Speaker for the Diodes

05:25 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-03-18:

"One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours--all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy." -- William Faulkner, writer.

(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)

05:25 am - QotD

"A lot of the media have made fun of Gingrich for this plan. The irony is they're doing it for the wrong reason. A Moon base is being likened to science fiction, just some silly fluff. But that's grossly unfair.

"Space exploration is an issue that's important. It's vital to our nation for a host of reasons, but it is also costly in every sense of the word. If we go, we should go for the right reasons, and we should do it the right way. If we go, we must go to stay. The budget for this can't be set up on political election cycles, it must be based on the real constraints of engineering and technology, and far more importantly it must be based on a commitment to the future. If we do this, we must invest in the long haul."

-- Phil Plait, 2012-01-27 [thanks to moominmuppet for linking to it]

05:25 am - QotD

"Can you find the chaos theory that makes poets out of people,
Can you find the simple sequence that commands us to explore?
Can you find the cold equation that builds castles, raises steeples,
Leaves our heads filled full of numbers while our minds cry out for more?
 
-- from "The Moon Alone", by Seanan McGuire (posted 2008-12-20)

05:25 am - QotD

"And high-tech companies -- stop messing with us on your treadmill of upgrades while making the old stuff obsolete. It may be that any software company that didn't routinely upgrade its product would go out of business. But what if the rest of the world worked this way? Oh, I lost a sock. I need to get a whole new wardrobe because the replacement sock is version 2.0.1, and the stores now only sell version 2.0.3." -- Jamie Hyneman (of MythBusters), "7 Tech Headaches -- and How to Fix Them", Popular Mechanics", February 2008 (quoted text appears on third page of the web version) [thanks to perspicuity for the link]

05:25 am - QotD

"I Murder hate by field and flood,
 Tho' glory's name may screen us;
 In wars at home I'll spend my blood,
 Life-giving wars of Venus:
 The deities that I adore
 Are social Peace and Plenty;
 I'm better pleased to make one more,
 Than be the death of twenty.
   -- from Lines written on windows of the Globe Tavern, Dumfries by Robert Burns (b. 1759-01-25, d. 1796-07-21)

05:25 am - QotD

"I'm very well aquainted with the seven deadly sins
 I keep a busy schedule trying to fit them in
   -- from "Mr. Bad Example" by Warren Zevon (b. 1947-01-24, d. 2003-09-07) and Jorge Calderón

05:25 am - QotD

Llewellyn: "Never feel bad about anything you write. Art does not apologize."

Millicent Mudd: "So if I write, in literary form, that my mom is a poopyhead..."

Llewellyn: "Art does not apologize. Cheeky little girls are quite another matter."

-- from Ozy and Millie by Dana Simpson, 2005-10-14

[Happy New Year to everyone celebrating the start of the Year of the Dragon!]

05:25 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list 2010-01-03:

"I just wish that in the heat of battle, about which Bell writes with passion but an absolute lack of variety, I hadn't had to keep running to the Oxford English Dictionary to look up 'widdershins,' 'osnaburg' and 'barracoon,' words that stop us dead in our tracks and make us feel like we're playing Scrabble with Yosemite Sam." -- Robert Goolrick, in the Washington Post, December 12, 2009, reviewing Madison Smartt Bell's Devil's Dream.

[ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/11/AR2009121103510.html]

(submitted to the mailing list by Thomas J. Newlin)

05:25 am - QotD

"A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water." -- Carl Reiner

[I think it's pretty. But how pretty depends on whether i need to drive (or walk) in it.]

05:25 am - QotD

"It isn't as if random crazy people on the street are granted 'they said it so that's good enough to print' privileges by our elite newspapers. Powerful connected people are.

"The 'liberal media' used to be called the 'establishment media' back before conservatives started to seriously work the refs."

-- Atrios, 2012-01-12

"Atrios Johnson is Correct..The Establishment Media was NEVER 'Liberal'

"Thats why when people came along who were, they were separated out and called, 'Muckrakers'..."

-- duane V, comment to above, same day

05:25 am - QotD

"I don't want to be one of the boys. I simply want to live in a world where my voice and work are not devalued because I'm not a boy." -- @ColleenDoran, 2012-01-11 [thanks to the friend who retweeted it (no more specific, because that friend's tweets aren't public)]

05:25 am - QotD

"[SOPA/PIPA] mandates that every broadband provider in the country must build the very security hole DNSSEC is designed to fix into its system as a feature. To put this in terms the non-technically inclined PIPA supporter can understand, this ranks up there with Doofenshmirtz (from Phineas and Ferb) building a self-destruct button into every -inator. He doesn't intend for it to ruin his plans, but it always does. Similarly, no matter how much the IP Mafia insist that they only intend to use the PIPA tools on foreign websites, it doesn't matter. At some point, the hacker equivalent of Perry the Platypus is going to come along and push the self destruct button. At which point, it is a little too late for PIPA supporters to say 'whoops! Sorry we left a gaping security hole for hackers to take down the power grid. But at least we stopped several dozen tweens from illegally downloading a preview copy of Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part II.'" -- Harold Feld, 2012-01-17

05:25 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2012-01-04:

"Now, it may seem like SOPA [the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act] is the end game in a long fight over copyright, and the Internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn't about copyright, because the copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in this coming century-long conflict. We tend to think of them as particularly successful -- after all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, and breaking the internet on this fundamental level in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies!

...

"Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices...to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks. And we haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won't be able to fight on without them. And I know this sounds like a counsel of despair, but as I said, these are early days. We have been fighting the mini-boss, and that means that great challenges are yet to come... we may yet win the battle, and secure the ammunition we'll need for the war."

-- Cory Doctorow, from his speech The Coming War on General Computation, presented at 28C3,the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, Dec. 26, 2011.

[ https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcript.md]

(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)

05:25 am - QotD

"Why do so many people trust [Stewart and Colbert]? Because we all see what is happening, and we all can't believe it, and those 'jesters' are the only ones out there telling us 'we see it too: and it's stupid and bad for you'." -- goldsquare, 2012-01-11

05:25 am - QotD

"Everything that is done in the world is done by hope." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today is:
Gregorian: 2012 January 15
Julian: 2012 January 02
Hebrew: 5772 Teveth 20
Islamic: 1433 Safar 20
Persian: 1390 Dey 25
Mayan Long Count (abbreviated): 12.19.19.0.19
Bahá'í: 1 9 Badí' Sharaf Sharaf
Indian: 1933 Pausa 25
(looked up here)

05:25 am - QotD

"Actually, pain is just how you learn to be more graceful (My uncle, for example, only ever chopped off the one toe). By the time I die, I expect to be more graceful than Jet Li and Rudolf Nuriyev combined." -- James Nicoll of Usenet fame ( james-davis-nicoll / james-nicoll), collected at Cally Soukup's List of Nicoll Events

05:25 am - QotD

"Science can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world." -- Vannevar Bush, inventor and politician (b. 1890-03-11, d. 1974-06-30), "Science - The Endless Frontier" (1945)

05:25 am - QotD

"A free press is one where it's okay to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence. One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats & Republicans, liberals & conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news." -- Bill Moyers (b. 1934-06-05), 2005-05-15, speech at the National Conference on Media Reform

[via WikiQuote]

05:25 am - QotD

"We do what we must, and call it by the best names." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (thanks to blueeowyn)

05:25 am - QotD

"The mobilization of world opinion and methods of negotiation should be developed and used by every nation in order to strengthen the United Nations. Then if we are forced into war, it will be because there has been no way to prevent it through negotiation and the mobilization of world opinion. In which case we should have the voluntary support of many nations, which is far better than the decision of one nation alone, or even of a few nations." -- Eleanor Roosevelt (b. 1884-10-11, d. 1962-11-07), My Day (newspaper column) 1954-04-16