399 pages
Rating: (7.6K votes)
“Of course. NSA is rumored to tape record every transatlantic telephone conversation. Maybe they’d recorded this session.”
“VI was predecessor to hundreds of word processing systems. By now, Unix folks see it as a bit stodgy—it hasn’t the versatility of Gnu-Emacs, nor the friendliness of more modern editors. Despite that, VI shows up on every Unix system.”
“Cliff, I’d like to take over, but our charter prevents it. NSA can’t engage in domestic monitoring, even if we’re asked. That’s prison term stuff.”
“Over the past decade Stallman created a powerful editing program called Gnu-Emacs. But Gnu’s much more than just a text editor. It’s easy to customize to your personal preferences. It’s a foundation upon which other programs can be built. It even has its own mail facility built in. Naturally, our physicists demanded Gnu; with an eye to selling more computing cycles, we installed it happily.”
“So what? Somebody’s always had control over information, and others have always tried to steal it. Read Machiavelli. As technology changes, sneakiness finds new expressions.” Martha”
“Ich langte in meine Tasche nach einem Milky Way - was sonst für einen Astronomen - und machte es mir bequem, um den Hacker auf meinem grünen Monitor zu beobachten.”
“Wait. I will say something. This is too important. And if you don’t listen to anything else I tell you, I hope you’ll listen now. No matter what you might hear about all these tragic figures, and the whole romantic image of the suffering artist, suicide is not cool. It’s not heroic. It’s not romantic. It’s like running away. Abandoning your family. And leaving someone else to clean up your mess. Only, it’s even worse, because once you go there, you can’t come back. And that would really suck.”
“alone doesn’t usually do much to help folks wake up on the inside. What wakes people up the quickest is some kind of tragedy or grief.”
“Every day the choice is presented to us, in a thousand different ways, to live up to the spirit which is in us or to deny it. Whenever we talk about right and wrong we are turning the light of scrutiny upon our neighbors instead of upon ourselves. We judge in order not to be judged. We uphold the law, because it is easier than to defy it. We are all lawbreakers, all criminals, all murderers, at heart. It is not our business to get after the murderers, but to get after the murderer which exists in each and every one of us. And I mean by murder the supreme kind which consists in murdering the spirit.”
“Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground.”
“That is another of your odd notions," said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing "odd" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of "oddities.”
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