Freebsd Fortunes

To every Ph.D. there is an equal and opposite Ph.D.
                -- B. Duggan

To generalize is to be an idiot.
                -- William Blake

To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three
men, two of them absent.

To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
                -- Thomas Edison

To iterate is human, to recurse, divine.

To the best of my recollection, Senator, I can't recall.

To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide
a test load.

To those accustomed to the precise, structured methods of conventional
system development, exploratory development techniques may seem messy,
inelegant, and unsatisfying.  But it's a question of congruence:
precision and flexibility may be just as disfunctional in novel,
uncertain situations as sloppiness and vacillation are in familiar,
well-defined ones.  Those who admire the massive, rigid bone structures
of dinosaurs should remember that jellyfish still enjoy their very
secure ecological niche.
                -- Beau Sheil, "Power Tools for Programmers"

To understand this important story, you have to understand how the
telephone company works.  Your telephone is connected to a local
computer, which is in turn connected to a regional computer, which is
in turn connected to a loudspeaker the size of a garbage truck on the
lawn of Edna A. Bargewater of Lawrence, Kan.

Whenever you talk on the phone, your local computer listens in.  If it
suspects you're going to discuss an intimate topic, it notifies the
computer above it, which listens in and decides whether to alert the
one above it, until finally, if you really humiliate yourself, maybe
break down in tears and tell your closest friend about a sordid
incident from your past involving a seedy motel, a neighbor's spouse,
an entire religious order, a garden hose and six quarts of tapioca
pudding, the top computer feeds your conversation into Edna's
loudspeaker, and she and her friends come out on the porch to listen
and drink gin and laugh themselves silly.
                -- Dave Barry, "Won't It Be Just Great Owning Our Own
                   Phones?"

"To vacillate or not to vacillate, that is the question ... or is it?"