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Never bring a gun to a fight where the other guy has a time-machine and tomorrow's newspapers.
--
Usenet article <e2s3p4$ofd$1@reader1.panix.com> (2006)

 

James Nicoll

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Anyone can fight the battles of just one day. It is only when you and I add the battles of those two awful eternities, yesterday and tomorrow, that we break down. It is not the experience of today that drives us mad. It is the remorse or bitterness for something that happened yesterday or the dread of what tomorrow may bring. Let us therefore do our best to live but one day at a time.

 

Richmond Walker

 

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

 

Clarence Darrow

 

To worry about tomorrow is to detract from your work today. Time you spend thinking about tomorrow is time you're not spending thinking about what to do today. The place you leave in the code because you think you'll need it tomorrow, is actually a waste of time today — and a liability tomorrow. It does more harm than good.

 

Ward Cunningham

 

Nash: You've been sitting out here for six months running your mouth: "this is where the big boys play," huh? Look at the adjective—"play". We ain't here to play. Now, he said last week that he was gonna bring somebody out here—I'm here. You still don't have your three people, and you know why? Because nobody wants to face us. This show's about as interesting as Marge Schott reading excerpts from Mein Kampf!
Bischoff: No trouble here, just speak the peace...
Nash: Yeah, no trouble 'cause you know I'll kick your teeth down your throat. Where's your three guys? What, you couldn't get a paleontologist to get a couple of these fossils cleared?! You ain't got enough guys off of dialysis machines to get a team?! Yeah, where's Hogan? Where's Hogan? Out doing another episode of Blunder in Paradise?! Where's the Macho Man, huh?! Doin' some Slim Jim commercial?! Hey, we're here. You wanna say something?
Bischoff: Look, I don't have the authority right here, right now. You want a fight? Your fight isn't with me. You want three guys? Tomorrow morning at 9:00, I'm gonna be in Atlanta, I'm gonna be in the offices of WCW, I'll try and get you your fight. And you know what? Live, this Sunday in Baltimore, Great American Bash, you guys wanna show up? You want a fight? You show up, I'll see if I can get you your fight.
Nash: [to Hall] I don't know about you, but...they love us in Baltimore.
Hall: Hey, big man, I say me and you, we be at the Bash, maybe these punks want a fight.
Nash: [to Bischoff] Bring what you got. The measuring stick just changed around here, buddy—you're looking at it.

 

Kevin Nash

 

Present-day computers are designed primarily to solve preformulated problems or to process data according to predetermined procedures. The course of the computation may be conditional upon results obtained during the computation, but all the alternatives must be foreseen in advance. ... The requirement for preformulation or predetermination is sometimes no great disadvantage. It is often said that programming for a computing machine forces one to think clearly, that it disciplines the thought process. If the user can think his problem through in advance, symbiotic association with a computing machine is not necessary.
However, many problems that can be thought through in advance are very difficult to think through in advance. They would be easier to solve, and they could be solved faster, through an intuitively guided trial-and-error procedure in which the computer cooperated, turning up flaws in the reasoning or revealing unexpected turns in the solution. Other problems simply cannot be formulated without computing-machine aid. ... One of the main aims of man-computer symbiosis is to bring the computing machine effectively into the formulative parts of technical problems.
The other main aim is closely related. It is to bring computing machines effectively into processes of thinking that must go on in "real time," time that moves too fast to permit using computers in conventional ways. Imagine trying, for example, to direct a battle with the aid of a computer on such a schedule as this. You formulate your problem today. Tomorrow you spend with a programmer. Next week the computer devotes 5 minutes to assembling your program and 47 seconds to calculating the answer to your problem. You get a sheet of paper 20 feet long, full of numbers that, instead of providing a final solution, only suggest a tactic that should be explored by simulation. Obviously, the battle would be over before the second step in its planning was begun. To think in interaction with a computer in the same way that you think with a colleague whose competence supplements your own will require much tighter coupling between man and machine than is suggested by the example and than is possible today.

 

J. C. R. Licklider