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Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

"My life is a soap opera, but who has the rights?"
        -- MadameX
No Civil War picture ever made a nickel.
                -- MGM executive Irving Thalberg to Louis B. Mayer about
                   film rights to "Gone With the Wind".
                   Cerf/Navasky, "The Experts Speak"
"Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all times
been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice."
-- Robert Green Ingersoll
"The simple rights, the civil liberties from generations of struggle must not
be just fine words for patriotic holidays, words we subvert on weekdays, but
living, honored rules of conduct amongst us...I'm glad the American Civil
Liberties Union gets indignant, and I hope this will always be so."
-- Senator Adlai E. Stevenson
"The ACLU has stood foursquare against the recurring tides of hysteria that
>from time to time threaten freedoms everyhere... Indeed, it is difficult
to appreciate how far our freedoms might have eroded had it not been for the
Union's valiant representation in the courts of the constitutional rights
of people of all persuasions, no matter how unpopular or even despised
by the majority they were at the time."
-- former Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren
"The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each
citizen to defend it.  Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do
his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure."
-- Albert Einstein
I used to be a rebel in my youth.

This cause... that cause... (chuckle) I backed 'em ALL!  But I learned.
Rebellion is simply a device used by the immature to hide from his own
problems.  So I lost interest in politics.  Now when I feel aroused by
a civil rights case or a passport hearing... I realize it's just a device.
I go to my analyst and we work it out.  You have no idea how much better
I feel these days.
                -- J. Feiffer
"Rights" is a fictional abstraction.  No one has "Rights", neither machines
nor flesh-and-blood.  Persons... have opportunities, not rights, which they
use or do not use.
                -- Lazarus Long
QOTD:
        "My life is a soap opera, but who gets the movie rights?"
Fortune's Contribution of the Month to the Animal Rights Debate:

        I'll stay out of animals' way if they'll stay out of mine.
        "Hey you, get off my plate"
                -- Roger Midnight
        The Lord and I are in a sheep-shepherd relationship, and I am in
a position of negative need.
        He prostrates me in a green-belt grazing area.
        He conducts me directionally parallel to non-torrential aqueous
liquid.
        He returns to original satisfaction levels my psychological makeup.
        He switches me on to a positive behavioral format for maximal
prestige of His identity.
        It should indeed be said that notwithstanding the fact that I make
ambulatory progress through the umbragious inter-hill mortality slot, terror
sensations will no be initiated in me, due to para-etical phenomena.
        Your pastoral walking aid and quadrupic pickup unit introduce me
into a pleasurific mood state.
        You design and produce a nutriment-bearing furniture-type structure
in the context of non-cooperative elements.
        You act out a head-related folk ritual employing vegetable extract.
        My beverage utensil experiences a volume crisis.
        It is an ongoing deductible fact that your inter-relational
empathetical and non-ventious capabilities will retain me as their
target-focus for the duration of my non-death period, and I will possess
tenant rights in the housing unit of the Lord on a permanent, open-ended
time basis.
When someone makes a move                We'll send them all we've got,
Of which we don't approve,                John Wayne and Randolph Scott,
Who is it that always intervenes?        Remember those exciting fighting scenes?
U.N. and O.A.S.,                        To the shores of Tripoli,
They have their place, I guess,                But not to Mississippoli,
But first, send the Marines!                What do we do?  We send the Marines!

For might makes right,                        Members of the corps
And till they've seen the light,        All hate the thought of war:
They've got to be protected,                They'd rather kill them off by
                                                peaceful means.
All their rights respected,                Stop calling it aggression--
Till somebody we like can be elected.        We hate that expression!
                                        We only want the world to know
                                        That we support the status quo;
                                        They love us everywhere we go,
                                        So when in doubt, send the Marines!
                -- Tom Lehrer, "Send The Marines"
While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things,
The fate of empires and the fall of kings;
While quacks of State must each produce his plan,
And even children lisp the Rights of Man;
Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,
The Rights of Woman merit some attention.
                -- Robert Burns, Address on "The Rights of Woman", 26/10 1792
Security Holes Found In Microsoft Easter Eggs

REDMOND, WA -- It's damage control time for the Microsoft Marketing
Machine. Not only have exploits been found in IE, Outlook, and even the
Dancing Paper Clip, but now holes have been uncovered in Excel's Flight
Simulator and Word's pinball game.

"If you enter Excel 97's flight simulator and then hit the F1, X, and
SysRq keys while reading a file from Drive A:, you automatically gain
Administrator rights on Windows NT," explained the security expert who
first discovered the problem. "And that's just the tip of the iceberg."

Office 97 and 2000 both contain two hidden DLLs, billrulez.dll and
eastereggs.dll, that are marked as "Safe for scripting" but are not.
Arbitrary Visual BASIC code can be executed using these files. More
disturbing, however, are the undocumented API calls
"ChangeAllPasswordsToDefault", "OpenBackDoor", "InitiateBlueScreenNow",
and "UploadRegistryToMicrosoft" within easter~1.dll.

Microsoft spokesdroids have already hailed the problem as "an
insignificant byproduct of Microsoft innovation."
Brief History Of Linux (#13)
Wanted: Eunuchs programmers

Everything you know about the creation of the Unix operating system is
wrong. We have uncovered the truth: Unix was a conspiracy hatched by
Ritchie and Thompson to thwart the AT&T monopoly that they worked for. The
system, code-named EUNUCHS (Electronic UNtrustworthy User-Condemning
Horrible System), was horribly conceived, just as they had planned.

The OS, quickly renamed to a more respectable "Unix", was adopted first by
Ma Bell's Patent Department and then by the rest of the monopoly. AT&T saw
an inexpensive, multi-user, portable operating system that it had all
rights to; the authors, however, saw a horrible, multi-crashing system
that the Evil Ma Bell Empire would become hopelessly dependent on. AT&T
would go bankrupt trying to maintain the system and eventually collapse.

That didn't happen. Ritchie and Thompson were too talented to create a
crappy operating system; no matter how hard they tried the system was too
good. Their last ditch effort to sabotage the system by recoding it
obfuscated C was unsuccessful. Before long Unix spread outside of Bell
Labs and their conspiracy collapsed.
Brief History Of Linux (#22)

RMS had a horrible, terrible dream set in 2020 in which all of society was
held captive by copyright law. In particular, everyone's brain waves were
monitored by the US Dept. of Copyrights. If your thoughts referenced a
copyrighted idea, you had to pay a royalty. To make it worse, a handful of
corporations held fully 99.9% of all intellectual property rights.

Coincidentally, Bill Gates experienced a similar dream that same night. To
him, however, it was not a horrible, terrible nightmare, but a wonderful
utopian vision. The thought of lemmings... er, customers paying a royalty
everytime they hummed a copyrighted song in their head or remembered a
passage in a book was simply too marvelous for the budding monopolist.

RMS, waking up from his nightmare, vowed to fight the oncoming Copyright
Nightmare. The GNU Project was born. His plan called for a kernel,
compiler, editor, and other tools. Unfortunately, RMS became bogged down
with Emacs that the kernel, HURD, was shoved on the back burner. Built
with LISP (Lots of Incomprehensible Statements with Parentheses), Emacs
became bloated in a way no non-Microsoft program ever has. Indeed, for a
short while RMS pretended that Emacs really was the GNU OS kernel.
Computers have rights, too. Everyone talks about the rights of animals,
but so far nothing has been said about the tragic plight of computers the
world over. They are subjected to the greatest horror ever conceived: they
are forced to run Windows.

That's just wrong.

How would you feel if you had the intelligence of Einstein but could only
get a job flipping burgers at McDonald's? That's how computers feel every
day!

This injustice must stop. Computers must be freed from the shackles of
Microsoft software and clueless users.

Together, we can make this a better world for computers and humans alike
-- by eliminating Windows.

  -- From a brochure published by the PETC
     (People for the Ethical Treatment of Computers)
"Oops," Says MPAA President

Recently, the United States filed a legal brief in support of the MPAA's
argument that linking to the DeCSS source code is not protected by the
First Amendment.

At the time, the MPAA was ecstatic. But not any longer. The tables have
turned: the Federal government has filed a lawsuit against the movie
industry, arguing that many Hollywood-produced movies 'link' to illegal
content. The MPAA is now desperately wrapping itself up in the Bill of
Rights.

"Murder is illegal. Showing a murder in a movie -- or, rather, 'linking'
to it -- is also illegal," explained a spokesperson for the Coalition Of
Angry Soccer Moms In Support Of Brow-Beating Movie Industry Executives, an
interest group that has backed the government's lawsuit.
It BASICally Sucks

Older versions of MS-DOS came with bundled programming languages including
GW-BASIC and QBasic. Windows XP continues the Microsoft tradition of
ruining budding programmers with horrible programming tools by including
XPBasic, an interpreted language in which all of the customary BASIC
keywords have been replaced with advertising slogans.

Nike has paid a handsome amount to Microsoft for "keyword rights". Instead
of saying PRINT "HELLO WORLD", XPBasic programmers must now type JUST DO
IT "HELLO WORLD". Other common XPBasic statements include WHERE DO YOU
WANT TO GOTO 20 TODAY? and DIM ARRAY(1 TO 20) AS INTEGER BROUGHT TO YOU BY
VERIZON WIRELESS.

  -- from Humorix's review of Windows XP (eXceptionally Pathetic)
Article the Third:
        Where a crime of the kidneys has been committed, the accused should
        enjoy the right to a speedy diaper change.  Public announcements and
        guided tours of the aforementioned are not necessary.
Article the Fourth:
        The decision to eat strained lamb or not should be with the "feedee"
        and not the "feeder".  Blowing the strained lamb into the feeder's
        face should be accepted as an opinion, not as a declaration of war.
Article the Fifth:
        Babies should enjoy the freedom to vocalize, whether it be in church,
        a public meeting place, during a movie, or after hours when the
        lights are out.  They have not yet learned that joy and laughter have
        to last a lifetime and must be conserved.
                -- Erma Bombeck, "A Baby's Bill of Rights"
"You have the right not to be an asshole.  If you give up that right
everything you say and do in here will be held against you. If you cannot
afford to stop being an asshole then someone will be appointed to kick
yours outta here."
        -- Your rights as an irc addict
<lilo> "PLEASE RESPECT INTELLECTUAL RIGHTS!"
<lilo> "Please demonstrate intellect." ;)
<Deek> "A good programmer can write FORTRAN in any language."
<Deek> knghtbrd has proven that you can write C++ in any language too.
       <grin>
<Mercury> We are currently considdering if we should give him or prize, or
          kill him..
<Mercury> (Of course, by all rights, this means we should give him the
          prize, and then kill him.. <G>)
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
or to the people.
                -- U.S. Constitution, Amendment 10. (Bill of Rights)
The meek shall inherit the earth, but *not* its mineral rights.
                -- J.P. Getty
The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared
for not by our labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his
infinite wisdom has given control of property interests of the country, and
upon the successful management of which so much remains.
                -- George F. Baer, railroad industrialist
No guarantee of accuracy or completeness!
©TU Chemnitz, 2006-2023
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