Machines Quotes - Page 36

• A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

  Danny Hillis

  Cycling, Knights, Broken

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• Government barriers on Business For example, the Endangered Species Act prevents 'disturbing the habitat' of the spotted owl. That has restricted 4.2 million acres of forest from development, leading to the loss of 30,000 lumber-related jobs and the annual loss of 1.1 billion board feet of lumber. This has driven up the cost of houses by at least $4,000 each. In addition, regulators ordered a Kansas City bank to install a Braille keypad on its drive-through automatic teller machine, presumably to aid any blind drivers. The list goes on and on.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Jobs, Business, Loss

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• It is easy to make a simple machine which will run toward the light or run away from it, and if such machines also contain lights of their own, a number of them together will show complicated forms of social behavior.

  Norbert Wiener

  Running, Simple, Numbers

  Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.33, Da Capo Press

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• People are not machines, but in all situations where they are given the opportunity, they will act like machines.

  Ludwig von Bertalanffy

  Opportunity, People, Given

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• One can decide that the principal role of knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning of society, and act in accordance with that decision, only if one has already decided that society is a giant machine

  Jean-Francois Lyotard

  Decision, Giants, Roles

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• It may seem unimaginable to you that child soldiers exist and yet the reality for many rebel and gang leaders, and even state governments, is that there is no more complete end-to-end weapon system in the inventory of war machines than the child soldierMan has created the ultimate cheap, expendable, yet sophisticated human weapon at the expense of humanity's own future: its children.

  Roméo Dallaire

  Children, War, Reality

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• Man minus the Machine is a slave; Man plus the Machine is a freeman.

  Henry Ford

  Men, Slave, Plus

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• I think everybody should just turn off their TV machines and make up their own songs about whatever comes to mind-their couch, their friends their loaves of bread. Everybody's got their own songs. There should be so many songs out there that it all turns into one big sound and we can put the whole thing into a pickup truck and let it roll off the edge of the Grand Canyon.

  Beck

  Song, Work, Thinking

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• I know that the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine who must not in any way permit himself to be swayed by indignation. If he sees suffering, privation or injustice he must not allow it to move him, for that would be evidence of the lack of proper education or of absence of self-control. He must speak in calm and objective accents and talk about a dying child in the same way as he would about the pieces inside an internal combustion engine.

  Aneurin Bevan

  Children, Party, Moving

  In Michael Foot 'Aneurin Bevan' (1973) vol. 2, ch. 11

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• The further a device is removed from human control, the more authentically mechanical it seems, and the whole trend in technology has been to devise machines that are less and less under direct human control and more and more under their own apparent will.

  Isaac Asimov

  Technology, Hands, Independence

  "Past, Present, and Future".

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• Kubrick is a machine, a mutant, a Martian. He has no human feeling whatsoever. But it's great when the machine films other machines, as in 2001.

  Jacques Rivette

  Feelings, Mutants, Film

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• I even believe in helping an employer function more productively. For then, we will have a claim to higher wages, shorter hours, and greater participation in the benefits of running a smooth industrial machine.

  Sidney Hillman

  Running, Believe, Wages

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• The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

  J. C. R. Licklider

  Thinking, Years, Data

  J. C. R. Licklider, Robert W. Taylor (1990). “In memoriam, J.C.R. Licklider, 1915-1990”

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• In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. That is a rather startling thing to say, but it is our conclusion.

  J. C. R. Licklider

  Believe, Book, Men

  "In memoriam, J.C.R. Licklider, 1915-1990".

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• Originally, I wanted a machine that would cost $100. My idea was to spend nothing on the console technology so all the money could be spent on improving the interface and software. If we hadn't used NAND flash memory and other pricey parts, we might have succeeded.

  Shigeru Miyamoto

  Memories, Technology, Ideas

  Business Week Interview (On Wii), November 16, 2006.

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• Of course, I would like to know what [Sony and Microsoft] do with their machines, but there is no game that I feel the need to go see. So far, from what I’ve seen on the show this year, there does not seem to be any games that I would like to have created myself.

  Shigeru Miyamoto

  Years, Games, Doe

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• Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

  Donna J. Haraway

  Self, Differences, Mind

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• Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

  Donna J. Haraway

  Lively, Cyborg

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• If there is any one proof of a man's incompetence, it is the stagnant mentality of a worker who, doing some small routine job in a vast undertaking, does not care to look beyond the lever of a machine, does not choose to know how the machine got there or what makes his job possible, and proclaims that the management of the undertaking is parasitical and unnecessary.

  Ayn Rand

  Jobs, Men, Care

  Ayn Rand (1999). “The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution”, p.35, Penguin

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• You lived and died alone, especially in fighters. Fighters. Somehow, despite everything, that word had not become sterile. You slipped into the hollow cockpit and strapped and plugged yourself into the machine. The canopy ground shut and sealed you off. Your oxygen, your very breath, you carried into the chilled vacuum, in a steel bottle.

  James Salter

  Oxygen, Vacuums, Steel

  James Salter (2012). “The Hunters”, p.193, Counterpoint Press

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• In nearly all cases where machines have been downed, it was during a fight which had been very short, and the successful burst of fire had occurred within the space of a minute after the beginning of actual hostilities.

  Billy Bishop

  Fighting, Successful, Fire

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• . . . my pilot pointed to his left front and above, and looking in the direction he pointed, I saw a long dark brown form fairly streaking across the sky. We could see that it was a German machine, and when it got above and behind our middle machine, it dived on it for all the world like a huge hawk on a hapless sparrow.

  James McCudden

  Dark, Sky, Long

  James McCudden (2009). “Flying Fury: Five Years in the Royal Flying Corps”, p.85, Casemate / Greenhill

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• It is wonderful how cheered a pilot becomes after he shoots down his first machine; his morale increases by at least 100 percent.

  James Ira Thomas Jones

  Pilots, Firsts, Aviation

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• Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party.

  Louis L'Amour

  Country, Time, Party

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• My mind's a machine gun, my body's the bullets and the audience is the target.

  GG Allin

  Gun, Mind, Target

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