Intellectuals can look deep into the past or into the future. They can see problems like global pollution destroying the ecosystem. But, if a house burns, an intellectual is not any better than an average man at solving this problem: he just runs like any other person.
Umberto Eco, Some Newspaper, paraphrased
I love disagreement and I love arguments; but I hate insults and I hate emotions.
Me, after not enough sleep.
Many theorists would agree that, had it not been for symmetric encryption, the construction of spreadsheets might never have occurred. After years of unfortunate research into SMPs, we verify the investigation of A* search. PailmallNog, our new method for Lamport clocks, is the solution to all of these obstacles.Janota, Grigore, Moskal, and Kiniry, Comparing Scheme and Markov Models with PailmallNog
When you kill one enemy, you then must plan for the one hundred enemies you have now created. No enemy ever stands alone. He comes with a mother and father, brothers and sisters. He has a wife and children, friends and neighbors. When you kill this enemy, you must be ready to face the angry revenge that comes from the grief of this loss for all the people who knew and loved this man. The only way to stop this endless chain of enemy killing enemy is to forgive it. And in doing so, teach each one that life is the most important, precious and valuable thing.Anwarshah Anwary
There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.Josh Billings
In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior.Sir Francis Bacon
Live well. It is the greatest revenge.The Talmud
Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to the more ought law to weed it out.Sir Francis Bacon
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.Martin Luther King Jr.
Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.Confucious
Little, vicious minds abound with anger and revenge, and are incapable of feeling the pleasure of forgiving their enemies.Earl of Chesterfield
I am grateful for suggestions made by Roger Downer and Pierre-Jacques Courtois after reading an early version of this "Viewpoint." Serious scientists, they did not ask to be co-authors.
David Parnas, Stop the Numbers Game
Worse, today's national curriculum teaches pupils to use computers but not to understand them. It's training, rather than education. As Mr Rodd's BCS colleague David Evans puts it, it's as if we thought that "educating a nation of car drivers will create an automotive engineering industry."
We all know a big company that doesn't do any debugging. Instead, it lets its users find the bugs and improve the programs. That's a great idea!
Since the time of Greek philosophy, scholars have prided themselves on their ability to understand something about infinity; and it has become traditional in some circles to regard finite things as essentially trivial, too limited to be of any interest. It is hard to debunk such a notion, since there are no accepted standards for demonstrating that something is interesting, especially when something finite is compared with something transcendent. Yet I believe that the climate of thought is changing, since finite objects are proving to be such fascinating objects of study.Donald E. Knuth, Mathematics and Computer Science: Coping with Finiteness, 1976
Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.
A "spec" is close to useless. I have never seen a spec that was both big enough to be useful and accurate.
And I have seen lots of total crap work that was based on specs. It's the single worst way to write software, because it by definition means that the software was written to match theory, not reality.