The Loony Bin
(
loonies@bloodaxe.com
)
Wed, 2 Sep 1998 10:22:20 +0100
The Loony Bin - http://loonies.net800.co.uk/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hiya People... Here's the third part of Alan's thoughts for the day... Wishes & Dreams... - ANDREA xx ******************************************************* ******************************************************* *** *** *** THE LOONY BIN *** *** loonies@bloodaxe.com *** *** Archive: http://loonies.net800.co.uk/ *** *** *** *******************Internet Goddess******************** **********************ANDROMEDA************************ ------- Forwarded foolishness follows ------- Place the rock within easy gazing distance of the computer. When totally baffled, stuck or dismayed, gaze at the rock. Try to remember that, like the rock, the computer is functioning perfectly. You're the one with the problem. - Doug Clapp, Infoworld, V5 N*30, July 25, 1983 It's strange to reflect that electronic digital computers were invented to replace women. [Rows of WACs, or in Britain WRENs, each punching keys on a desk calculator, each computing her tiny task of some large computing problem.] Stranger still to realize that, for some (male) programmers, the replacement seems to have succeeded beyond expectations. If this paragraph has nothing to do with you, please take no offense. But if you recognize yourself in this picture, take a break. Log off. Shut down, Talk to people. - Michael Swaine, Swaine's Flames Dr Dobbs' Journal Jan 89 Never trust a man who can count to 1023 on his fingers We have here the latest in primitive technology. Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those people I had to kill because they pissed me off. If we remove the crash from racing, we remove the test of courage, and then we might as well go play golf. - Dave Despain Our need for artificial intelligence is so great mainly because the natural variety is in such short supply. As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. - Albert Einstein The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..." -Isaac Asimov USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population. ... Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed. The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up. When I die, I want to go quietly in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming like the other people in his car. There are two rules to success in life: 1. Don't tell people everything you know. I am a creationist; I refuse to believe that I could have evolved from humans. I would like to help you out. Which way did you come in? I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people? I must've seen it in a USENET posting; that's sort of like hearsay evidence from Richard Nixon... - Blair Houghton If addiction is judged by how long a dumb animal will sit pressing a lever to get a 'fix' of something, to its own detriment, then I would conclude that netnews is far more addictive than cocaine. - Rob Stampfli Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare. - Blair Houghton The meaning of life: Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it. - Zippy the Pinhead Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific advances. - Dr. Lee De Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube and father of television. Desert racing is like an all day plane crash. - Parnelli Jones USER ERROR: replace user and press any key to continue. Computer possessed? Try DEVICE=C:\EXOR.SYS Have you heard about the new Cray? It's so fast, it executes an infinite loop in 6 seconds. Imagine that the Cray computer company decides to make a personal computer. It has a 750 MHz processor, 200 megabytes of RAM, 1500 gigabytes of disk storage, a screen resolution of 2048x2048 pixels, relies entirely on voice recognition for input, fits in your shirt pocket, and costs $300. What's the first question that the computer community asks? "Is it PC compatible?" Asking whether machines can think is like asking whether submarines can swim. If a train station is where the train stops, what is a work station? There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works. It turned out that the worm exploited three or four different holes in the system. From this, and the fact that we were able to capture and examine some of the source code, we realized that we were dealing with someone very sharp, probably not someone here on campus. - Dr. Richard LeBlanc, associate professor of ICS, was quoted in "The Technique," Georgia Tech's newspaper, that November (after the computer worm hit the Internet) The Met office is now using fax machines to give local authorities early warning of severe weather. The Hampshire emergency planning office said: "Rather than having to rely on telephones, for instance, where lines are at risk in bad weather, we are encouraging the wider use of fax machines." When I was a boy of 14 my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in 7 years. When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?' - Sydney J. Harris, "Majority of One" Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten. - B.F. Skinner "Education in 1984", New Scientist, 21 May 1964 I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals; I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants. - Whitney A. Brown You don't sew with a fork, so I see no reason to eat with knitting needles. - Miss Piggy, on eating Chinese food The beauty of mechanical problems is that they are often visible to the naked and untrained eye. If white smoke is rising from a disk drive, that is probably where the problem lies (unless your disk drive has just elected the new Pope). - John Bear, Computer Wimp Imitation of nature is bad engineering. For centuries inventors tried to fly by emulating birds, and they have killed themselves uselessly...You see, Mother Nature has never developed the Boeing 747. Why not? Because Nature didn't need anything that would fly at 700 mph at 40,000 feet: how would such an animal feed itself?...If you take Man as a model and test of artificial intelligence, you're making the same mistake as the old inventors flapping their wings. You don't realize that Mother Nature has never needed an intelligent animal and accordingly, _has never bothered to develop one._ So when an intelligent entity is finally built, it will have evolved on principles different from those of Man's mind, and its level of intelligence will certainly not be measured by the fact that it can beat some chess champion or appear to carry on a conversation in English. - Anonymous, in Jacques Vallee's _The Network Revolution_ Entropy isn't what it used to be. - anonymous The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." - Ronald Reagan I race cars, play tennis, and fondle women, BUT!...I have weekends off, and I am my own boss. - Arthur Bach (Dudley Moore) in the movie "Arthur" There's no such thing as portable software, only software that has been ported. I do not suggest that you should not have an open mind, particularly as you approach college. But don't keep your mind so open that your brains fall out. - William J. Bennett, Gonzaga College High School 1987 I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. - William F. Buckley, Jr., Rumbles Why is American beer served cold? So you can tell it from urine. - David Moulton Why is U.S. Beer like having s_x in a canoe? Because it's f_ck_ng near water. (I didn't say that) Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer. - Dave Barry My mom said she learned how to swim. Someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. That's how she learned how to swim. I said, 'Mom, they weren't trying to teach you how to swim.' - Paula Poundstone Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant? In my day, we couldn't afford shoes, so we went barefoot. In the winter we had to wrap our feet with barbed wire for traction. In my day, we didn't have dogs or cats. All I had was Silver Beauty, my beloved paper clip. In my day, we didn't have Strom Thurmond. Oh, wait. Yes we did... I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it. Guns don't kill people, postal workers do. ----------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent via ListBot. To remove yourself from this list, please visit http://www.listbot.com/remove.html or send mail to loonies-unsubscribe@listbot.com Start Your Own FREE Mailing List At http://listbot.com/ -----------------------------------------------------------------