Linux Cookie

"Perhaps I am flogging a straw herring in mid-stream, but in the light of
what is known about the ubiquity of security vulnerabilities, it seems vastly
too dangerous for university folks to run with their heads in the sand."
-- Peter G. Neumann, RISKS moderator, about the Internet virus

"Seed me, Seymour"
-- a random number generator meets the big green mother from outer space

"Buy land.  They've stopped making it."
-- Mark Twain

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
-- Dave Bowman, 2001

"There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of
pure chance..."
-- Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_

...Saure really turns out to be an adept at the difficult art of papryomancy,
the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers -
the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof
in the paper.  "You will soon be in love," sez Saure, "see, this line here."
"It's long, isn't it?  Does that mean --" "Length is usually intensity.
Not time."
-- Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_

Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it will make you feel
less responsible -- but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with
the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless
hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they
are --"
-- Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_

...the prevailing Catholic odor - incense, wax, centuries of mild bleating
from the lips of the flock.
-- Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_

...At that time [the 1960s], Bell Laboratories scientists projected that
computer speeds as high as 30 million floating-point calculations per
second (megaflops) would be needed for the Army's ballistic missile
defense system.  Many computer experts -- including a National Academy
of Sciences panel -- said achieving such speeds, even using multiple
processors, was impossible.  Today, new generation supercomputers operate
at billions of operations per second (gigaflops).
-- Aviation Week & Space Technology, May 9, 1988, "Washington Roundup", pg 13

Shit Happens.