This is a just a few thoughts that have tickled my fancy over time. Your mileage may vary...


It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

--Voltaire


Notice that one definition of commerce is sexual intercourse. Makes you wonder what electronic commerce is... 
A matter of perspective:
Applied mathematics is bad mathematics
- Paul Halmos
Computers are important, but not to mathematics.
- Paul Halmos
Mathematics is important, but not to most humans.
- me

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.

--- Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
1952 Public Utilities Commission v Pollak


Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)


Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Helen Keller


I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.

Thomas Jefferson



 
When C++ is your hammer, everything looks like your thumb.

- source unknown


Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

George Bernard Shaw


If the theory of numbers could be employed for any practical and obviously honorable purpose ... then surely neither Gauss nor any other mathematician would have been so foolish as to decry or regret such applications.

--- G.H. Hardy
A Mathematician's Apology


The ultimate security is your understanding of reality.

- H. Stanley Judd


It is when we all play safe that we create a world of the utmost insecurity.

- Dag Hammarskjld


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


Security is not the meaning of my life. Great opportunities are worth the risk.

- Shirley Hufstedler


The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards -- and even then I have my doubts.

- Eugene H. Spafford


Corn can be used to feed armies and fuel war machines, but we don't restrict its export as a munition. Basic research and speech about the properties of corn should be even less of a threat to a free society. As a dual-use technology, I put cryptography in the same category as corn.

- me


Sex takes a toll on people. Please have exact change.

- unknown


"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."

- John F. Kennedy


"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."

- Mark Twain


When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.

Ever notice the similarity to the "point and click interface" and a Smith and Wesson revolver? From a security perspective they look the same!

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."

- Leslie Lamport, 1992


Within industry it falls to research to imagine the future ... It is also prudent for mathematics research to contribute products and services that will appear before the next millenium.

- Robert Calderbank


The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

- George Bernard Shaw


Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all.

Sophocles, 496-406 B.C.


Click here for a definition of recursion.

"The right to be left alone - the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men."

-Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis


The Macintosh - the computer for people with only one working finger. 

When scientists and engineers are in charge of a national laboratory, they produce their best product - science and technology in the national interest.

When bureaucrats are in charge of a national laboratory, they produce their best product - bureaucracy.


On the constitution

Reprinted from the Internet: (attributed to Tim Freeman)
When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
Now they've taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it.

On applied vs. pure mathematics

Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematics technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.

- G.H. Hardy


Comment on Centralized Computer Services

Every once in a while someone in the CIO's office at my place of employment decides that the lab would be better served if everyone registered and turned over control of their computers to a central authority. A ex-colleague of mine had a good comment in response to this:
I don't register guns or computers.

- Stephen Wheat, 1994


Random Numbers

Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random.

- Donald Knuth, in volume 2.

I wonder if he was thinking about encryption keys when he said this? 


I was trained as a mathematician, and like most mathematicians I was taught that mathematics is like an art form. Unfortunately, if mathematicians continue to push this idea then they have no defense against society treating them like artists. It's not a coincidence that we sometimes hear the term "starving artist".

- me


I believe that electronic commerce will truly make many people rich and revolutionize how we buy goods and services. On the other hand, before you get too excited, you better first figure out a way to download a pizza
I'm anxiously waiting the day that I see the following in a mailcap file:
   odor/basic; stink.exe %s;

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

- John Steinbeck (1902-1968)


Mathematicians are the least expensive researchers to support. All they need is pencils, paper, and a wastebasket -- and when they turn philosopher, they don't even need the wastebasket!

- anonymous


Did you ever stop to think that prostitutes are "customer focused and market driven"? 

The fantastic advances in the field of communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.

-- Earl Warren


Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...

-- The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Now explain to me what part was unclear.

Minds and parachutes are alike - they only work when they are open.

- from a bumper sticker


Anyone who claims to remember the 70's clearly must not have experienced it the way I did.

The most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is that if they foul up there's no law against whacking them around a little.

- anonymous


Change is not merely necessary to life - IT IS LIFE

Alvin Toffler


Running Netscape as root is the skydiving of the 90's.

Poem by Ron Rivest
   Mary had a little key
   (It's all she could export),
   and all the email that she sent
   was opened at the Fort.

A little more poetry from Jim Bidzos, CEO of RSA Data Security:
    There is a group at Fort Meade
    who fear that which they cannot read
    so they fight with their friends
    (God knows to what ends!)
    In attempts to get more than they need.

Never let school interfere with your education.

- Mark Twain


Attempts to regulate the content of the Internet are doomed to failure, for the simple reason that the Internet transcends national boundaries. How does one regulate content, given that content is produced anywhere in the world, and requested by citizens of this country?

Can our society stand to have the content of data that flows into our borders regulated by government?


Is version 6 of the Internet Protocol (IPv6) a threat to our privacy?

What if a web server could identify you when you visited a site? Then they could begin to build a database of your visits, in order to more effectively market to you. I would regard this as a serious invasion of privacy, but luckily the prevailing current practice of Internet service providers is to assign a random IP address whenever a user dials in. In doing so, they effectively thwart the ability of web servers to track the visitors to their site (at least ordinarily).

One provision of IPv6 that threatens this anonymity is the enormous enlargement of the IP address space, from 32 bits to 128 bits. In adopting this future addressing scheme, we will have the ability to assign a unique IP address to each individual accessing the Internet. In this case, it will become possible to track all users by the addresses in packets sent to them, and effectively destroy the last shred of privacy that we have on the net.

Bummer!


Everything that can be invented has been invented.

- Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.


Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, if he gets angry, he'll be a mile away - and barefoot.

Anonymous e-mail sig


Trying to have sex at my age is like trying to play pool with a rope.

- George Burns


There can be no greater good than the quest for peace, and no finer purpose than the preservation of freedom.

- U.S. President Ronald Reagan


"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

- Albert Einstein


"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."

- George Bernard Shaw


Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.

- James F. Byrnes, former US secretary of state.


Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

- George Bernard Shaw


The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.

- John Perry Barlow


I'm all in favor of the democratic principle that one idiot is as good as one genius, but I draw the line when someone takes the next step and concludes that two idiots are better than one genius.

- Leo Szilard


I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret.

- Walter Winchell


The more the national laboratories treat their government research like a business, the more we do crappy business and crappy research.


A secret's safe 'Twixt you, me, and the gatepost.

- Robert Browning (1812-1889)

I don't think he was talking about Internet firewall proxies. 
There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.

- George Bernard Shaw

I don't think he was talking about exportable encryption. 
Shamir and Blakely never realized the problems with secret sharing among n>2 people.
Two may keep counsel when the third's away.

- William Shakespeare

A secret between two is a secret of God; a secret among three is everybody's secret.

- French proverb

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

- Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanac


Let others seek what is safe. Utter misery is safe; for the fear of any worse event is taken away.

- Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto, Bk ii, eleg 2, l 31.


Secrecy and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake are uneasy bedfollows.

- James B Conant, President's Report, Harvard University, 1951-52


The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.

- Henry L. Stimson


A man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts.

- Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister of Britain.


There is no security in life - only opportunity.

- Mark Twain (sometimes attributed to General Douglas MacArthur)


If handicapped people are called physically challenged, then should we call fat people "gravitationally challenged"?

Have you ever had your privacy compromised by an electronic transaction?
You Will!
And the company that will bring it to you . . .

Actually, it's hard to tell. It's a competitive business, and many people will compete for this title. 


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