Quotes
Quotes about Men
Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.
The research rat of the future allows experimentation without manipulation of the real world. This is the cutting edge of modeling technology.
Learning how to access a continuity of common sense can be one of your most efficient accomplishments in this decade. Can you imagine "common sense" surpassing science and technology in the quest to unravel the human stress mess? In time, society will have a new measure for confirming truth. It's inside the people-not at the mercy of current scientific methodology. Let scientists facilitate discovery, but not invent your inner truth. -Doc Childre.
What is more difficult, to think of an encampment on the moon or of Harlem rebuilt? Both are now within the reach of our resources. Both now depend upon human decision and human will.
Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrheaâmassive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity.
It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.
Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men.
The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
As nuclear and other technological achievements continue to mount, the normal life span will continue to climb. The hourly productivity of the worker will increase.
The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.
What we know is not much; what we do not know is immense.
Theory provides the maps that turn an uncoordinated set of experiments or computer simulations into a cumulative exploration.
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
I am dying from the treatment of too many physicians.
By the time (the Leaning Tower of Pisa) was 10% built, everyone knew it would be a total disaster. But the investment was so big they felt compelled to go on. Since its completion, it cost a fortune to maintain and is still in danger of collapsing. There are no plans to replace it, since it was never needed in the first place. I expect every installation has its own pet software which is analogous to the above.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
FORTRAN --'the infantile disorder'--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use. PL/I --'the fatal disease'-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set. It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence. APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
Hardly a year passes that fails to find a new, oft-times exotic, research method or technique added to the armamentarium of political inquiry. Anyone who cannot negotiate Chi squares, assess randomization, statistical significance, and standard deviations is less than illiterate; he is preconscious.
If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get one million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
