recently noted quotes

gaze upon my opposable thumbs and fingers -- hugh neutron

two things every Python programmer needs to do in life: 1) Reinvent Lisp 2) Write a web framework -- Jason Huggins

Religious points of view must never be allowed to dictate public policy and limit fundamental freedoms. -- from CFI bulletin on gonzales vs carhart

If you work at IBM Global Services, ask your boss outright if you are on the list to be fired. It puts the boss in a bind, sure, but might lead to a sort of "Alice's Restaurant" effect in which hypocrisy is confronted and exposed. -- cringely [lean and mean]

You cannot, of course, gradually build a self-supporting, free-standing arch by using only the component stones, piling them up, one at a time. But if you have scaffolding – and a pile of rocks will suffice to support the growing structure – you can build the arch one stone at a time until the keystone is in place, and the structure becomes self-supporting. When this occurs, the (now redundant) scaffolding can be removed to leave the irreducibly complex, free-standing structure. -- niall shanks [God, The Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory]

it seems a few high school students are far smarter than the entire gang of evolution deniers at the Discovery Institute. -- pz myers [pharyngula]

Jini is a service architecture. OSGi is a service architecture. Both have ways of dealing with services written in Java. So why are there two?

This, of course, is a classic example of what I have called the Highlander Fallacy, which briefly stated is the principle that there can be only one. If any two technologies can be described using the same set of words, then there is no need for both of them, and only one will survive. I call this a fallacy because, to use a technical term, it is total crap. -- jim valdo [jini and osgi, yet again]