A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, … - Danny Hillis

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Why does the guerrilla fighter fight? We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery.

Danny Hillis

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong. " Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

Broken, Cycling, Knight, Knights, Spoke, Worked

Same Author Quotes

[Language is] really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it. Here I have a very complicated, messy, confused idea in my head. I'm sitting here making grunting sounds and hopefully constructing a similar messy, confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it.

Confused, Hopefully, Inspiration, Motivation, Similar

Global consciousness is that thing responsible for deciding that pots containing decaffeinated coffee should be orange.

Coffee, Consciousness, Decaffeinated, Orange, Pots

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. [We] need to pay some more attention to that, because it's actually kind of fragile.

Communication, Inspiration, Medium, Mostly, Motivation, Surprisingly

A human body is a conversation going on, both within the cells and between the cells, and they're telling each other to grow and to die; when you're sick, something's gone wrong with that conversation.

Body, Cells, Gone, Grow, Health, Sick

Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?

Carpenters, Lasts, Oak, Replacing, Tree, Years