        Reinstall the application.
        Reload the OS.
        Reformat the disk.
        

• "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea-- massive, difficult to direct, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." -- Gene Spafford (spaf@cs.purdue.edu), 1992
• "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry..." -- Henry Petroski
• Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be very selective about who it decides to make friends with.
• 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
• "The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be general systems laws. For example, Frank Harary once suggested the law that any field that had the word `science' in its name was guaranteed thereby not to be a science. He would cite as examples Military Science, Library Science, Political Science, Homemaking Science, Social Science, and Computer Science. Discuss the generality of this law, and possible reasons for its predictive power". -- Gerald Weinberg, "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking."
• "If you take a bale of hay and tie it to the tail of a mule and then strike a match and set the bale of hay on fire, and if you then compare the energy expended shortly thereafter by the mule with the energy expended by yourself in the striking of the match, you will understand the concept of amplification." - William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor
• One Page Principle: A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be understood. -- Mark Ardis
• Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. -- Henry Spencer
• Number of problems = (services running * number of user accounts * number of threads * version of sofware) DIVIDED BY (RAM in MB * free disk space in MB)
• Programming X-Windows is like trying to find the square root of pi using roman numerals.
• {Free,Net,Open}BSD is the continuation of a failed idea -- that quality matters. The lesson of the last 20 years has been that marketing is more important. Unix has always had superior technology to anything Microsoft. Microsoft has always out-marketed Unix vendors. Unix vendors (and this includes the *BSD people) have responded by creating Yet Another Unix which will have higher technical quality than the opposition. (public comments by Russ Nelson on /., May 12, 1999)
• Faster, better, cheaper -- pick any two.
• Simple. Powerful. Fast. Choose at most two.
• You can have it Soon, Cheap, and Working; choose two.
• Clippy: It looks like you're trying to copy an unchecked buffer, would you like help with this feature?...
• Shaw's Principle:
  Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.
• Since the world's computers didn't all crash on 1/1/00, some newscasters have needed to find a way to share their angst with the public. Today I heard a reporter complain about the $XB "wasted" on solving the Y2K bug, with the speculation that it was a ploy by the computer industry to get extra income. I wonder if we spent $NB on preventive health care and nobody got sick, if the news media would consider that also a waste? -- Rebecca Mercuri (from Risks Digest 20.72)
• If you want to secure your computer from the internet, don't use the internet.
• It's not the size of the CRT that matters...it's the resolution of the image!

  At least that's what my wife tells me.

• Where does the data go that is sent to /dev/null?
  
  • The bit bucket.
    You won't have to empty the one in your machine until the year 2038, which we assume someone will come up with a way of recyling the used bits by then (or just compressing them into bus benches).
  • The same place where /dev/random gets its data from. Unless your computer is owned by gummint, in which case FBI gets it as you have to keep a copy of all output.
  • It's similar to the space/time wormhole that appears in your clothes dryer, and randomly sucks out only one sock out of every pair into a parallel universe.
  • ..to help fight the secret, hidden war against entropy.
  • Answer 1. Data is not like energy. There is no "conservation of data" law. So the data simply "disappears".
• Random taglines
  • Encryption: Encoding used in computer manuals.
  • Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
  • WINDOWS: Wait Idly Now During Obscure Warning Signals.
  • Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.
  • REALITY.SYS not found. Load FANTASY.COM?
  • I *did* read the docs! That's why I'm confused!

From a former coworker (don't ask me who this is)

• "My philosophy is to know as little as possible to accomplish the task."
• "I like vi. The key bindings are really intuitive."