Wolfland Computers Quotes

All those substitutes for magic Muggles use - electricity, computers, and radar, and all those things - they all go haywire around Hogwarts, there's too much magic in the air. ~ J.K. Rowling

What's missing from the online experience is community. Married couples are still going to need something to do on Tuesday nights, right? And it's not going to be individually retiring to their offices to watch on their computers. It's: "We just put the meat loaf dishes away, let's go watch television." It's going to happen. We shouldn't be so led around by other models. ~ Edward Allen Bernero

I hate the thought of my children being glued to a screen. Children only play on computers all day because their parents let them. ~ Mariella Frostrup

If you imagine the difference between an abacus and the world's fastest supercomputer, you would still not have the barest inkling of how much more powerful a quantum computer could be compared with the computers we have today. ~ Marcus Chown

Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility. ~ Richard Dawkins

A realization washed over her in that cold, dark space: this was how virtually all living things born on earth have died - with teeth tearing through their muscle and bones. We humans have computers and soap and houses but it doesn't change the fact that everything that walks is nothing but food for something else. ~ David Wong

But we're not very good at building them. The forced matings of minds and electrons succeed and fail with equal spectacle. Our hybrids become as brilliant as savants, and as autistic. We graft people to prosthetics, make their overloaded motor strips juggle meat and machinery, and shake our heads when their fingers twitch and their tongues stutter. Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left
behind. ~ Peter Watts

United States, Google Versus
A man approached the checkout desk with a request.
MAN: I want to use one of your public computers, but could you please disable Google on it?
ME: Pardon?
MAN: I do not believe in, nor trust, Google. They are taking over the United States.
ME: I see. Well, I can't disable it, I'm sorry. But you don't have to visit the site if you don't want to.
MAN: That's not good enough.
ME: Come again?
MAN: I refuse to use the computers if Google is on them.
ME: Okay.
MAN: -
ME: -
MAN: -
Me: Enjoy your day! ~ Gina Sheridan

When I write software, I know that it will fail, either due to my own mistake, or due to some other cause. ~ Wietse Venema

I've been asked to explain why I don't worry much about the topics of privacy threat ... One reason is that these scenarios seem to assume that there will be large, monolithic bureaucracies ... that are capable of harnessing computers for one-way surveillance of an unsuspecting populace. I've come to feel that computation just doesn't work that way. Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when they have computers, is like being afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire. ~ Bruce Sterling

The real nightmare, worse than the one in which the Big Machine wants to kill you, is the one in which it sees you as irrelevant, or not even as a discrete thing to know. ~ Benjamin H. Bratton

Computers have virtually replaced tape recorders. ~ Tony Visconti

Today's meters are little computers. ~ Ros Hubbard

I write exclusively using computers. Pens and typewriters can fsck right off - I wrote my first half million words in my teens on a manual typewriter (had to trade it for a new one due to keys snapping from metal fatigue) so I am not a pen or typewriter fetishist. ~ Charles Stross

Well, my wife always says to me, and I think it's true, it's very difficult for us to understand the Elizabethan understanding and enjoyment and perception of form as it is to say ... it would be for them to understand computers or going to the moon or something. ~ Mark Rylance

When it comes to their capacity to screw things up, computers are becoming more human every day. ~ Seth Lloyd

With faster Internet and better computers, you'd better believe we're creating and consuming more digital data. ~ Peter Diamandis

Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs. ~ Seth Lloyd

Computers don't kill books; people do. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

Mr. Duffy Napp has just transmitted a nine-word e-mail asking that I immediately send a letter of reference to your firm on his behalf; his request has summoned from the basement of my heart a star-spangled constellation of joy, so eager am I to see Mr. Napp well established at Maladin IT.

As for the basis of our acquaintanceship: I am a professor in an English department whose members consult Tech Help - aka Mr. Napp - only in moments of desperation. For example, let us imagine that a computer screen, on the penultimate page of a lengthy document, winks coyly, twice, and before the "save" button can be deployed, adopts a Stygian façade. In such a circumstance one's only recourse - unpalatable though it may be - is to plead for assistance from a yawning adolescent who will roll his eyes at the prospect of one's limited capabilities and helpless despair. I often imagine that in olden days people like myself would crawl to the doorway of Tech Help on our knees, bearing baskets of food, offerings of the harvest, the inner organs of neighbors and friends - all in exchange for a tenuous promise from these careless and inattentive gods that the thoughts we entrusted to our computers will be restored unharmed.

Colleagues have warned me that the departure of Mr. Napp, our only remaining Tech Help employee, will leave us in darkness. I am ready. I have girded my loins and dispatched a secular prayer in the hope that, given the abysmal job market, a former maso ~ Julie Schumacher

My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers. ~ Edward Abbey

Can machines think?"... The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B... We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think? ~ Alan Turing

The big break from the past may come when speech recognition software is perfected. At that point we'll be able to write simply by talking: Speak into your computer's recorder, and it'll do all the messy work of punctuation and spelling. This could result in the elimination of the keyboard, [Dennis] Baron speculates. 'We'd get back to oral composition--reinventing Homer. ~ James Maguire

We're humans, not machines. We have bad days. We have mental difficulties. We are inspired, yet we fail. We are not linear. We have hearts that break and souls we don't know what to do with. We kill and destroy but we build and make possible too. We've been to the moon and invented computers. We outsource most things but we still have to live with ourselves. We're pessimists who believe it's too late so what the hell? We're the comeback kids in love with second chances. And every New Year is another chance. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time. ~ Thomas Nagel

I'm sure computers are useful, but next to all these warm, beautiful books they seem so cold and clinical. ~ J.R. Johansson

If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars. ~ James Surowiecki

Dad was very into electronics, robotics and computers, so I was interested in what he was doing. ~ Rhianna Pratchett

Without computers, in the 17th century, we could classify the entire animal kingdom ... there was this idea of the speciation, right? And now, all a search engine is is essentially the mathematical speciation of ideas - and these things really derive from the way that language is used and the way words relate. ~ Joshua Cohen

except one bit about a movie with werewolves and a woman bursting like a balloon is just special effects, that's drawing on computers. ~ Emma Donoghue

Use a personal firewall. Configure it to prevent other computers, networks and sites from connecting to you, and specify which programs are allowed to connect to the net automatically. ~ Kevin Mitnick

I am a night creature, and I write from midnight till dawn, secluded in my office and surrounded by my collection of dragons (I have 400 of them). I only use Macintosh computers, which I name in dynastic order. Right now I'm using MacDragon 5. Only the devil is able to decipher my handwriting. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A bureacrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battary of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he may never have been asked to answer for his actions. ~ Neil Postman

My point is that life on earth can take care of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years in a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn't have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines...It was a whole different world. But to the earth, a hundred years is *nothing*. A million years is *nothing*. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us."

- Ian Malcolm ~ Michael Crichton

People are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet, and there's been surprisingly little attention to defending the Internet itself as a communications medium. ~ W. Daniel Hillis

It couldn't have been Eric. I'm pretty sure he couldn't even find a computer's on switch, let alone write actual emails on a regular basis. It took him forever just to learn how to spell his own name." Eric ~ Kylie Scott

[Science] works! Planes fly. Cars drive. Computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people. If you base the design of planes on science, they fly. If you base the design of rockets on science, they reach the moon. It works ... bitches. ~ Richard Dawkins

Computers are wasteful of paper and time. Once, we'd get documents with a few errors. Now, people make hundreds of copies until each sheet is flawless and memos are duplicated endlessly. Managers get swamped with emails. ~ Felix Dennis

If I were a 13-year-old and I wanted to create subversive art, I wouldn't go out and buy an electric guitar. I'd get myself a personal computer. ~ Thomas Dolby

Whether you sell hamburgers or computers, we're all in the customer service business. Our goal must be to exceed our customers' expectations every day. ~ Dave Thomas

You couldn't have fed the '50s into a computer and come out with the '60s. ~ Paul Kantner

Now I stand before houses set
on our secret trail, the haunt of arrowheads
and lost Indians the color of small plums,
rooms in which the new boys play, tamed
by computers and a summer waste of games,
where once, in these woods, we tasted wild fruit. ~ Thomas Dukes

As computers become more and more powerful, they won't be substitutes for humans: they'll be complements. ~ Peter Thiel

Video games and computers have become babysitters for kids. ~ Taylor Kitsch

Computers are so deeply stupid. What bother me most when they talk about technology is they don't realize how much more exciting their minds are. That machine is stupid. And boring. It does just a few things and then it'll crash. People think, 'I am on the Net, I am in touch with the world'. Wrong! The point is how we work, not how machines work. ~ Laurie Anderson

We're leading a fundamental shift from centralized energy to distributed energy. Energy will go in that direction, just like mainframe computers went to client servers, then to the Internet. I believe in solar, and the macro trends are just too undeniable. ~ Lynn Jurich

People call me an optimist, but I'm really an appreciator ... years ago, I was cured of a badly infected finger with antibiotics when once my doctor could have recommended only a hot water soak or, eventually, surgery ... When I was six years old and had scarlet fever, the first of the miracle drugs, sulfanilamide, saved my life. I'm grateful for computers and photocopiers ... I appreciate where we've come from. ~ Julian Simon