Authors From Canada

"From age to age, Love's word rings forth, “The truth is true and all is well, Unconquerable life prevails.”"

"The body of the mother is the physical planet. The physical planet therefore symbolizes the mother. The body of the father is the sun. The sun symbolizes the father. Neither the sun nor the earth are the father and the mother, but they are forms representing them."

"There is the necessity for the spiritual point of focus to be embodied on earth. This is the one thing that has been lacking."

"I am incarnate—and we all may share this awareness, seeing that there is but one God and one identity—I am incarnate in the earth, in all the animate forms of the earth, and in my human form. My human form was created so that I might be consciously incarnate. Being consciously incarnate, I may be unrestricted in the expression of myself and in the fulfilment of my purposes according to my will."

"The spirit of truth says, “Remember.” And you will, if you accept the spirit of truth, allow the spirit of truth to be your expression."

"I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens."

"We don't know what the future will bring, but that's because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit."

"Never before, I suspect, have so many people been so rich to so little purpose."

"How doe we create the world we want, rather than a world that just happens to us?"

"We are capitalism made flesh."

"All social space is suffused with political meanings and agendas, the very stones and walls a kind of testament to the ongoing struggles for liberation and justices."

"Paradoxically, the problems of politics often arise not in the form of a problem of scarcity, but as one of abundance."

"For every apparent gain, in short, we now observe a balancing danger. This is the world we have created."

"Socrates was likewise right that pissing people off is how we first, and maybe best, go about the business of provoking thought."

"Dreams are evidence that we are creatures who produce more meaning than we can ourselves understand."

"It is only through a devoted attention to the details of objects and faces in the modern urban scene, he argues, that the commodity fetish of capitalism can be effectively dispelled."

"Tyranny is abhorrent, freedom benefits all, whereas violence benefits no one for long."

"Friendship requires a leap, not of faith but of regard."

"Ambition is ever tempered by experience. Otherwise, fortune makes fools of us all."

"But what I mean is not as odd as it might sound - and is by no means intended as the last word on the subject, only the first."

"Our desires are never wholly transparent, even to ourselves."

"Politics is rather the creation of the best possible polity out of the deep inner needs of its citizenry - who are only some of its members."

"It wasn't atheism and corruption they feared, but inquiry."

"Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought."

"We tend to think of the problems of globalization and cultural identity as peculiar to our times. In fact they are rooted in ancient problems of civic belonging."

"War is smaller in scale than in recent memory, but it is far more ambiguous, intractable, and nasty. Money flows more quickly than ever, but it is still somehow manages to gather and puddle in certain places, for certain people rather then others."

"Where will we be ten years from now? CRT’s will be a thing of the past, multimedia will no longer be a buzzword, pen-based and voice input will be everywhere, and university students will still be editing with emacs. Pens and touchscreens are too low-bandwidth for real interaction; voice will probably also turn out to be inadequate. (Anyway, who would want to work in an environment surrounded by people talking to their computers?) Mice are sure to be with us a while longer, so we should learn how to use them well."

"Syntax highlighting is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught arithmetic using colored rods. I grew up and today I use monochromatic numerals."

"The Unix room still exists, and it may be the greatest cultural reason for the success of Unix as a technology. More groups could profit from its lesson, but it's really hard to add a Unix-room-like space to an existing organization. You need the culture to encourage people not to hide in their offices, you need a way of using systems that makes a public machine a viable place to work - typically by storing the data somewhere other than the "desktop" - and you need people like Ken and Dennis (and Brian Kernighan and Doug McIlroy and Mike Lesk and Stu Feldman and Greg Chesson and ...) hanging out in the room, but if you can make it work, it's magical. When I first started at the Labs, I spent most of my time in the Unix room. The buzz was palpable; the education unparalleled."

"One odd detail that I think was vital to how the group functioned was a result of the first Unix being run on a clunky minicomputer with terminals in the machine room. People working on the system congregated in the room - to use the computer, you pretty much had to be there. (This idea didn't seem odd back then; it was a natural evolution of the old hour-at-a-time way of booking machines like the IBM 7090.) The folks liked working that way, so when the machine was moved to a different room from the terminals, even when it was possible to connect from your private office, there was still a "Unix room" with a bunch of terminals where people would congregate, code, design, and just hang out. (The coffee machine was there too.)"

"The major things we saw wrong with Unix when we started talking about what would become Plan 9, back around 1985, all stemmed from the appearance of a network. As a stand-alone system, Unix was pretty good. But when you networked Unix machines together, you got a network of stand-alone systems instead of a seamless, integrated networked system. Instead of one big file system, one user community, one secure setup uniting your network of machines, you had a hodgepodge of workarounds to Unix's fundamental design decision that each machine is self-sufficient."

"I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy."

"Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl."

"On a related topic, let me say that I'm not much of a fan of object-oriented design. I've seen some beautiful stuff done with OO, and I've even done some OO stuff myself, but it's just one way to approach a problem. For some problems, it's an ideal way; for others, it's not such a good fit. [...] OO is great for problems where an interface applies naturally to a wide range of types, not so good for managing polymorphism (the machinations to get collections into OO languages are astounding to watch and can be hellish to work with), and remarkably ill-suited for network computing. That's why I reserve the right to match the language to the problem, and even - often - to coordinate software written in several languages towards solving a single problem. It's that last point - different languages for different subproblems - that sometimes seems lost to the OO crowd."

"Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing."

"Eventually, I decided that thinking was not getting me very far and it was time to try building."

"Language and the human spirit are inextricably intertwined. We interpret the world through language. We express ourselves through language. Language is powerful. Language can bring us together or set us apart. It can be used to include — to bridge barriers between cultures, religions, worldviews — at the same time as it can be used to exclude by inflaming xenophobia and racism. Language can establish community and solidarity at the same time as it can be used to erect boundaries and divide communities. More often than not, when we turn on the TV we see language used to occlude — to hide reality — to deceive, to spin, to distract, to disempower, to reinforce us versus them conceptions of humanity. Language is no longer innocent. We can no longer conceptualize language as some kind of neutral code that can be taught in classrooms in splendid isolation from its intersection with issues of power, identity, and spirituality."

"As educators of linguistically and culturally diverse students we face choices with respect to how we view language and human potential. Is language the means of interpreting our increasingly complex world and mobilizing intellect, imagination, and identity to create new knowledge and act on social realities or is it simply a set of sounds and symbols and the codes that bind them? Can our society benefit from all the intelligence, imagination, and multilingual talent it can get or should schools develop these attributes only among a privileged elite while focusing on English-only basic skills for those constructed as incapable of independent learning?"

"When students' language, culture and experience are ignored or excluded in classroom interactions, students are immediately starting from a disadvantage. Everything they have learned about life and the world up to this point is being dismissed as irrelevant to school learning; there are few points of connection to curriculum materials or instruction and so students are expected to learn in an experiential vacuum. Students' silence and nonparticipation under these conditions have frequently been interpreted as lack of academic ability or effort, and teachers’ interactions with students have reflected a pattern of low expectations which become self-fulfilling."

"I know that when I write, I'm writing for people who can handle high-school math, read at the Grade 12 level, and appreciate subtle humor as opposed to the toilet-bowl kind. I guess that makes the lower cutoff about 17-18 years old."

"I agree. When I hear a player talking about how he "needs" to know about all the other details, I hear a player who is being adversarial to the GM and simply not trusting him to "get it right." Players like that make baby seals die and cause cancer with prolonged exposure. I don't write books for them."

"We tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term."

"Training, as practiced in much of corporate America, is an astonishing waste of resources."

"Sometimes it's just not practical to go through the effort of creating a new solution when an existing solution will do the job almost as well."

"Often the true causes of our discomfort are so integral to our environment that we fail to recognize them."

"As in any discipline, to become good you need first to learn the rules. To become great, you need to break them."

"We think the more detailed and exhaustive our plans, the more likely the future will actually mirror our vision. But it rarely even comes close."

"In the heat of the moment, it can be all too easy to generate solutions that take on a life of their own, without reference to the core values of the people developing them or those expected to implement them."

"Ideas are mutable. They are always capable of growing. Each time we look at them, we can see something new. We just need to give ourselves permission to do so."

"Preliminary ideas are often weak and impure, and need to be driven through a forge in order to become powerful, workable solutions."