The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less; we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness. We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often. We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've done larger things, but not better things. We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less. These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete.
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Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: 'Learn, guys.'
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Sending a good link to a nice juicy shocker of a website is the net equivalent of bumping into a celebrity or bedding someone desirable. You get massive kudos from your peers. People are impressed. They're suddenöt interested in you. They imagine you're some kind of wild Internet frontiersman / treasure hunter for whom the Web is like some small, easily explored patio. You're on a one-man USS Enterrprise out on a mission to discover strange new pictures of really fat people and to send them back to entertain us, mere mortals.
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There is not a flower or bird in sight, only a small screen on which lines are moving, while the child sits almost motionless, pushing at the keyboard with one finger. As a learning environment, it may be mentally rich, but it is perceptually extremely impoverished. No smells or tastes, no wind or bird song (unless the computer is programmed to produce electronic tweets), no connection with soil, water, sunlight, warmth, the actual learning environment is almost autistic in quality, impoverished sensually, emotionally, and socially.
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Life!... It's a cybernetic psychedic explosion of garishly illuminated images, sounds, smells, and feelings! I am skewed, warped, distorted, twisted, altered in such a way as to defy description. I am discomboomulated to the maximum intensity of a technorave, industrial force. I'M ALIVE, DAMN YOU, AND MY HEAD IS TWEAKED TO THE Nth POWER! My mind is swirling and pulsing with wreckless, exuberant abandon! Pounding and surging in a vortex of sensory overload! Euphoric insanity!!'
'Sooooo..... how's life been treatin you?'
'I LIKE IT!
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It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.
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We have come through a strange cycle in programming, starting with the creation of programming itself as a human activity. Executives with the tiniest smattering of knowledge assume that anyone can write a program, and only now are programmers beginning to win their battle for recognition as true professionals. Not just anyone, with any background, or any training, can do a fine job of programming. Programmers know this, but then why is it that they think that anyone picked off the street can do documentation? One has only to spend an hour looking at papers written by graduate students to realize the extent to which the ability to communicate is not universally held. And so, when we speak about computer program documentation, we are not speaking about the psychology of computer programming at all - except insofar as programmers have the illusion that anyone can do a good job of documentation, provided he is not smart enough to be a programmer.
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A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man's emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel--until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion.
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When a girl gets cut, it's not like we're being snobs or anything. The girls pick the sororities they want, the sororities list the girls they want, it all goes into a computer, and the computer matches everybody up, ... We're not sitting in a room, going down a list, and saying 'Oh, I hate her.' It's a mutual match. Kind of like online dating...but that's a really rough comparison.
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I have a cat named Trash. In the current political climate it would seem that if I were trying to sell him (at least to a Computer Scientist), I would not stress that he is gentle to humans and is self-sufficient, living mostly on field mice. Rather, I would argue that he is object-oriented.
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At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, 'If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.'
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
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It's bad luck to drown a postman.
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pixel, n.: A mischievous, magical spirit associated with screen displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology: Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence, and the trolls in the marketing department.
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It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values-- the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.
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If when a businessman speaks of minority employment, or air pollution, or poverty, he speaks in the language of a certified public accountant analyzing a corporate balance sheet, who is to know that he understands the human problems behind the statistical ones? If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart. It is as simple as that -- but that isn't simple.
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I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
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Has everyone been incapacitated by a unknown virus introduced into the world population in order to incapacitate internet users by slowing typing speed to a reallllly slow pace ....or am I just lagged?
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If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart
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If you receive an e-mail with a subject of 'Badtimes,' delete it immediately WITHOUT reading it! This is the most dangerous E-Mail virus yet. It will re-write your hard drive. Not only that, but it will recalibrate your refrigerator's coolness setting so all your ice cream goes melty, drink all your beer, make you fall in love with a penguin, give you nightmares about circus midgets, leave the toilet seat up and kill your dog.
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This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin colour, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
'Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
'My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
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I had a girlfriend once, but then she changed her screenname...
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I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. The transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse.
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A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
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One can think of a secretary actively operating a filing system, of a librarian actively cataloguing books, of a computer actively sorting out information. The mind however does not actively sort out information. The information sorts itself out and organises itself into patterns. The mind is passive. The mind only provides an opportunity for the information to behave in this way. The mind provides a special environment in which information can become self-organising. This special environment is a memory surface with special characteristics.
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The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
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Apple Computer can argue that its use of the trademark has nothing to do with music. They could say, 'This isn't our music. We're selling access to this service.' That's another argument for a low royalty.
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My computer beat me at checkers, but I sure beat it at kickboxing.
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If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
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A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy
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In Life: You spill your cereal at breakfast, you get fired from your job, your dog dies, and your house burns down. Computer Equivalent: Virus Detected.
In Life: You've finished a 900 page novel. Your life's work. You will be a famous author world-wide; but then, it falls into the lit fireplace. Computer Equivalent: Quitting without saving.
In Life: A solution to all problems is found. World peace is achieved, all conflicts end, and everyone is happy. Computer Equivalent: Ctrl+Alt+Del
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