Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?" -- Richard MacDuff in Douglas Adam's _The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul_ "Every particle in the universe," continued Dirk, warming to his subject and beginning to stare a bit, "affects every other particle, however faintly of obliquely. Everything interconnects with everything. The beating of a butterfly's wings in China can affect the course of an Atlantic hurricane. If I could interrogate this table-leg in a way that made sense to me, or to the table-leg, then it could provide me with the answer to any question about the universe. I could ask anybody I liked, chosen entirely by chance, any random question I cared to think of, and their answer, or lack of it, would in some way bear upon the problem which I am seeking a solution. It is only a question of knowing how to interpret it. Even you, whom I have met entirely by chance, probably know things that are vital to my investigation, if only knew what to ask you, which I don't, and if only I could be bothered to, which I can't." -- Dirk Gently in Doulas Adam's _The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul_ "I'll live forever, or die in the attempt!" -- Me "Sure I know everything, I just can't remember it all at once." -- Me "Drive offensively, Don't Panic, Live long, and Prosper. Remeber, the Future is Disposable." -- Me (Well, sorta conglomerated...) "Small though it is, the human brain can be quite useful when used effectively." -- Anon. "There is always something to see if you'd just open your eyes. " -- Anon. "No need to give up a good theory just because it isn't true!" -- Anon. "In theory, there is no difference between practice and theory." -- Anon. "Better to lose a minute of your life than to lose your life in a minute" -- Some wise person. "If this is the master race, I'd hate to see the starting heats!" -- Gallagher "Now, was that civilized? No... Fun, but clearly not civilized!" -- Gremlin "Hit paydirt with KDIRT" -- Andrew Dice Clay as Ford Fairlane "Why do vampires always chase christians?! Chase Jews or Moslems, they won't have a cross!!!" -- Gallagher "No brains... no headaches!" -- dvs at soda.Berkeley.EDU "I don't like cats, and I don't like dogs, if I wanted a housepet, I'd get a boyfriend." -- cynthia at soda.Berkeley.EDU "Your mind is not a dish, so don't let no-one wash your brain." -- Inca Inca "What the hell, this *is* a cruise..." -- J.S. "Life was full: no hacker is worth missing a Dead concert for." -- C. Stoll "There'd be hell to pay on Monday, but it's easier to give an apology than get permission." -- C. Stoll "Freeze! Drop that keyboard!" -- C. Stoll "He challenged me to use the C language; in a few minutes he'd reduced it down to twenty lines of tightly written code." -- C. Stoll "Computer crimes weren't sexy." -- C. Stoll "Wrote my own communications software in LISP. Got a phone bill for a thousand dollars. My computer keeps calling itself." - Anonymous "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw "What do I know, I'm only the consultant!" -- T.C. "typhoon:~ [5:38am - 8] uptime 5:38am up 6 days, 12:07, 2 users, load average: 4.16, 91.44, 102.51" -- alanc at ocf.Berkeley.EDU "ROS: My name is Guildenstern, and this is Rosencrantz. (GUIL confers briefly with him.) (Without embarrassment.) I'm sorry -- his name's Guildenstern, and I am Rosencrantz." "ROS (An anguished cry): Consistency is all I ask!" "ROS: Shouldn't we be doing something -- constructive?" GUIL: What did you have in mind?... A short, blunt human pyramid...?" "GUIL: Pragmatism?!--is that all you have to offer? You seem to have no conception of where we stand! You won't find the answer written down for you in the bowl of a compass -- I can tell you that." -- Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard "Love is the condition that exists when another's happiness is essential to your own." -- R. A. Heinlein writes in _Stranger In a Strange Land_ "When I see someone coming to give me help, I reach for my revolver." -- American Saying "In specifications, Murphy's law supercedes Ohm's" -- /usr/games/fortune "Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing machines are so poor at I/O." -- /usr/games/fortune "Fall seven times, get up eight." -- Japanese Proverb "No matter what other nations may say about the United States, immigration is still the sincerest form of flattery." -- Jack Parr "Marco: So, what's your opinion on spiders? R. Stallman: Well, spiders kill bugs, so I think that they should be the programmer's totem." (May not be exact...) "Eye donwannatalkaboutit" -- karlht at soda.Berkeley.EDU "The on-line tough-guy stuff is really pointless and unimpressive." -- F.A.Weihe on the Harley Enthusiasts Mailing List "soda is here to get screwed with." -- bernt at xcf.Berkeley.EDU "over consumption of subsidized resouce might make for the microeconomic reality of a moral hazard but, conscious ignorance of social external costs is not ethical." --psb at soda.Berkeley.EDU "Windows/NT - From the people who brought you EDLIN." Overheard by -- hpeyerl at novatel.cuc.ab.ca "Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of UNIX, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement." -- From an MIT job ad "Packing a weapon invites someone else to use one in your direction. Non-combatant does not rhyme with 9-mm." -- Kent Taylor "It's a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart, so don't sweat the small stuff." -- Carolyn, _Insomnia_ by Stephen King "I have ABS, reflexes honed by untold years of video games, and *way* lower insurance rates than this loser." -- bwendt at nyx10.cs.du.edu U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world's greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills. U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people. -- John Dos Passos, _The Big Money_ part of "U.S.A." "We cannot bear to admit defeat, we cannot take the pain. We are prepared to take the risks, bask in the glory of our own success. We are not prepared to wallow in the depths of our inadequacies, so we look for someone else to blame." -- A House, "Why Me?" "And if I never give you credit it's because I'm too busy taking it for myself" -- A House, "Everything I Am" "I'm not bitter, i'm cynical! I wouldn't want people to get confused!" -- cgd "Some people hack for fun, some because they want things their way, some don't because they can't, and some because they can't be bothered. Some can make anything work, some can but would rather not, and some could misconfigure a bowling ball." -- bill davidsen "I recently shampooed my pet rabbit with Body Shop shampoo. Its eyes bulged out and turned red. If you tested your stuff on animals like everyone else, this sort of thing wouldn't happen." -- customer complaint letter "Pray, but keep rowing to the shore." "Three movings is equal to one fire." "Don't be angry with the mirror if you have an ugly face." -- Russian sayings "Last night I lay in bed looking up at the stars in the sky and I thought to myself, `Where the heck is the ceiling?!'" -- Unknown "Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment." "We trained hard, but it seemed that everytime we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization." -- Petronius Arbiter (210 B.C.) " - People are communicating beings, doing best face-to-face, in person, with real-time question and answer. - People have trouble acting consistently over time. - People are highly variable, varying from day to day and place to place. - People generally want to be good citizens, are good at looking around, taking initiative, and doing "whatever is needed" to get the project to work. - People need both think time and communicating opportunities. - People work well from examples. - People prefer to fail conservatively than to risk succeeding differently [Pi]; prefer to invent than to research, can only keep a small amount in their heads, and do make mistakes, and find it hard to change their habits. - Individual personalities easily dominate a project. - A person's personality profile strongly affects their ability to perform specific assignments." -- Alistair Cockburn (arc at acm.org) "The way it was characterized politically, you had copyright, which is what the big companies use to lock everything up; you had copyleft, which is free software's way of making sure they can't lock it up; and then Berkeley had what we called "copycenter," which is "take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want." -- Kirk McKusick "HUGO: In Russia at the end of the last century there were characters who would place themselves in the path of a grand duke with bombs in their pockets. The bombs would go off, the grand duke would get blown up, and the guys too. That's the sort of thing I can do. LOUIS: They were anarchists. You think of them because you belong to the same type; you are an intellectual and an anarchist. You are fifty years behind the times. Terrorism, that's finished." -- Dirty Hands, Jean-Paul Sarte, premiered April 2, 1948 "My favorite hero taught me that your father can save you from evil emperors, but he'll die in the process." -- Ryan Hamilton "Search is so filled with uncontrollable opportunities to make new and novel mistakes, I really hate it when we make the same old ones again." -- e14 "You can never be happier than your wife." -- Hal Schectman "JavaScript is a child's plastic toy sword, that on closer examination turns out to be a working light sabre." - Jef Poskanzer If this plan was too long for you (and yer on a reasonable UNIXbox) : finger mlp at escape.org | more Thanks... E-mail: Marco E. Nicosia marco at escape.org