Related:

• It took 300 years to build and by the time it was 10% built, everyone knew it would be a total disaster.
  But by then the investment was so big they felt compelled to go on....
• The following appeared in a memo from a vice president of a large, highly diversified company.
  "Ten years ago our company had two new regional office buildings built in two different regions....
• ecurity through obscurity (alt. `security by obscurity') A term applied by hackers to most OS vendors' favorite way of coping with security holes -- namely
  ignoring them, documenting neither any known holes nor the underlying security algorithms, trusting that nobody will find out about them and that people who do find out about them won't exploit them....
• Pascal n. An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967-68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming.
  This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot and thus extremely restrictive from a general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and Ada (see also bondage-and-discipline l summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of K&...
• Spontaneity has its time and place.
• Although Poles suffer official censorship, a pervasive secret police and laws similar to those in the USSR
  here are thousands of underground publications, a legal independent Church, private agriculture, and the East bloc's first and only independent trade union federation, NSZZ Solidarnosc, which is an affiliate of both the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labor....
• Moore's Law /morz law/ prov. The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^(t - 1962) where t is time in yea
  hat is, the amount of information storable on a given amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year since the technology was invented....
• For fifteen days I struggled to prove that no functions analogous to those I have since called Fuchsian functions could exi
  I was then very ignorant. Every day I sat down at my work table where I spent an hour or two...
• The following appeared in a newsletter distributed at a recent political rally.
  "Over the past year, the Consolidated Copper Company (CCC) has purchased over one million square miles of land in the tropical nation of West Fredonia....