A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated?
All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.
Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.
Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them 'librarians.'
Christmas: the one time of year when you can't avoid the nuts in your family muesli.
Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, 'if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?'
Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.
Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death- with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights- will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.
Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.
Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!
Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.
Humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?
I tend to think that immortal souls, invisible sky daddies, and Santa Claus all belong in the same basket. The disposition of that basket is left as an exercise for the reader.
I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.
I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos- in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever- was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I'll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I'm keeping the last shell for myself.
I'm a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending-if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism.
I'm trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.
I've reached an age at which I'd rather pay more for something that 'just works' than roll up my sleeves, reach for a spanner, and make it work. Time is money, and the older we get the less of it we've got left.
Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.
If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.
In general, a little controversy isn't harmful: if anything, it gets people interested.
In my experience, the best way to deal with such people is to politely agree with everything they say, then ignore them.
Kittens: self-propelled barbed wire in a dewy-eyed mohair sweater.
Knowing you can die horribly at any moment because of decisions made by alien intelligences thousands of miles away who don't even know you exist- there's something Lovecraftian about that, isn't there?
Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.
Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)
Middle age is not the best time to be changing smartphones every six months or adopting new technology platforms- because we tend to get slower and less accommodating to change as we age.
More often than not, piracy is a symptom of an under-provisioned market.
One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience- it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time.
Personal pride is probably a bad guide to merit.
Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.
The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent.
The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.
The dirty little secret of publishing is that, all along, each book sold has had an average of 5 readers. That's an 80% 'piracy' rate if you insist on looking at it in those terms.
The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.
The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is 'doormat.'
Things have gone downhill since Mom decided a modal average dose of old-time religion was an essential part of her upbringing...
Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms.
We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!
We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.
Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?
What I've learned during my life is that the near future is 90% identical to the present- if you buy a new car today, it'll probably still be on the road in 2022.
Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.
You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I'd never have time to do anything else.
Found 44 occurence(s) in 52,045 quotation(s).
Categories: Quotes of the day
KGB Quotation Database Search page design and software
contributed by Rafal Sulejman.
