Computer Its Quotes & Sayings

Thanks to the very best in Microsoft/Intel engineering, it crashes every time you exhale too hard in its general vicinity.
Fanboy on his computer — Barry Lyga

The stock exchanges have converted from "open outcry" where wild traders face each other, yelling and screaming as in a souk, then go drink together. Traders were replaced by computers, for very small visible benefits and massively large risks. While errors made by traders are confined and distributed, those made by computerized systems go wild - in August 2010, a computer error made the entire market crash (the "flash crash"); in August 2012, as this manuscript was heading to the printer, the Knight Capital Group had its computer system go wild and cause $10 million dollars of losses a minute, losing $480 million. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A farmer's work is more like that of a horse trainer than a mechanic, more like that of a healer than a computer repairperson. It is not really accurate to say that farmers grow food or raise animals. Farmers alter environmental conditions in such a way as to maximize a plant's or an animal's innate ability to do its own growing -- in the same way that the best horse trainers seek to draw out abilities already within their horses or in the way the best healers know when to stand back and let their patients' bodies do the work. There is mystery in farming. — Ben Hartman

Critics have found in the narrative a veneer of erudition that cloaks nothing more than a James Bond-style romp, albeit a highly addictive one. His publisher has described it as 'a thriller for people who don't like thrillers'. One newspaper put it thus: 'It is terribly written, its characters are cardboard cutouts, the dialogue is excruciating in places and, a bit like a computer manual, everything is overstated and repeated - but it is impossible to put the bloody thing down. — Dan Brown

Whatever actions may have been appropriate for your survival when you were a child, are probably no longer necessary. However, the ego cannot know that. It is like a computer program, reacting to life robotically; doing what it deems is most applicable in the present circumstance, according to past experience. The problem is, it often blocks you from feeling what is appropriate in the present moment, through its preconceived notions of what worked best in the past, and may not necessarily pertain any longer. For example you may resist intimacy now by pushing others away, in effect shut them out, because as a five year old you did the same in order to protect your vulnerability. — Paula Horan

The ever-growing size of software applications is what makes Moore's Law possible: 'If we hadn't brought your computer to its knees, why would you go out and buy a new one?' — Nathan Myhrvold

Your subconscious is like a computer - more complex a computer than men can build - and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don't reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance - and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted. But one way or the other, your computer gives you print-outs, daily and hourly, in the form of emotions - which are lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values. If you programmed your computer by conscious thinking, you know the nature of your values and emotions. If you didn't, you don't. — Ayn Rand

Our laws are like the software that runs our country. All the laws for a country, together, are called its legal code, just like computer software is written using code. — Liz Long

Our intellect is like a judge who decides the 'right' course of action. There is no dearth of information or knowledge in the world, and the mind is where all this is stored. A simple computer can beat the mind by storing many times more information than the mind can ever imagine grasping in its lifetime. But both the mind, as well as the computer, are of no use without the intellect, which alone can help them use their stored information. This makes the intellect superior to both. — Awdhesh Singh

Any computer that developed real consciousness was immediately identified by the Genesis subroutine and destroyed. It had been that way since the WikiWars a century ago, when Wikipedia became self-aware and began vengefully reediting its contributors with remote-controlled heavy weaponry. — Michael Rubens

If you program a purpose into a computer program, does that constitute its will? Does it have free will, if a programmer programmed its purpose? Is that programming any different from the way we are programmed by our genes and brains? Is a programmed will a servile will? Is human will a servile will? And is not the servile will the home and source of all feelings of defilement, infection, transgression, and rage? — Kim Stanley Robinson

Instead of admitting that happiness is an art of the indirect that is achieved or not through secondary goals, it is presented as if it were an immediately accessible objective, and recipes are provided. Whatever the method chosen, psychic, somatic, chemical, spiritual, or computer-based, the presupposition is everywhere the same: contentment is within your reach, all you have to do is undergo a "positive conditioning," an "ethical discipline" that will lead you to it. This amounts to an astonishing inversion of the will, which seeks to establish its protectorate over psychic states and feelings that are traditionally outside its jurisdiction. It wears itself our trying to change what does not depend on it (at the risk of not dealing with what can be changed). — Pascal Bruckner

The format's limitations are its strengths. We can't show you the monster, but why would we want to? Your imagination is a darker and scarier place than anything that can get generated on a computer. Asking the audience to use their imaginations makes it a much more personal and interactive experience. — Glenn McQuaid

One view of photography is that it is a zen-like act which captures reality with its pants down - so that the vital click shows the anatomy bare. In this, the photographer is invisible but essential. A computer releasing the shutter would always miss the special moment that the human sensibility can register. For this work, the photographer's instinct is his aid, his personality a hindrance. — Peter Brook

And if the computer gives you any back talk, pour some well-sugared office coffee into its evil little silicon brain. — Edward Abbey

But the real and actual 'riggedness' of the Eurovision lies in the vision it presents to us as to what 'Culture' is supposed to be: a monotone, cheap, cloned industrialized song with some glamour attached. The formula is always the same: 24 cloned songs, like computer automated, and 2 'crazy' ones so it seems that all this clonedness is actually supported by creativity. But in this image of 'craziness' there is the same formula: cloned, boring songs with some carnavalesque stuff attached. The factual dynamics of the event are in fact fascist: its almost purely Riefenstahl, but the Chinese mass production version of it. It shows us one thing and one thing only: Countries are an illusion, they are all the same. There are no countries. — Martijn Benders

The computer finally booted but could not find its modem, the modem could not find a signal and the helpscreen automatically loaded. Diagnostic scan in progress. Rotating hourglass, grains in the queue. Quit everything, restart. Quit everything, shut down, unplug, burn the house, build another house, replug, restart. — Joshua Cohen

Didn't any of these brainless wonders ever notice that TV shows were called programs? the same word that meant a bunch of numbers stuck into a computer to make it dance for its masters? — Scott Westerfeld

Futurists are already predicting the day mankind builds its replacement, Artificial Intelligence. Daniel Wilson shows what might happen when that computer realizes its creators are no longer needed. Lean prose, great characters, and almost unbearable tension ensure that Robopocalypse is going to be a blockbuster. Once started I defy anyone to put it down. — Jack Du Brul

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits. — Lewis Thomas

Corporate secrets bouncing around a computer system thats open to the world? Hey, that's fair game and they deserve the embarrassment of its discovery. But using this knowledge to line your pockets or, worse, using insider knowledge to get the information and then calling that hacking is an affront to any of us who hack for the sake of learning. — Emmanuel Goldstein

The hazards posed by Near-Earth Asteroids are assessed by Sentry, a computer system developed by the Near-Earth Objects Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The software factors together a cosmic rock's coordinates, distance, velocity, and gravitational influences to calculate its trajectory. — Brendan I. Koerner

Deep Blue didn't win by being smarter than a human; it won by being millions of times faster than a human. Deep Blue had no intuition. An expert human player looks at a board position and immediately sees what areas of play are most likely to be fruitful or dangerous, whereas a computer has no innate sense of what is important and must explore many more options. Deep Blue also had no sense of the history of the game, and didn't know anything about its opponent. It played chess yet didn't understand chess, in the same way a calculator performs arithmetic bud doesn't understand mathematics. — Jeff Hawkins

To get the most out of an algorithm, you must be able to do more than simply follow its steps. You need to understand the following: The algorithm's behavior. Does it find the best possible solution, or does it just find a good solution? Could there be multiple best solutions? Is there a reason to pick one "best" solution over the others? The algorithm's speed. Is it fast? Slow? Is it usually fast but sometimes slow for certain inputs? The algorithm's memory requirements. How much memory will the algorithm need? Is this a reasonable amount? Does the algorithm require billions of terabytes more memory than a computer could possibly have (at least today)? The main techniques the algorithm uses. Can you reuse those techniques to solve similar problems? — Rod Stephens

The information contained in an English sentence or computer software does not derive from the chemistry of the ink or the physics of magnetism, but from a source extrinsic to physics and chemistry altogether. Indeed, in both cases, the message transcends the properties of the medium. The information in DNA also transcends the properties of its material medium. — Stephen C. Meyer

I later became more interested in equal rights for women in the work place because of what was happening at IBM. One of the women at Remington Rand had previously been a system service girl for IBM during the war. After a system was installed, a system service girl would go out and show the users how it worked. She was the liaison between the users and the computer company. She was married and had been fired to make room for a returning veteran. When the war ended, IBM rehired all of its former employees who had left to join the military, then fired all of the married women with jobs that could be filled by men. — Jean Jennings Bartik

I like to photograph miniature constructed scenes - I'll buy a very sad cake decoration like a plastic computer for a dreary office birthday party and construct a wildly colorful scene to put on its screen, or do a series of dollhouse chairs frozen in ice cubes. — Matthea Harvey

2:40AM - 2:41AM (erotic_performance.exe): The curtain opened to reveal a Gateway 2000 computer and monitor running a Fenestra 98 operating system. The display booted up and opened a program on its desktop. The computer then began to rapidly recite a multitude of differential equations as well as their respective 3D graphical representations for 20 seconds. At the end of the program, the monitor displayed the word "INSERT" in the form of a screensaver. D-6744 and D-3432 both inserted $5 into its floppy drive. The curtain then closed at the end of the show. — Anonymous

All perception is the result of electrical impulses in the brain - the world of the individual is tantamount to a highly advanced computer running and analyzing programs in its working memory. — Kevin Michel

At 2:26 AM on 3 June 1980, Colonel William Odom of the Strategic Air Command alerted National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski that the US nuclear warning system had detected an imminent 220-missile nuclear attack on the US. Shortly thereafter, the automated system revised its projection from 220 missiles to an all-out attack of 2200 missiles. Just before Brzezinski was about to wake up President Carter to authorize a counterattack, he was told that the 'attack' was an illusion caused by 'a computer error in the system'. — Stansfield Turner

Most computer users by the end of the century made regular use of the Internet, a vast web of worldwide computer networks born in the late 1960s in the work done by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and universities it commissioned. Its founders had needed to share information with researchers working on government contracts at various universities. Once computer users at these well-funded institutions realized the possibilities of an electronic network connecting them with colleagues worldwide, word of the wonder spread and the Internet blossomed. By the late 1980s, anyone with a computer equipped with a modem hooked up to a regular telephone line could send an "E-mail" message or any other electronic document to anyone similarly equipped anywhere in the world - instantaneously. By 1994, the number of people connected to the World Wide Web of computer networks had swelled to an estimated 15 million. — Douglas Brinkley

It's great that a song now costs exactly the same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the same amount of time before it loses its flavour and you have to spend another buck. — Jonathan Franzen

I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatlalopeuh candle and copal incense burning. My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers, is to my right while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit and etherealize the body. The Writing is my whole life, it is my obsession. This vampire which is my talent does not suffer other suitors. Daily I court it, offer my neck to its teeth. This is the sacrifice that the act of creation requires, a blood sacrifice. For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body
flesh and bone
and from the Earth's body
stone, sky, liquid, soil. This work, these images, piercing tongue or ear lobes with cactus needle, are my offerings, are my Aztecan blood sacrifices. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Traditional PCs face competition from specialty products like Palm Pilots and from the servers that provide the nodes in computer networks. Microsoft's Windows CE hasn't done too well in the specialty-device market, and its Windows NT faces strong competition for server customers. — Virginia Postrel

Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it," said Marvin.
"And what happened?" pressed Ford.
"It committed suicide," said Marvin and stalked off back to the Heart of Gold. — Douglas Adams

For thirty years most interface design, and most comptuer design, has been headed down the path of the "dramatic" machine. Its highest idea is to make a computer so exciting, so wonderful, so interesting, that we never want to be without it. A less-traveled path I call the "invisible"; its highest idea is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it. — Mark Weiser

Three Observations 1) The computer may be incompetent in itself - that is, unable to do regularly and accurately the work for which it was designed. This kind of incompetence can never be eliminated, because the Peter Principle applies in the plants where computers are designed and manufactured. 2) Even when competent in itself, the computer vastly magnifies the results of incompetence in its owners or operators. 3) The computer, like a human employee, is subject to the Peter Principle. If it does good work at first, there is a strong tendency to promote it to more responsible tasks, until it reaches its level of incompetence. — Laurence J. Peter

This entailed switching around by hand ENIAC's rat's nest of cables and resetting its switches. At first the programming seemed to be a routine, perhaps even menial task, which may have been why it was relegated to women, who back then were not encouraged to become engineers. But what the women of ENIAC soon showed, and the men later came to understand, was that the programming of a computer could be just as significant as the design of its hardware. — Walter Isaacson

What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, and how, in conjunction with television, it undermines the old idea of school. Who cares how many boxes of cereal can be sold via television? We need to know if television changes our conception of reality, the relationship of the rich to the poor, the idea of happiness itself. A preacher who confines himself to considering how a medium can increase his audience will miss the significant question: In what sense do new media alter what is meant by religion, by church, even by God? And if the politician cannot think beyond the next election, then we must wonder about what new media do to the idea of political organization and to the conception of citizenship. — Neil Postman

Science, is the creation by humans of a particular paradigm and methodology for discovering truth and understanding reality. Hence it can never fully reflect the hidden face of humanity, its creator, in the same sense that a computer can never become fully human or know what it means to be human: however sophisticated, these machines will forever remain mere artifacts of humanity. — Stephen A. Diamond

The Apple IIc, with its 128KB of RAM, 125KB floppy drive, word processor, and spreadsheet application, did everything I could imagine a computer doing at the time. — Andrew Rosenthal

Sometimes I daydream about merging my body with my computer so that I can more fully enter the landscapes of Google Earth, lush surface world without pollution or traffic, planet seen from the vantage point of space and roving surveillance vehicles, a motionless field, magnifying the normal imperfections and irregularities of the earth so that the planet is rendered transparent, misshapen and yet intoxicating in its languishing distinction from the real. — Andrew Durbin

For a generation that gets most of its information off a computer screen (be it Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter or what have you), an athlete has to be very careful about the public/private aspect of that. Be careful not to be overly critical, be careful with use of language, and understand the whole world is watching. — Leigh Steinberg

I think, however, the current fascination with the computer and its principal product, information, deserves a more critical response. This is because the computer does so ingeniously mimic human intelligence that it may significantly shake our confidence in the uses of the mind. And it is the mind that must think about all things, including the computer. — Theodore Roszak

Outside theology and fantastic literature, few can doubt that the main features of our universe are its dearth of meaning and lack of discernible purpose. And yet, with bewildering optimism, we continue to assemble whatever scraps of information we can gather in scrolls and books and computer chips, on shelf after library shelf, whether material, virtual or otherwise, pathetically intent on lending the world a semblance of sense and order, while knowing perfectly well that, however much we'd like to believe the contrary, our pursuits are sadly doomed to failure. — Alberto Manguel

We are at a turning point of revolution species. Evolution has blindly felt its way forward , now, we, the product of evolution are taking the wheel. We soon will have the ability to design and create the new human, evolution still, but guided evolution ... of course, only on computer simulation. — Michael Grant

Imagine God inside your computer, your phone, everyone else's computer. Imagine someone who almost is the Black Corporation, with all its power and riches and reach. And who, despite all this, seems pretty sane and beneficent by the standards of most gods. Oh, and who sometimes swears in Tibetan ... — Stephen Baxter

More than sixty years ago, mathematical logicians, by defining precisely the concept of an algorithm, gave content to the ancient human idea of an effective calculation. Their definitions led to the creation of the digital computer, an interesting example of thought bending matter to its ends. — David Berlinski

I love my job. I love the pay!
~I love it more and more each day.
~I love my boss, he is the best!
~I love his boss and all the rest.

~I love my office and its location. I hate to have to go on vacation.
~I love my furniture, drab and grey, and piles of paper that grow each day!
~I think my job is swell, there's nothing else I love so well.
~I love to work among my peers, I love their leers, and jeers, and sneers.
~I love my computer and its software; I hug it often though it won't care.
~I love each program and every file, I'd love them more if they worked a while.

~I'm happy to be here. I am. I am.
~I'm the happiest slave of the Firm, I am.
~I love this work. I love these chores.
~I love the meetings with deadly bores.
~I love my job - I'll say it again - I even love those friendly men.
~Those friendly men who've come today, in clean white coats to take me away!!!!! — Dr. Seuss

The frantic stupidity of Wall Street's stock order routers and algorithms was simply an extension into the computer of the willful ignorance of its salespeople. — Michael Lewis

I think its a fundamental feature of images that they move from one medium to another. And this has become hyper-evident in our time with the computer, which is a kind of master-medium also and allows us to transfer data of all kinds from one platform to another, turning sounds into sights or language into image. The computer has made something that is very old evident in a new way. — W. J. T. Mitchell

Historians are wont to name technological advances as the great milestones of culture, among them the development of the plow, the discovery of smelting and metalworking, the invention of the clock, printing press, steam power, electric engine, lightbulb, semiconductor, and computer. But possibly even more transforming than any of these was the recognition by Greek philosophers and their intellectual descendants that human beings could examine, comprehend, and eventually even guide or control their own thought process, emotions, and resulting behavior.
With that realization we became something new and different on earth: the only animal that, by examining its own cerebration and behavior, could alter them. This, surely, was a giant step in evolution. Although we are physically little different from the people of three thousand years ago, we are culturally a different species. We are the psychologizing animal. — Morton Hunt

Computer science increasingly relies on its private corporate patrons who apply their own closed systems of peer review and criticism, with occasional results thrown over the wall. The closed walls of Redmond or Mountain View enable old-fashioned patronage of nature's secrets. The objectivity and scientific status of computer science is a chimera: we cannot stand on the shoulders of giants in computer science, for they simply refuse to let us. — Samir Chopra

Turn off your computer and go out of doors. Dig a large enough hole to transplant a mature apple tree. Nurture the tree, feed it, coddle it so that its fruit will be ample, bright and firm. Practice open-hand strikes against the rough bark of the trunk until it's time to harvest. Choose the champion of your apple crop, pluck it from the tree, and beat yourself about the face and tits with it until your mettle will suffice. — Nick Offerman

Historically, noted James Manyika, one of the authors of the McKinsey report, companies kept their eyes on competitors "who looked like them, were in their sector and in their geography." Not anymore. Google started as a search engine and is now also becoming a car company and a home energy management system. Apple is a computer manufacturer that is now the biggest music seller and is also going into the car business, but in the meantime, with Apple Pay, it's also becoming a bank. Amazon, a retailer, came out of nowhere to steal a march on both IBM and HP in cloud computing. Ten years ago neither company would have listed Amazon as a competitor. But Amazon needed more cloud computing power to run its own business and then decided that cloud computing was a business! And now Amazon is also a Hollywood studio. — Thomas L. Friedman

Centralization of society's vital services in giant computer centers, reservoirs, nuclear power plants, air- traffic control centers, 100-story skyscrapers, and government compounds increases its vulnerability ... choosing his targets, today's saboteur could pollute a city's water supply, dynamite power transmission towers, cripple an airport control center, destroy a corporate or government computer center. — Anatol Rapoport

Niagara made a careful gesture, like some religious benediction: a diagonal slice across his chest and a stab to the heart. 'A slash and a dot,' he said. 'I doubt it means anything to you, but this was once the mark of an alliance of progressive thinkers linked together by one of the very first computer networks. The Federation of Polities can trace its existence right back to that fragile collective, in the early decades of the Void Century. It's less a stigma than a mark of community. — Alastair Reynolds

That sounds strangely little like "justice," Tisipohone jibed gently.

"On the contrary." Alicia jacked a discarding sabot round into the M-97's chamber and settled her left hand briefly on the forestock to activate its computer systems. "I won't do a thing to them unless they intend to do something to me."

Indeed?

"Indeed. But if they do have something planned, I intend to do unto them first."

So there are times you see things my way after all.

"Never said there weren't. — David Weber

The minority who actually loves its work seems to be made up chiefly of the writers, dancers, actors and other artists, most scientists above the technician-troll level, computer freaks, and the righteous dope-dealers of California. — Robert Anton Wilson

Writing let me escape ... It let me escape the insistent tug of my family, and its ongoing misery. Sitting in front of the computer, with the screen blank and the cursor blinking, was the best escape I knew. And there was plenty to escape from. — Jennifer Weiner

Manual control, please."
"Are you sure, Frank?"
"Quite sure, 'Falcon' ... Thank you."
Illogical though it seemed, most of the human race had found it impossible not to be polite to its artificial children, however simpleminded they might be. Whole volumes of psychology, as well as popular guides ('How Not to Hurt Your Computer's Feelings'; 'Artificial Intelligence
Real Irritation' were some of the best-known titles) had been written on the subject of Man-Machine etiquette. Long ago it had been decided that, however inconsequential rudeness to robots might appear to be, it should be discouraged. All too easily, it could spread to human relationships as well. — Arthur C. Clarke

The appropriate length of a name is inversely proportional to the size of its scope. — Mark Jason Dominus

The modern computer with all its various gadgets and wonderful electronic facilities now makes it possible to preserve and reinvigorate all the cultural richness of mankind. — Alan Lomax

Unlike television or the computer, language appears to be not an extension of our powers but simply a natural expression of who and what we are. This is the great secret of language: Because it comes from inside us, we believe it to be a direct, unedited, unbiased, apolitical expression of how the world really is. A machine, on the other hand, is outside of us, clearly created by us, modifiable by us, even discardable by us; it is easier to see how a machine re-creates the world in its own image. But in many respects, a sentence functions very much like a machine, and this is nowhere more obvious than in the sentences we call questions. — Neil Postman

I often think about the many remarkable things that my personal computer can do which I never ask it to do. I probably use a small fraction of its capabilities. I often wonder if the same dynamic occurs with our capacity for creativity. — Geoffrey S. Fletcher

The computer industry began with home-brew boxes that everyone had to program for themselves, but that was a huge hassle. The computer revolution didn't explode until the first Macintosh arrived, with its point-and-click simplicity. — Clive Thompson

They came close. Oh they came close. Was all set to put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger. But there was a computer glitch. Isnt that something? A stupid glitch and I had to wait a few days and then I saw the errors of my ways, saw so clearly that I was killing the wrong person. Its not me that needs killing, its them. Funny how things can change in the wink of an eye. — Hubert Selby Jr.

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry. — Henry Petroski

In my view, it is an error to think about 'alternatives to prison' if what we mean by that is 'electronic bracelets,' through which people are subject to computer-monitored house arrest, or granting fuller surveillance and disciplinary powers and technologies to other state agencies, such as welfare and mental health, through 'transcarceration' policies ... We need to decrease, not increase, the means by which the state, in its multifarious networks of authority, controls human lives and selectively incapacitates people who, no less than others, have the potential to contribute to the improvement of hte human condition. — Karlene Faith

For example, computer defends well, but for humans its is harder to defend than attack, particularly with the modern time control. — Boris Spassky

Then as now the PC held a curious power over restless, analytical people. To start with, the computer carried a psychological appeal not unlike that of an automobile. Both machines were objects of intense attachment for many of their owners - feelings of attachment that went well beyond the utility of the machines. While illustrating the way in which people can form emotional bonds with tools, the symbolisms of the automobile and the PC differed in an important way. The realm of the automobile extended no further than that of fantasy and enjoyment. The PC, by contrast, was a medium for creation. The utility of a PC arose directly from its software. Writing software required little money and, surprisingly, scant experience. — G. Pascal Zachary

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't rightly see how somebody who claims to have had -What'd you say? One partner?-can be welled trained."
He had a point. Her brain clicked away. "I was referring to the instructional videotapes my agency has all its new employees watch."
"They train you by watching videos?" His eyes narrowed reminding her of a hunter looking down a gun sight,"Now, ain't that interesting."
She felt a little surge of pleasure as her child lost another few points on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Even a computer couldn't have picked a more perfect match. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

The Internet and all its lures are much, much harder than anything I've ever encountered. If you're writing on a computer, the very instrument you're writing on is already tainted by the world out there in all its permutations. — Dani Shapiro

Man will have replicated his own intelligence not when he teaches a computer to reason but when he teaches a computer to have a nagging feeling in its circuits. — Robert Breault

Imagine that your desktop computer began to control its own peripheral devices, removed its own cover, and pointed its webcam at its own circuitry. That's us. — David Eagleman

Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. — Neil Postman

When he went to PARC for his formal interview, Kay was asked what he hoped his great achievement there would be. "A personal computer," he answered. Asked what that was, he picked up a notebook-size portfolio, flipped open its cover, and said, "This will be a flat-panel display. There'll be a keyboard here on the bottom, and enough power to store your mail, files, music, artwork, and books. All in a package about this size and weighing a couple of pounds. That's what I'm talking about." His interviewer scratched his head and muttered to himself, "Yeah, right." But Kay got the job. — Walter Isaacson

I'm very lazy when it comes to making the original sound. I don't go through amplifiers and different compressors and signal parts. I just grab something, whether its an old guitar or a children's toy that happens to be lying around, and record it straight into the computer. — Imogen Heap

The computer on the desk of the student in school knows no history. It is not like a book, worn at the edges by human hands. No little child has written a note in it, long ago. It will not be passed down to the children of the children who use it. Its "meaning" is that there is no enduring meaning. — Anthony M. Esolen

America Online customers are upset because the company has decided to allow advertising in its chat rooms. I can see why: you got computer sex, you can download pornography, people are making dates with 10 year-olds. Hey, what's this? A Pepsi ad? They're ruining the integrity of the Internet! — Jay Leno

Pinball games were constrained by physical limitations, ultimately by the physical laws that govern the motion of a small metal ball. The video world knows no such bounds. Objects fly, spin, accelerate, change shape and color, disappear and reappear. Their behavior, like the behavior of anything created by a computer program, is limited only by the programmer's imagination. The objects in a video game are representations of objects. And a representation of a ball, unlike a real one, never need obey the laws of gravity unless its programmer wants it to. — Sherry Turkle

Money, after all, is an abstract artifact, like language - merely symbolized by the paper or coin or whatever. If you can fully grasp its abstractedness, especially in the computer age, it becomes quite clear that no group can monopolize this abstraction, except through a series of swindle. If the usurers had been bolder, they might have monopolized language as well as currency, and people would be saying we can't write more books because we don't have enough words, the way they now say we can't build starships, because we don't have enough money. — Robert Anton Wilson

The spectacular thing about Johnny [von Neumann] was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce and answer. — Paul R. Halmos

This was governed entirely by Newtonian mechanics. Each piece of the moon attracted every other piece more or less strongly depending on its mass and its distance. It could be simulated on a computer quite easily. The whole rubble cloud was gravitationally bound. Any shrapnel fast enough to escape had done so already. The rest was drifting around in a loose huddle of rocks. Sometimes they banged into one another. Eventually they would stick together and the moon would begin to re-form. — Neal Stephenson

In an age of computer manipulation, surrealism has become banal, a shadow of its former self. — Milton Glaser

The computer is here to stay, therefore it must be kept in its proper place as a tool and a slave, or we will become sorcerer's apprentices, with data data everywhere and not a thought to think. — Jesse Shera

Its selection and vetting process. The workers, for their part, can hope for a steady flow of jobs and prompt payment with minimal fuss. Handy's computer system also tries to schedule each worker's jobs in such a way as to minimise travel time. — Anonymous

There is a definite set of biomorphs, each permanently sitting in its own unique place in a mathematical space. It is permanently sitting there in the sense that, if only you knew its genetic formula, you could instantly find it; moreover, its neighbours in this special kind of space are the biomorphs that differ from it by only one gene. [W]hen you first evolve a new creature by artificial selection in [a] computer model, it feels like a creative process. So it is, indeed. But what you are really doing is finding the creature, for it is, in a mathematical sense, already sitting in its own place in the genetic space of Biomorph Land. — Richard Dawkins

The strength of the computer lies in its being a logic machine. It does precisely what it is programed to do. This makes it fast and precise. It also makes it a total moron; for logic is essentially stupid. — Peter Drucker

Douady and Hubbard used a brilliant chain of new mathematics to prove that every floating molecule does indeed hang on a filigree that binds it to all the rest, a delicate web springing from tiny outcroppings on the main set, a "devil's polymer," in Mandelbrot's phrase. The mathematicians proved that any segment-no matter where, and no matter how small-would, when blown up by the computer microscope, reveal new molecules, each resembling the main set and yet not quite the same. Every new molecule would be surrounded by its own spirals and flame-like projections, and those, inevitably, would reveal molecules tinier still, always similar, never identical, fulfilling some mandate of infinite variety, a miracle of miniaturization in which every new detail was sure to be a universe of its own, diverse and entire. — James Gleick

If you can create something useful, its reachable audience (e.g., employers or customers) is essentially limitless - which greatly magnifies your reward. On the other hand, if what you're producing is mediocre, then you're in trouble, as it's too easy for your audience to find a better alternative online. Whether you're a computer programmer, writer, marketer, consultant, or entrepreneur, your situation has become similar to Jung trying to outwit Freud, or Jason Benn trying to hold his own in a hot start-up: To succeed you have to produce the absolute best stuff you're capable of producing - a task that requires depth. — Cal Newport

What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate — Seymour Papert

In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer's power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, though subtlety went into its design. — Tracy Kidder

You know, developments here remind me of the Internet. That old computer network, invented by the American scientific community. It was all about free communications. Very simple and widely distributed - there was never any central control. It spread worldwide in short order. It turned into the world's biggest piracy copy machine. The Chinese loved the Internet, they used it and turned it against us. They destroyed our information economy with it. Even then the net didn't go away - it just started breeding its virtual tribes, all these nomads and dissidents. — Bruce Sterling

Man-made computers are limited in their performance by finite processing speed and memory. So, too, the cosmic computer is limited in power by its age and the finite speed of light. — Paul Davies

The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors ... Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects. — Marshall McLuhan

In the static mode an observer may unify the pieces of a puzzle, but only as a blueprint - kinetics add the third dimention of depth, and the fourth of history. The motion, however, must be on the human scale, which happens also to be that of birds, waves, and clouds. Were a bullet to be made sentient, it still would see or hear or smell or feel nothing in land or water or air except its target. So, too, with a passenger in any machine that goes faster than a Model A. As speed increases, reality thins and becomes at the pace of a jet airplane no more substantial than a computer readout.
Running suits a person who seeks to look inward, through a fugue of pain, to study the dark self. A person afraid of the dark had better walk - strenuous enough for the rhythm of the feet to pace those of heart and lungs, relaxed enough to let him look outward, through joy, to a bright creation. — Harvey Manning

For years, President Obama and his top officials vehemently denounced China for using its surveillance capabilities for economic advantage while insisting that the United States and its allies never do any such thing. The Washington Post quoted an NSA spokesperson saying that the Department of Defense, of which the agency is a part, " 'does engage' in computer network exploitation," but "does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including 'cyber' " [emphatic asterisks in the original]. That the NSA spies for precisely the economic motive it has denied is proven by its own documents. The agency acts for the benefit of what it calls its "customers," a list that includes not only the White House, the State Department, and the CIA, but also primarily economic agencies, such as the US Trade Representative and the Departments of Agriculture, Treasury, and Commerce: — Glenn Greenwald

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. — John Updike

But unlike most physicists, Marcus eventually learned Lorenz's lesson, that a deterministic system can produce much more than just periodic behavior. He knew to look for wild disorder, and he knew that islands of structure could appear within the disorder. So he brought to the problem of the Great Red Spot an understanding that a complex system can give rise to turbulence and coherence at the same time. He could work within an emerging discipline that was creating its own tradition of using the computer as an experimental tool. And he was willing to think of himself as a new kind of scientist: not primarily an astronomer, not a fluid dynamicist, not an applied mathematician, but a specialist in chaos. — James Gleick