Memorable Quotes

• “Make English America's offical [sic] language”. A protester in Houston. Right on...and vote this clown off the island.
• "No laws were broken."—University of California spokeswoman Marie Felde. "She did not receive anything special."—UC spokesman Paul Schwartz—both are defending the cash-strapped campus' decision to pay police chief Victoria Harrison (who is 54 years old) a $2.1 million retirement package and hire her back for $194,000 per year. What about the law of common decency?
• “When you have a big, significant businessman like myself, why wouldn’t you want to help move things along? What else would they do? They waste so much time with legislation.”—Donald R. Diamond, an Arizona real estate developer, discussing Senator McCain's efforts on his behalf that made him earn millions of dollars.
• "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems."— Jamie Zawinski
• "Writing code has a place in the human hierarchy worth somewhere above grave robbing and beneath managing." — Gerald Weinberg
• “Our competitiveness as a nation in coming decades will be determined not only by our financial accounts but also by our intellectual accounts. In that respect, we’re at a disadvantage, particularly vis-à-vis East Asia with its focus on education. From Singapore to Japan, politicians pretend to be smarter and better- educated than they actually are, because intellect is an asset at the polls. In the United States, almost alone among developed countries, politicians pretend to be less worldly and erudite than they are”—Nicholas D. Kristof. Here is one example of quintessentially American anti-intellectualism, reported by Dan Mitchell: The city of Sebastopol, Calif., was all set to offer free wireless Internet service. Then last week the City Council rejected the idea after several residents complained that the radio waves pose a health hazard. “I have had health challenges, and my body cannot handle Wi-Fi,” one resident was quoted as saying. “It gives me headaches and makes me very sick.” Why give free access to information, just so that some punk kid can do their science homework? Let the Koreans do that.
• “We know exactly how you feel.” Caption in the San Francisco Chronicle. The picture shows Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili listening to President Bush at the NATO Summit in Bucharest.
• “On March 20 there were 19 public seats -- 325 fewer than required under the 1985 formula”—John King, San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco developers must include public spaces in their projects. Some are very pleasant, others a slap in the public face. If you live in SF, check out this and this site.
• “How could a 6 000-page document be fast-tracked?”—The first entry on ISO's FAQ about ISO 29500. The answer contains this memorable sentence: “It should be noted that it is not unusual for IT standards to run to several hundred, or even several thousand pages.” That may be true, but those don't get fast-tracked. Look at this graph by Rob Weir showing the lengths of ECMA fast-tracked standards. Can you spot the outlier?

  When an organization starts dishing out bullshit like this, you know that they know that they have lost all credibility.

  

• "I think ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF 1.0) can be compared to a neat house built on good foundations which is not finished; 29500 (OOXML) is a baroque cliffside castle replete with toppling towers, secret passages and ghosts: it is all too finished." — Alex Brown, head of the ISO work group responsible for OOXML
• “Open XML is already widely available and is being used by Apple and Novell. It is in the Palm operating system, and in the Java and Linux operating environments.” Tom Robertson, Microsoft’s general manager for interoperability and standards, on Office Open XML, as quoted in the New York Times on 2007-09-05. If quoted correctly, this is a baldfaced lie. There is currently no Java or Linux product or library that comes close to reading or writing OOXML. Clearly it is not “in the Palm operating system”. When a company dishes out bullshit like that, you know that they know that they have lost all credibility.
• "If a proposal with this low of a quality level is approved as-is, then by what criteria can we disapprove of any proposal in the future?" -- IBM's published comment on the proposed ISO standard for OOXML, which, in 6000+ pages, sets a new low for a standards document, as explained here, here, and here.
• This table, due to Rob Weir, shows Microsoft's engineering genius at work. To the untrained eye, OOXML appears to be the result of mediocre coders going to town with half-baked ideas. However, it actually demonstrates Microsoft's ability to innovate. Contrast this with ODF pathetically settling for boring consistency. Also note that OOXML is firm in the knowledge that there is only one true text orientation. If left-to-right text was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for ISO. Once again, ODF's politically correct waffling ("end") is truly pathetic.

  Format	Text Color	Text Alignment
  OOXML Text	<w:color w:val="FF0000"/>	<w:jc w:val="right"/>
  OOXML Sheet	<color rgb="FFFF0000"/>	<alignment horizontal="right"/>
  OOXML Presentation	<a:srgbClr val="FF0000"/>	<a:pPr algn="r"/>
  ODF Text	<style:text-properties fo:color="#FF0000"/>	<style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align="end" />
  ODF Sheet	<style:text-properties fo:color="#FF0000"/>	<style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align="end"/>
  ODF Presentation	<style:text-properties fo:color="#FF0000"/>	<style:paragraph-properties fo:text-align="end"/>

• “After 10 full years inside the GOP, 90 days among honest criminals wasn't really any great ordeal.”—Allen Raymond, who ran dirty tricks operations for the Republican party. He served jail time for running a phone bank that made calls, purportedly on behalf of the Democratic candidate, that were designed to anger voters.
• “Audiences rarely complain about too little embellishment but are easily distracted and offended by too much.” — Robert Gaskins, the inventor of PowerPoint, CACM December 2007
• “So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.” — Francis Bacon. That is how I feel about debugging a computer program.
• “The researchers also know from their surveys that the happiest of happy Americans are Republicans, social butterflies, and bigots.”—Sue M. Halpern, reviewing books about happiness. That puts McGovern's strategy in perspective.
• “McGovern is often blamed for taking a Democratic Party that represented the working man and refashioning it into a party of blacks, women, gays, environmentalists, college professors, criminals, movie stars, software engineers and personal-injury lawyers.” — Timothy Noah, in a New York Times book review of Bruce Miroff. The Liberals' Moment, The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party. On the face of it, that strategy doesn't sound all that stupid. Don't blacks and women easily outnumber non-black men? But what do I know—I am both a college professor and a software engineer.
• “Creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstance. Of course, that also ties into the racial aspect because our society is such that minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do. They die first.” -- John Tanner, chief of the civil rights division of the Bush Justice Department, arguing that minority voters were not widely disenfranchised by laws requiring photo identification because many members of minorities died before reaching old age.
• Why is this man smiling? This is Charlie Reed, the chancellor of the California State University system, whom the trustees gave a generous salary raise, from $377,000 to $421,500. The principal “achievements” of his “leadership”? Student fees have doubled in 5 years, the campuses are more overcrowded and dilapidated than ever, and he engaged in a long and brutish fight over faculty salaries (average: $71,159 per year) that he only settled after an administrative law judge agreed with all faculty arguments. Of course, the fish rots from the head, and one may well wonder why the governor (annual salary: $206,500) doesn't appoint a better set of trustees.
• "They are using public money and playing with it like it's monopoly money," --State Senator Jackie Speier about the decision of California State University to hire former chancellor Barry Munitz to teach one course per year in the English department at a salary of $163,776, far more than any other CSU professor.
• “I have never heard them basically say, 'We've got to protect the oil supplies of the world,' but that would have been my motive.”—Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank
• “What this ruling will do is send a message to companies that if they establish a good market position with a successful product, they will be forced in Europe to essentially give up that product to their competitors”—Robert Kramer, a vice president of public policy for the CompTIA trade organization. Microsoft was held to violate European law by failing to disclose file server communications protocols and by interfering with a competitive market for music players.
• "Let's have a moment of silence for all those Americans who are stuck in traffic on their way to the gym to ride the stationary bicycle." -- Earl Blumenauer, Oregon Congressman
• "After months of unfair treatment that has created a harmful distraction at the Justice Department, Judge Gonzales decided to resign his position and I accept his decision," George Bush, 2007-08-7, from Texas, where he is vacationing.
• "28 percent of the investment tax cut savings went to just 11,433 taxpayers, saving them almost $1.9 million each...The nearly 90 percent of Americans who make less than $100,000 a year saved on average $318 each on their investments. They collected 5.3 percent of the total savings from reduced tax rates on investment income."—New York Times, 2007-08-22, explaining why you don't feel richer after the recent frenzy of tax cutting.
• "So...what does the F12 button do? Does it do anything? Is it a joke button". — Jon Stewart, interviewing Bill Gates on the Daily Show. Mr. Gates replied: "I'd stay away from it if I were you."
• “If class warfare is being waged in America, my class is clearly winning.”—Billionaire Warren Buffet, opposing obscene tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
• “Ledbetter should have filed an E.E.O.C. charge within 180 days after each allegedly discriminatory pay decision was made and communicated to her.”—Justice Samuel Alito, ruling against Lilly M. Ledbetter in her pay discrimination suit with Goodyear Tire. Apparently, this man had never held down a job.
• "Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives."—Cindy Sheehan, Memorial Day 2007
• "Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night ... And one thing we want during this war on terror is for people to feel like their life's moving on."—George Bush, responding to Jim Lehrer's question why he hadn't asked Americans to sacrifice anything for the war.
• "If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, 'I read a science fiction novel that says it's not a problem.' You take action." Al Gore, responding to a challenge of his testimony on global warming by Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas.
• “It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use of reason as to administer medication to the dead.”—Thomas Jefferson, anticipating Fox News.
• “Do you think it’s been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?”—National Journal asked this question to 113 members of Congress. If the results are representative of the political parties as a whole, they are truly disturbing. 95% of Democrats and 13% of Republicans agreed with the scientific consensus. A country is in big trouble when it has a political party representing about half of the population that is fundamentally disassociated from the scientific process.
• "The operation itself — the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq — is costing more than $300 million a day"—David Leonhart, comparing the annual cost of the Iraq war with the annual cost of unfunded domestic programs, such as expanding preschool.
• “More people will graduate in the United States in 2006 with sports-exercise degrees than electrical-engineering degrees. So, if we want to be the massage capital of the world, we're well on our way”—Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric
• “To be honest, I think it's a little delusional.” — Rep. Trent Skaggs, a member of the Missouri House Special Committee on Immigration Reform, explaining why he refused to sign the committee report. The report states that “30 years of abortion and expanding liberal social welfare policies have produced a shortage of workers.”
• "Public companies spend 10% of their earnings to compensate their top 5 executives." -- Clara Jeffrey
• “The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.” —John Kenneth Galbraith
• "There are two options for the escapee -- Macintosh and Linux. I like the Mac. OS X is an addictive shiny thing, the hardware is toothsome and if you can afford to join its gated enclave the lawns are well-mown, the security guys courteous and your fellow inmates stylish and bright. But I can't afford it. Truth to tell, I get a little scared by the evangelical chaps on the corner." -- Rupert Goodwins, contemplating his choices after he realized that he no longer wanted to be a "battery hen" that is kept in a smelly cage to "lay golden licensing fees".
• "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." -- Howard Aiken
• "It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical?" -- Alan Perlis
• "Time for an oil change and lip service" -- Caption in the San Francisco Chronicle, April 28, 2006. After asking President Bush for a Federal Trade Commission investigation into oil prices, House Speaker Dennis Hastert left a press conference in the hydrogen-powered car at left, then stopped, got out and climbed into an SUV.
• "And then to the rarest treasure, Golden Gate Park on a car-free Sunday morning, the air wet and clean, the meadows green with the promise of spring. Not a single automobile: The silence is deafening, you can actually hear the branches dripping moisture, squirrels scrambling through the underbrush -- and the birds! Hundreds of redbreasted robins bobbing across the lawns, now that there are no cars to frighten them. On Stanyan, the families are renting bikes and heading into the winding trails. Slowly it dawns on them that they can use the main drive and the roads. For once the world does not belong to the automobile. The bicycle is king again and the rider may go where fancy dictates without looking nervously over his shoulder. You are even allowed, for a few unrealistic minutes, to reflect on how pleasant life would be if the car were banned from San Francisco." -- Herb Caen, San Francisco Chronicle, January 28, 1973
• "We took this photo of downtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq. Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it - in part becase many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism." -- From the "truth tour" section of the campaign web site of Howard Kaloogian, the former GOP assemblyman running for the seat vacated by disgraced 50th Congressional District Rep. Randy Cunningham. The picture was actually taken in Istanbul, Turkey.
• "Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." --Jamie Raskin, professor of Constitutional Law at American University's Washington College of Law, in his testimony in the Maryland State Senate on the constitutionality of proposed anti-gay legislation. He responded to Senator Nancy Jacobs's question: "Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man and a woman. What do you have to say about that?"
• "One of the bureau's highest domestic terrorism priorities is prosecuting people who commit crimes in the name of animal rights or the environment."--Robert S. Mueller III, FBI director, on the indictment of members of two environmental groups whose actions caused substantial property damage, expanding the reach of the "terrorism" label well beyond "Friends of Osama". (January 11, 2006)
• "This is basically what we do. This is what homeland security is all about."--Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, about the secret FBI monitoring of radiation levels at Islamic mosques, businesses and homes. (No suspicious radiation levels have been found.)
• "To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions." -- Judge John E. Jones III, a Republican appointed by Bush Jr.,  in his decision that was unconstitutional for the Dover, PA school district to present intelligent design as a scientific alternative to evolution in high school biology courses
• "Other than what I expressed, that's--scientists, a lot of scientists--don't ask me the names, I can't tell you where it came from. A lot of scientists believe that back through time, something, molecules, amoeba, whatever, evolved into the complexities of life we have now."--William Buckingham, curriculum chair of the Dover, PA school board and proponent of teaching "intelligent design" in the schools under his tutelage, responding in a court deposition to the question: "Do you have an understanding, in very simple terms, of what 'intelligent design' stands for?"
• "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian."--The biologist J. B. S. Haldane, when asked what might disprove evolution. The scientifically astute reader will appreciate that this is just one of many possible answers. What, on the other hand, might disprove "intelligent design" to the satisfaction of its proponents?
• "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. . . . Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of 'chance and necessity' are not scientific at all, but, as John Paul put it, an abdication of human intelligence." -- Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna.  
• In 2000, 17 percent of university bachelor degrees in the U.S. were in science and engineering compared with a world average of 27 percent and 52 percent in China. -- from a study written by Richard Freeman at the National Bureau of Economic Research
• "The most intelligent thing the U.S. government can do is to beef up the education system...The K-12 system does a good job of weeding out any students interested in math and science. We prepare them to be lawyers and consultants instead." -- Craig Barrett, Intel's chief executive officer,October 2003
• "During the past six years, when 35,000 additional students enrolled at CSU [California State University] campuses, full-time faculty grew by just 1 percent, while CSU managers and administrators jumped by 30 percent. These numbers will surprise no one who teaches undergraduates in the United States. Assistant deans and vice chancellors sprout like weeds in academic life." -- San Francisco Chronicle, October 26, 2001
  "I am pleased to announce that on September 7, Jennifer C. Cauble joined us as the first-ever associate vice president for university marketing and communications. In this newly created position, Jennifer will direct the university's Office of Marketing and Communications, formerly known as the Office of Communications and Public Affairs." -- Robert Ashton, Vice President, University Advancement Division, San Jose State University, September 21, 2005. 
  "At the recommendation of the search committee and following a regional search, I a pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Bradley Davis as the Assistant Associate Vice President for Faculty Affairs." — Joan Merdinger, Associate Vice President for Faculty Affairs, San Jose State University, September 15, 2006, announcing the appointment of yet another junior birdman with a vice presidential title.
• "But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."--William Bennett, former secretary of education, on his radio show "Morning in America". 
• "Our nation does not surrender to blackmail, and fear of blackmail is not a legally sufficient argument to prevent us from performing a statutory command. Indeed, the freedoms that we champion are as important to our success in Iraq and Afghanistan as the guns and missiles with which our troops are armed."--U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, rejecting government arguments that releasing war images would provoke terrorists and incite violence against U.S. troops in Iraq.
• "I had been programming in assembler for more than 5 years before I started programming in C. I remember that my first C program looked very much like assembler
  

  void function() {

      asm {
           // all code here :)
      }
  }"
  

  A programmer on yet another Java forum thread about programmers who can't truly appreciate object orientation because of their C background. I thought this would have killed the discussion, but it went on for another 110 postings.
  
• "In the next two months, it would be better if we just do the fundraising"--California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, telling the Republican National Committee to hold their fundraising after the 2005 "special election" to avoid "donor fatigue". In that special election, held at considerable expense to the taxpayer, fatigued donors, and Mr. Schwarzenegger's own pocket book, Californians get to vote on four issues that are so important that they can't wait for the next regular election. (1) Extend from two to five years the time it takes for school teachers to get tenure (2) Have retired judges redraw voting districts (3) Allow the governor to take money from schools, local governments, and state employees in a "fiscal emergency" and (4) Require unions to get written permission from members for every political expenditure. It is a true blessing to live in a state that has no bigger problems than these.
• "When a guy tries to chop your arm off and then offers to shake your hand, it's hard to be forgiving." Ben Tulchin, a Democratic pollster, on the reluctance of democrats to collaborate with Governor Schwarzenegger, all of whose propositions lost in the special election. 
• "I don't think he wanted to see the world. He wasn't that kind of mouse. But he's seeing it now, whether he wanted to or not.''--Caroline Nielsen, 11-year old owner of a stuffed plush mouse that escaped after being tied to a helium ballon
• "What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." Barbara Bush, in a BBC interview, on hurricane Katrina refugees 
• "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." -- George W. Bush. Apparently the National Geographic did, in this October 2004 article: "The chances of such a storm hitting New Orleans in any given year are slight, but the danger is growing. Climatologists predict that powerful storms may occur more frequently this century, while rising sea level from global warming is putting low-lying coasts at greater risk." 
• "A new subway line will be completed to my neighborhood later this year, and I'm hoping many other people will ride it so that the traffic will get better. I'll keep driving my car, though."--Yu Quiang, a salesman living in a Shanghai suburb,  explaining why he is confident that the government will improve the traffic situation. 
• In 2006, just 123 of the nation's 2.2 million farms will be subject to estate tax. -- from a study by the Congressional Budget Office, confirming that eliminating the estate tax is a gift to the hyper-rich and, contrary to President Bush's claims, has nothing to do with the "destruction of family farms".
• "Since 1980, U.S. government policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working families - and under the current administration, that favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich to bankruptcy 'reform' that punishes the unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our march back to the robber baron era."--Paul Krugman in a New York Times editorial
  
• "I've never had that happen to me before. It's supposedly random. My registration was expired because I had been out of town, and it was my first day back. They wouldn't let me go in [to the Midtown Tunnel which connects the New York City borough of Queens with Manhattan]. But he said to take the bridge instead. And I didn't understand that logic. If you're a suspect, don't take the tunnel, take the bridge?" Actress Natalie Portman, who was stopped by New York police recently, and has blamed her newly shaved head on raising suspicions with officers.   
• "The war in Iraq was sold to the American public the way a cheap car salesman sells a lemon. Dick Cheney assured the nation that Americans in Iraq would be 'greeted as liberators.' Kenneth Adelman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board said the war would be a 'cakewalk.' And Donald Rumsfeld said on National Public Radio: 'I can't say if the use of force would last five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that.'"--Bob Herbert in a New York Times editorial
• "I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning. "--British MP George Galloway, in U.S. Senate testimony, May 2005, speculating on why U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman falselyaccused him of owning a company that profited from oil trades with Iraq.
• "There are several lessons to be learned from the Rhind papyrus. The most obvious is that instruction in mathematics has changed hardly at all since the subject was discovered. Teachers have been passing mathematics on to the next generation in much the same way over the centuries: problem, solution, practice. As all the teachers of mathematics know, the method does not always work, but if there is a better way, no one has found it in four thousand years of looking." -- Underwood Dudley, 2002, in a book review of the world's first mathematics textbook
  
• "Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet. Here's an example. Go to Amazon.com. Buy a book without using SSL. Watch the total lack of chaos." -- Bruce Schneier, 2005, when asked whether disclosure of an algorithm to crack SSL would create chaos on the internet.
• "It is possible to give an illusion of knowledge by teaching the technical words which someone uses in a field (which sound unusual to ordinary ears) without at the same time teaching any ideas or facts using these words." -- Richard Feynman, 1965, in an article about elementary school mathematics textbooks.
• "You know, the only trouble with capitalism is capitalists; they're too damn greedy. " -- Herbert Hoover, 31st President of the USA
• "We don't want to feed the monster. We want to feed the private sector, and we want to starve the public sector." -- California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sacramento Bee, January 19, 2005. Mr. Schwarzenegger is himself fed by the private sector, to the tune of $28 million in his first year in office, twice the amount raised by his much-maligned predecessor, Gray Davis.
• "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. "--Max Planck, as cited by Michael Kölling in the SIGCSE 2005 "Objects First has Failed" debate.
• "These students are very smart. They are smart enough to work the system and to get through high school without doing the work." -- Betsy Gilliland, coordinator of the freshman writing program at San Jose State University, commenting on high school students who admit to never reading novels and relying on Cliff notes and TV to pass their English classes
• "If you look closely, you'll see the communist menace has infiltrated governments everywhere. Ever notice those free photons as you walk the city at night? Ever think about the poor streetlamp companies, run out of business because municipalities deigned to do completely what private industry would do only incompletely? Or think about the scandal of public roads: How many tollbooth workers have lost their jobs because we no longer fund all roads through private enterprise? Municipal buses compete with private taxis. City police departments hamper the growth at Pinkerton's. It's a national scandal." -- Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, congratulating the Pennsylvania State government for outlawing public funding of WiFi
• "Children across our country don't have health care. We're the richest country on the face of the planet, the only industrialized nation in the world not to do it." -- John Kerry.  "If every family in America signed up, it would cost the federal government $5 trillion over 10 years. It's an empty promise. It's called bait-and-switch." -- George Bush. Both statements are from the third presidential debate. $5 trillion over 10 years is about $1,700 per person per year. The following is from the Oct. 14 San Francisco Chronicle:
  

• "I will set a different tone. I will restore civility and respect to our national politics. ... I will work with Republicans and reach out to Democrats ... I will treat the other party with respect, and when we make progress, I will share the credit. ... I will unite our nation, not divide it. I will bring Americans together." -- George W. Bush. More about how Bush operates...
• "We need to do something about these frivolous lawsuits that are running up the cost of your health care and running good docs out of business. We've got an issue in America. Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country."--George W. Bush, President of the United States of America, commenting on the rising cost of health care.
• "As a kid, I saw the Socialist country that Austria became after the Soviets left" -- Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, speaking at the 2004 Republican convention about his youth. According to the CIA world book, Austria has  a "well-developed market economy", 2003 unemployment rate of 4.3% (United States: 6.2%), with 3.9% of the population below the poverty line (United States: 12%). 
• "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." -- President George W. Bush, at a signing ceremony for a $417 billion military spending bill, August 2004
• "You can't impose democracy. That in itself is an oxymoron." -- Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, The Boston Globe, January 18, 2004
• "It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high TCO, our lack of a sexy vision at times, and many other difficulties." -- Microsoft C++ General Manager Aaron Contorer in a 1997 memo to Bill Gates
• ``If San Jose State threw out Division I football, I'd write them out of my will, never step foot on the campus again and resign all the boards I'm on because they would become just another mediocre state university.'' Ed Mosher, class of 1952, a donor who serves on several university committees.
• "Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this." —Lt. General William G. Boykin, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, The New York Times , October 17, 2003
• "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it's gonna happen? It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"—Barbara Bush on 'Good Morning America', New York Times , January 13, 2003
• ``The first time I hosted the Oscars 13 years ago, things were different from today: Bush was president, the economy was tanking and we'd just finished a war with Iraq.''--Billy Crystal, hosting the 2004 Oscars
• "Mr. Speaker, yesterday against the roar of Japanese cannon in Hawaii our American people heard a trumpet call; a call to unity; a call to courage; a call to determination once and for all to wipe off of the earth this accursed monster of tyranny and slavery which is casting its black shadow over the hearts and homes of every land." -- Representative Charles A. Eaton, Republican of New Jersey,  1941
  "And if we don't go at Iraq, that our effort in the war on terrorism dwindles down into an intelligence operation. We go at Iraq and it says to countries that support terrorists, there remain six in the world that are as our definition state sponsors of terrorists, you say to those countries: we are serious about terrorism, we're serious about you not supporting terrorism on your own soil." -- Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, 2002. 
• "I feel I did exactly what I was supposed to do" -- San Jose police office Chad Marshall, testifying how he felt threatened by Bich Cau Thi Tran, 4-foot-9 and 98 pounds, holding a vegetable peeler, and promptly shot and killed her.
• "During its investigation, the board was surprised to receive presentation slides from NASA officials in place of technical reports. The board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA." -- From the report of the independent board that investigated the Columbia disaster.
• "It's always a great mystery to me why Freud shows up on these 'great people with great ideas' lists. Not a single one of Freud's ideas have led to a scientific discovery. They aren't scientific ideas. They may be good ideas for bad novels, but they were bad ideas for good science" -- James McGaugh, Director of UC Irvine's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
• "As the leading middleweight of the 2003 California State Sumo Series and a serious, well-educated, nonpartisan candidate for governor, I will attack the 800 lb. gorilla of big government." -- Kurt E. "Tachikaze" Rightmyer, Candidate for Governor of California
  "Bill Prady is an award-winning television comedy writer and producer who will bring the skills he's learned creating sitcom episodes to Sacramento. If elected, he pledges to solve all the state's problems in twenty-two minutes and forty-four seconds with two commercial breaks and a hug at the end. -- Bill Prady, Candidate for Governor of California
  "Dear Voters, Please vote for me, thus breaking the Seventh Seal and incurring Armageddon" -- Trek Thunder Kelly, Candidate for Governor of California
  These are all from the official voter information guide. Too bad you can only vote for one!
• "Finally, a candidate who canexplain the Bush administration's positions on civil liberties in the original German." -- TV commentator Bill Maher, on Arnold Schwarzenegger's candidacy for governor of California
• "What is an impeachable offense? Lying about Sex? No! Lying to Wage War? Yes!" -- From the marquee of the Grand Lake movie theater, Oakland, CA, July 2003
• "Feeling safe is not the same thing is being safe." -- John Gilmore, explaining the rationale behind his challenge to the ID requirement at airport checkin
• "We don't talk about work/life balance. We educate people on how to enjoy their lives and make Microsoft part of their lives" --Steve Harvey, HR Manager at Microsoft UK, May 2003
• "The California lottery has done more to hurt public education than almost anything" -- Jack O'Connell, California Superintendent of Public Education, May 2003, complaining about the public perception that lottery revenues fund much of public education. In the 2001/02 school year, the state spent $7,119 per student. The lottery portion was $135.
• "In liberating Iraq, [the US] worked very hard to protect infrastructure in Iraq and to preserve the valued resources of Iraq for the people of Iraq." -- White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan, April 2003, responding to the resignation of three members of the White House Cultural Property Advisory Committee over the looting of Baghdad's National Museum of Antiquities. Perhaps the valued resource she had in mind was oil
• "The average American worker earns only about $40,000 per year; why does the administration, even on its own estimates, need to offer $500,000 in tax cuts for each job created? If it's all about jobs, wouldn't it be far cheaper just to have the government hire people?" -- New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, April 2003, analyzing the {lie/myth/hope} that the Bush administration's $726 billion tax cut proposal will create 1.4 million jobs
• "The INS is moving fast". -- Attorney Alex Park, commenting on the uncharacteristic efficiency with which the immigration service is deporting 275 immigrants whose green cards were processed by a corrupt INS official, Leland Sustaire who accepted over $500,000 in bribes from immigration consultants. In an odd reversal of what would commonly be perceived as justice, Mr. Sustaireavoided jail time by naming the immigrants who apparently had no idea that their green cards were processed illegally.
• "I don't know about the legality, but whether a third party could keep feature parity with Visual Studio is a concern. It's an insurmountable problem for the Mono Project. The chance that another company could reach feature parity and stay current with Microsoft's Visual Studio platform is extremely small. The CLI [common language interface] and C# is managed by ECMA, but the bulk of the value of the .Net framework is Windows Forms and that is not part of the standard." -- Thom Robbins, a senior technology specialist for Microsoft, during a panel at Web Services Edge East, March 2003, shedding light on Microsoft's interaction with standards bodies.
• "No president has taken more flak over his language than George W. Bush -- not Eisenhower, not even Harding. That's understandable enough; Bush's malaprops can make him sound like someone who learned the language over a bad cell phone connection." -- Stanford linguist Geoff Nunberg
• [New houses] "are so vast and magnificent that their inhabitants seem to be only vermin that infest them." -- Henry David Thoreau, 1854, anticipating monster homes and starter castles.
• "There's no equivalent to the versatility of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Toolbars and menus customize themselves to the way I work. I wouldn't know how to function without the Track Changes and Comments features of Word." -- An enthusiastic "convert" who gave up the Macintosh for Windows XP. Microsoft wanted to counter the popular "switch" ads from Apple ("I used to think it was my fault that Windows doesn't work..."). Faced with the challenge of locating a real person who made the switch in the other direction, they instead hired a freelance writer to pose as convert. ("Apple's switchers tend to be plain spoken. By contrast, Microsoft's convert sounds a bit like Microsoft's own marketing department." -- News.com) The Associated Press found the writer by looking at the hidden information in the Word document linked to the web ad. Investigative reporters wouldn't know how to function without the Metadata feature of Word...
• "I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies." -- Tony Hoare, Turing Award Lecture 1980
• "Although we are often unaware of our indebtedness to this other civilization, its gifts are very much a part of our heritage. The technology industry would not exist without the contributions of Arab mathematicians. Sufi poet-philosophers like Rumi challenged our notions of self and truth. Leaders like Suleiman contributed to our notions of tolerance and civic leadership. And perhaps we can learn a lesson from his example: It was leadership based on meritocracy, not inheritance." -- HP CEO Carly Fiorina, in a speech on technology and business, anticipating Walter Hewlett's proxy fight. Walter Hewlett thought that HP should focus on the printer business and not low-margin PCs. Maybe he never had to hook up a HP printer and deal with the technobabble of the HP tech "support".
• "Allen zu gefallen ist unmöglich" (To be liked by everyone is impossible) -- Inscription on the side panels of the entrance door to the Schiffergesellschaft (Guild of the Blue Water Captains) in Lübeck
• “We buy junk and sell antiques. Some fools buy, some fools sell.” Truth in advertising, from the Far Eastern Economics Review Travellers' Tales column
• "We've been doubling sales every 18 months. However, when you start from zero, it takes a long while." -- Stephen Yeo, a marketing director at terminal manufacturer Wyse, explaining his company's underwhelming success
• "No wonder I think they're evil." -- President George W. Bush, defending his "axis of evil" statement, upon learning that North Korea's Peace Museum displays two axes used to kill American soldiers in the Demilitarized Zone between the Koreas in 1976. 
• Millions of Mexicans have no desire to learn English or become U.S. citizens. . . Rather than assimilate, they create their own radio and TV stations, newspapers, films and magazines". -- Pat Buchanan, 2002, member of an unassimilated fringe group with its own media outlets, and descendant of German immigrants
• "Measures of great temper are necessary with the Germans. Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant, stupid sort of their own nation, and . . . 'tis almost impossible to remove any prejudices they entertain. . . . Few of their children in the country learn English . . . Advertisements intended to be general are now printed in German and English; the signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1753, presciently cautioning against ignorant, stupid German immigrants and their descendants
  
• Bruce Fordyce, 10-time winner of the grueling Comrades Marathon in South Africa, was once asked how he could possibly beat 15,000 other competitors year after year. He replied that he only ever planned to beat one man-–the one who came second.
• "If we really wanted to accomplish something, we shouldn't be teaching our allies how to use PowerPoint. We should give it to the Iraqis. We'd never have to worry about them again." -- Peter Feaver, a military expert at Duke University, wondering if the U.S. military is misusing the presentation software.
• "The reason you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines.", Bill Gates, claiming--with apparent ignorance of computing history--Microsoft's significance in the open source movement
• "Yes, Mr. Gates, recently you have helped open source succeed -- in much the same way Osama bin Laden has helped beef up airport security lately. ", Eric Raymond, author of the open source manifesto "The Cathedral and the Bazaar",responding to Mr. Gates' claim.
• "More than anything else, [Windows] XP reminds me of a tourist trap. You arrive in a foreign city, and a handsome stranger walks up to you and says he will show you around the city. He offers to take you to the very best shops and restaurants. But you soon realize that he is taking you only to places that are owned by his relatives or by someone who gives him a kickback." , Tom Regan, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
• “There is one overriding factor that makes Linux virtually unassailable by all closed-source competition: Your investment in Linux is protected by the best software warranty on earth, the GNU General Public License.” -- Nicholas Petrerley, InfoWorld
• “Some of the most successful OSS [open source software] technology is licensed under the GNU General Public License or GPL. The GPL mandates that any software that incorporates source code already licensed under the GPL will itself become subject to the GPL. . . .This viral aspect of the GPL . . . fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector”—Craig Mundie, Microsoft Senior Vice President , in a speech at NYU on May 3, 2001, expressing his chagrin that Microsoft doesn't make a dime when someone uses free software. 
• “[Mundie] wants you to forget about all the work done by people like Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr, Leonardo da Vinci and a lot of other people who have done a lot more for humanity than most companies have ever done. And those people did it for the love of the art, not for some petty 'intellectual property rights'”.—from Linus Torvalds'reaction to Mundie's speech
• “The daily life of the cowboy was among the least glamorous of American occupations. Cowboys were stoic and rarely complained, even when suffering excruciating pain. When evaluated on this trait, the term cowboy programmer appears at its most oxymoronic, since no programmer ever left a complaint unvoiced.”—Bill (Tex) Curtis, in IEEE Software March/April 2001, pp. 110-112.
• “Real Programmers consider 'what you see is what you get' to be just as bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in Women. No, the Real Programmer wants a 'you asked for it, you got it' text editor--complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous. TECO, to be precise.”—From a classic article on Real Programmers
• “My new computer has a truly fascinating feature: Whenever I try to turn it off, the following message, which I am not making up, appears on the screen: An exception 0E has occurred at 0028:F000F841 in VxD---. This was called from 0028:C001D324 in VxD NDIS(01) + 00005AA0. It may be possible to continue normally. Clearly, this message is not of human origin.” -- Dave Barry , explaining why he is a big fan of technology .
  If your computer has the same symptoms, and you found this page through a search engine, please don't send me email asking for help. I don't know how to fix this, and can do nothing but share your pain.
• “There are no deleted items. To delete an item, right-click on a message and choose Delete. Do you want Outlook Express to delete some items for you?” -- Microsoft Outlook Express 5.0, trying to help when a user inspects a Deleted Items folder that is empty .
  
  More bad user interface design in the Interface Hall of Shame ...
• Are you a vi user? Do you wish you too had an animated assistant to aid you with the cryptic vi command set, similar to the ever-popular Microsoft Office paperclip? Check out Joel Ray Holveck's Vigor —a version of vi with an animated paperclip. It warns you before you embark on dangerous commands (Are you sure you want to move left?) and just like the real thing, it won't let go until you click the Ok button. See the screen shots for more... As Iliad, the author of the User Friendly comic strip told Joel: "You are a sick, sick person, and I admire that greatly. " More paperclip jokes...
• It is no coincidence that the number of the beast is vi vi vi. More amazing facts about the number 666.
• According to Chinese custom, the number “8” is supposed to bring you luck. But apparently not in the Airline Hotel in Shenzhen, where traveller Bernhard Ting saw these entries in the room telephone directory.
• “In America, the guy with the most supreme court votes wins”—Attorney Mark Levine . Check out his Layman's guide to the Supreme Court Decision in Bush v. Gore and learn all about states' rights, equal protection, irreparable harm, the December 12 deadline, the intent of the voter, and courts changing the rules of the election after the fact.
• “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities”—The Supreme Court of the United States, in its Gore vs. Bush opinion , trying to limit the scope of the “Gore exception” to the doctrine of states' rights
• “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything”—Josef Stalin, anticipating the Florida vote count
• “Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods.”—G. W. Bush, Austin, Texas, Dec. 20, 2000.More Bushisms...
• “Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.”—Bertrand Russell
• “Since a student is more likely to make mistakes when writing compound and complex sentences, avoid them. Meet TAAS writing standards by using at least one adjective per sentence and one metaphor per paragraph.” Let me rephrase this for readers who are recent graduates of Texas public schools: “Long sentences are hard. They make you make very bad mistakes. Make your sentences as easy as cherry pie. Then you will always be correct.”—Jerry Jesness, a Texas teacher discussing the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills
• “The other side talks about being the party of diversity and the party of inclusion. How do they figure this? This is what I want to know. Unless they define diversity as two guys at the head of the ticket that are from two different oil companies.” -- Rob Reiner, actor and director, discussing the Republican party
• “This trial has developed, in the most remarkable manner, the insane love of speaking among public men...We have been wading knee deep in words, words, words...and are but little more than half across the turbid stream. I verily believe that there are fierce impeachers who, if the alternative of conviction of the President, coupled with their silence; and an unlimited opportunity to talk, coupled with his certain acquittal, were before them, would instantly decide to speak.”—James Garfield, then a U.S. senator, about the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson . (From William Rehnquist's excellent book “Grand Inquests”, William Morrow 1992)
• "Translations are like women. If they are pretty, chances are they won't be very faithful."--Steven Seymour, interpreter whose misinterpretations embarrassed President Carter in Poland, 1978
  
• "If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning."--Aristoteles Onassis
  
• “My severance package is in shareholders' best interests.”—Vincent Pluvinage, CEO of Preview Systems on June 12, 2001, commenting to the Wall Street Journal on his $1.7 million severance package, which includes forgiving a $937,000 loan for company shares whose value failed to rise under his leadership.
• “In public services, we lag behind all the industrialized nations of the West, preferring that the public money go not to the people but to big business. The result is a unique society in which we have free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich.”—Gore Vidal
• A federal judge ruled on January 20, 2000, that it is illegal under the “Digital Millenium Copyright Act” to make available the source code for removing DVD protection. It is also illegal to provide a hyperlink to that source code, even if the code is stored on a server elsewhere. But apparently it is legal to provide the URL in plain text —that's protected speech. I can also tell you (but not give you a hyperlink) how to use a search engine to give you those links (presumably thereby violating the DMCA). For example, type this into your browser: google.com/search?q=DeCSS . How about singing the source code? Or a dramatic reading? Dave Touretsky's gallery explores these and other options.
• "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen" ("Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent") -- Ludwig Wittgenstein , philosopher
• "An Associate Professor with a Ph.D. who has completed a six-year probationary period and received tenure and promotion through the rigorous peer review process is paid less than a California prison guard with only a high school diploma and six years of experience. And Governor Wilson negotiated an additional 12-percent pay increase for prison guards this year!" -- Terry Jones, President, California Faculty Association, December 1998
• "If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudoscientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to 'normalize' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightned claims of its enunciatory modality." -- Homi K. Bhabha, English Professor at the University of Chicago, in “The Location of Culture”. This quotation won second prize in the 1998 Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the journal Philosophy and Literature . More bad writing...
• "Remote Method Invocation (RMI) enables the programmer to create distributed JavaTM technology-based to Java technology-based applications". -- An anonymous tech writer at Sun who wanted to write "Java-to-Java" but had to conform to the Java trademark usage requirements
• "That's a bit like comparing apples to hand grenades." -- Bill Roth, Sun's product line manager for Java 2 Enterprise Edition, when asked whether XML will replace Java
• "That's like saying the Titanic owed something to the iceberg". -- Paul Begala, a White House adviser, reacting to a suggestion that Republican senators owed it to their House colleagues not to dismiss the Clinton impeachment case.
• "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to use the Net and he won't bother you for weeks." -- Anon.
• The Song of Hakawatha . (For comparison, here's the original version by Longfellow.)
• "Football incorporates the two worst elements of American society: violence punctuated by committee meetings."--George F. Will, journalist
• "I told him, 'Son, what is it with you? Is it ignorance or apathy?' He said, 'Coach, I don't know and I don't care."—Frank Layden, Utah Jazz president, on a former player
• Incompetence is bliss . . . as Justin Kruger and David Dunning observed. "We found again and again that people who perform poorly relative to their peers tended to think that they did rather well."
• "If he were a swimming instructor, he would row everyone in the middle of a cold, eel-infested lake, and shove them in. Whoever made it back to shore would know how to swim. Strangely, I have come to regard that as a good thing." --A SJSU computer science student in my programming languages class.
• "I'm in your CmpE46 class and I am having trouble trying to download the program files from your website onto my computer.  . . . Could you please give me detailed instructions (not using the words 'directory', 'files', or other technological terms) so that I can download these programs."  -- A SJSU computer engineering student in my CS1 class
  
• Guy Steele gave a memorable speech at OOPSLA ninety-eight. Read the speech and you will know why I need to tell you that a fact or set of facts is said to be memorable if it is worth keeping in mind.
• if new true friend not protected for explicit private union, break case and try using this —Nathan Myers. Remarkably, this sentence is composed entirely of reserved words of ISO C++.
• "I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true--I no longer know how to use my telephone."--Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++
• "The cost [of the C standard document] is $130.00 from ANSI . . .the Annotated ANSI C Standard, with annotations by Herbert Schildt . . . sells in the U.S. for approximately $40. It has been suggested that the price differential between this work and the official standard reflects the value of the annotations." -- The Usenet C FAQ
• Obfuscated C meets the lambda calculus . More obfuscated C...
• Everyone knows that the use of GOTO statements in programming is considered harmful. The classic INTERCAL language uses COME FROM, a safe and convenient alternative. There is also an object-oriented version , with CLASS and LECTURE keywords. More bad languages...
• Using the metric system can save money--125 million dollars in the case of the Mars climate orbiter that crashed into the Martian atmosphere because the subcontractor didn't use metric units for all measurements . According to the US Metric Association , there are three countries in the world that do not standardize on the metric system: Burma, Liberia and the United States of America.