Educators From The United States

"However, as every parent of a small child knows, converting a large object into small fragments is considerably easier than the reverse process."

"Many security texts decompose the security of an information system in three components: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Together, they are often referred to as "CIA". [They] constitute the core security properties that we must protect against attackers and eavesdroppers—such as the (other) CIA."

"Fight Features. … The only way to make software secure, reliable, and fast is to make it small."

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

"I had never engaged in remote multishrink psychoanalysis on this scale before, so it was a fascinating experience."

""Linux is a leprosy; …" This statement is not grammatically, politically, or factually correct."

"System designers who do not allow users to type far ahead ought to be tarred and feathered, or worse yet, be forced to use their own system."

"UNIX does not allow path names to be prefixed by a drive name or number; that would be precisely the kind of device dependence that operating systems ought to eliminate."

""He" should be read as "he or she" throughout the book."

"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from."

"Microkernels are not a pipe dream. They represent proven technology."

"If you just want to use the system, instead of hacking on its internals, you don't need source code."

"Will we soon see President Bush coming to Europe with Richard Stallman and Rick Rashid in tow, demanding that Europe import more American free software?"

"While most people can talk rationally about kernel design and portability, the issue of free-ness is 100% emotional."

"Writing a portable OS is not much harder than a nonportable one, and all systems should be written with portability in mind these days."

"A multithreaded file system is only a performance hack."

"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-) […] Writing a new OS only for the 386 in 1991 gets you your second "F" for this term."

"But in all honesty, I would suggest that people who want a modern "free" OS look around for a microkernel-based, portable OS, like maybe GNU or something like that."

"The only real argument for monolithic systems was performance, and there is now enough evidence showing that microkernel systems can be just as fast as monolithic systems."

"LINUX is obsolete."

"I really am not angry with Linus. Honest. He's not angry with me either."

"A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring."

"Economics is that way of understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that people have objectives and tend to choose the correct way to achieve them."

"The tendency to be rational is the consistent and hence predictable element in human behavior. (p.4)"

"[T]he assumption describes our actions, not our thoughts. If you had to understand something intellectually in order to do it, none of us would be able to walk. Economics is based on the assumption that people have reasonably simple objectives and choose means to achieve them. Both assumptions are false-but useful. Suppose someone is rational only half the time. Since there is generally one right way of doing things and many wrong ways, the rational behavior can be predicted but the irrational cannot. If we assume he is rational, we predict his behavior correctly about half of the tie - far from perfect, but a lot better then nothing. If I could do well at the racetrack I would be a very rich man. [R]ationality is an assumption I make about other people. I know myself. [R]ationality is an assumption I make about other people. I know myself well enough to allow for the consequences of my own irrationality. But for the vast mass of my fellow humans, about whom I know very little, rationality is the best predictive assumption available. (pp.3-5)"

"Legal rules are to be judged by the structure of incentives they establish and the consequences of people altering their behavior in response to those incentives (p.11)"

"David D. Friedman is the one of the most important living anarcho-capitalist philosophers. He has added a philosopher's insistence on consistency to the firm grasp of economic principles he presumably learned at the paternal knees."

"I predict that, if anarcho-capitalist institutions appeared in this country tomorrow, heroin would be legal in New York and illegal in most other places. (p.128)"

"We must ask, not whether an anarcho-capitalist society would be safe from a power grab by the men with the guns (safety is not an available option), but whether it would be safer than our society is from a comparable seizure of power by the men with the guns. I think the answer is yes. In our society, the men who must engineer such a coup are politicians, military officers, and policemen, men selected precisely for the characteristic of desiring power and being good at using it. They are men who already believe that they have a right to push other men around - that is their job. They are particularly well qualified for the job of seizing power. Under anarcho-capitalism the men in control of protection agencies are selected for their ability to run an efficient business and please their customers. It is always possible that some will turn out to be secret power freaks as well, but it is surely less likely than under our system where the corresponding jobs are labeled 'non-power freaks need not apply'. (pp. 123-124)"

"Perhaps the best way to see why anarcho-capitalism would be much more peaceful than our present system is by analogy. Consider our world as it would be if the cost of moving from one country to another were zero. Everyone lives in a housetrailer and speaks the same language. One day, the president of France announces that because of troubles with neighboring countries, new military taxes are being levied and conscription will begin shortly. The next morning the president of France finds himself ruling a peaceful but empty landscape, the population having been reduced to himself, three generals, and twenty-seven war correspondents. (p.123)"

"In the ideal socialist state, power will not attract power freaks. People who make decisions will show no slightest bias towards their own interests. There will be no way for a clever man to bend the institutions to serve his own ends. And the rivers will run uphill. (p.108)"

"If we want to be honest, we can ship the Statue of Liberty back to France or replace the outdated verse with new lines, "America the closed preserve/ That dirty foreigners don't deserve". (p.71)"

"The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations. (p.4)"

"An ideal objectivist society with a limited government is superior to an anarcho-capitalist society in precisely the same way that an ideal socialist society is superior to a capitalist society. Socialism does better with perfect people than anarcho-capitalism with imperfect. And it is better to wear a bikini with the sun shining than a raincoat when it is raining. That is no argument against carrying an umbrella. (p.134)"

"God is in the details."

"I don´t want to be interesting, I want to be good."

"Less is more."

"Symmetry is the aesthetics of the stupid."

"Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins."

"Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space."

"Millions of kids are being maimed right now on Ritalin. I would have been given Ritalin. And there would have been no Sexual Personae, no nothing. We are castrating a whole generation of kids."

"Scholars who refuse to toe the feminist line are also ignored... The iconoclastic Camille Paglia appears [only] once [...], in Women’s Realities, Women’s Choices, and is described as someone who “assails feminists for what she regards as dull rhetoric.”"

"It is very rare these days to hear anyone praising masculinity. The dissident feminist writer Camille Paglia is a refreshing example. Her observations are effective antidotes to the surfeit of disparagements."

"When I mentioned to friends that I was heading to Philadelphia to meet Camille Paglia, I realized the degree of animosity she provokes. She was contemptuously dismissed, often by people who had never read her work. Others seemed torn by her … Some praised her as fresh and profound, but even more dismissed her as outrageous and repugnant. … Despite such opinions, in person and in context instead of in sound bites, Paglia is often reasonable, witty and likable … She is also correct in at least one of her assessments — that she, like such loudmouths as Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and Ross Perot, helps to encourage discourse and free speech in a country that needs all it can get."

"When pro-choice social commentator Camille Paglia wrote that she sanctions "murder" when it is called "abortion," pro-lifers were horrified. They should have cheered. […] Almost every pro-abortion activist lives in a zone where they conceal what abortion really is -- though they know that the procedure involves killing a person each and every time. The difference between them and Paglia is that they don't come out and say it."

"[T]he most threatening thing about her, from the American viewpoint, is that she refuses to treat the arts as an instrument of civil rights. Without talent, no entitlement."

"There is one area in which I think Paglia and I would agree that politically correct feminism has produced a noticeable inequity. Nowadays, when a woman behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, 'Poor dear, it's probably PMS.' Whereas, if a man behaves in a hysterical and disagreeable fashion, we say, 'What an asshole.' Let me leap to correct this unfairness by saying of Paglia, Sheesh, what an asshole."

"How can you take her seriously? She is an exhibitionist, and she takes the most extreme elements of the women's movement and tries to make the whole movement antisexual, antilife, antijoy. And neither I nor most of the women I know are that way."

"Examples [of censorship and intolerance from self-described 'liberals'] are well-known. When Camille Paglia was invited to speak at Brown, campus feminists were outraged, though their voices greatly outnumbered hers..."

"The literary critic Camille Paglia argues that sexuality is by nature aggressive. “My theory,” she says [on page 3 of Sexual Personae] “is that whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sadomasochism will not be far behind.” She attacks feminists who believe that sex is all sugar and spice and that it is patriarchal society that makes sex violent. Sex, for Paglia, is about power; society is not the source of sexual violence; sex, the irrepressible natural force, is. If anything, society is the force that inhibits the natural violence of sex. Paglia is certainly more accurate than those who deny that perversion is rife with aggression. But in assuming that sex is fundamentally aggressive, and sadomasochistic, she doesn’t allow for the plasticity of human sexuality. Just because sex and aggression can unite in a plastic brain, and appear “natural,” doesn’t mean that that is their only possible expression."