“
There are two basic ways to criticize an argument:
■ Challenge the premises-show that at least one is false.
■ Challenge the reasoning-show that the premises are not a good reason for the conclusion.
”
”
Ian Hacking (An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic)
“
Eva’s only fault has been the one of wanting to know more, to experiment and search with her own sources the laws of the Universe, of her own body and to refuse the teachings from “above”. Eva, basically, represents the curiosity of science against the passive acceptance that belongs to faith.
”
”
Margherita Hack
“
What is your least favorite part of the male anatomy?” “Uh…what?” “Come on.” I nudged her shoulder. “You have to have a least favorite part.” Marie stared at me for a beat then blinked rapidly. “Really? I just pour out my heart to you and….” “Balls,” Ashley announced unceremoniously from her place on the floor. Elizabeth snickered. “Oh, my lord.” Marie covered her face with her hands and shook her head. I ignored her and leaned closer to Ashley. “I know, right? I mean, shouldn’t those things be on the inside?” Janie’s thoughtfully distracted voice chimed in. “I feel like the rest of the male body makes a lot of sense. And then…balls.” “Yes!” “It makes me think maybe God is an alien or ran out of alluring parts before he got to the male reproductive system.” “They never look nice; it’s basically impossible. You can’t dress them up, and I’ve seen a lot of balls in the ER. I’ve never seen a man’s balls and thought to myself, Now that guy has a great set of testicles
”
”
Penny Reid (Love Hacked (Knitting in the City, #3))
“
Today, scientists and doctors find themselves outnumbered and outgunned by vast armies of individuals who feel entitled to pass judgment on matters of evidence—an admirable aspiration—without troubling themselves to obtain a basic understanding of the issues.
”
”
Ben Goldacre (Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks)
“
It becomes obvious that if we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms. In the words of Thoreau, “For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.” We can only achieve quantum improvements in our lives as we quit hacking at the leaves of attitude and behavior and get to work on the root, the paradigms from which our attitudes and behaviors flow.
”
”
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
“
The host tool is built into most Linux systems including Kali. We can access it by opening a terminal
”
”
Patrick Engebretson (The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing: Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing Made Easy)
“
Self-compassionate people experience far less fear of failure than their self-critical peers. They basically know that they’ll be fine in spite of failure. They don’t need to fear self-punishment because they don’t engage in self-punishing behavior. When they fail, they forgive and console themselves. They build themselves back up. They support and encourage themselves.
”
”
Nils Salzgeber (Stop Procrastinating: A Simple Guide to Hacking Laziness, Building Self Discipline, and Overcoming Procrastination)
“
But the point is not to do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details. Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize. As you master the art of showing up, the first two minutes simply become a ritual at the beginning of a larger routine. This is not merely a hack to make habits easier but actually the ideal way to master a difficult skill. The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things. By doing the same warm-up before every workout, you make it easier to get into a state of peak performance. By following the same creative ritual, you make it easier to get into the hard work of creating. By developing a consistent power-down habit, you make it easier to get to bed at a reasonable time each night.
”
”
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
“
The detox phenomenon is interesting because it represents one of the most grandiose innovations of marketers, lifestyle gurus, and alternative therapists: the invention of a whole new physiological process. In terms of basic human biochemistry, detox is a meaningless concept. It doesn’t cleave nature at the joints. There is nothing on the “detox system” in a medical textbook. That burgers and beer can have negative effects on your body is certainly true, for a number of reasons; but the notion that they leave a specific residue, which can be extruded by a specific process, a physiological system called detox, is a marketing invention.
”
”
Ben Goldacre (Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks)
“
New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word "liberal," they also have to take back the word "elite." By now you've heard the constant right-wing attacks on the "elite media," and the "liberal elite." Who may or may not be part of the "Washington elite." A subset of the "East Coast elite." Which is overly influenced by the "Hollywood elite." So basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being "elite," you'd be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh.
I don't get it: In other fields--outside of government--elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I'd like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad--the elite aren't down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains.
Which is fine, except that whenever there's a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, "Where are they getting these screwups from?" Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I'm not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she's smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She's thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College--you know, home of the "Fighting Christies"--and then went on to attend Pat Robertson's law school.
Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause "earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor," has a law school. And what kid wouldn't want to attend? It's three years, and you have to read only one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It's not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn't get into the University of Phoenix.
Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist diploma mill work in the Bush administration? On hundred fifty. And you wonder why things are so messed up? We're talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? In two hundred years, we've gone from "we the people" to "up with people." From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson's law school? The problem here in America isn't that the country is being run by elites. It's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.
”
”
Bill Maher (The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass)
“
the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearing house.
”
”
Donna Brazile (Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House)
“
Then I get to work hacking the dead guy to pieces. Nice, easily digestible pieces to ship off to a contact who enjoys using them as bait in his arctic fishing expeditions. Weird guy but he pays good green and the cops aren't exactly trolling the arctic nets for missing perps. It's basically recycling. I'm a fucking humanitarian, an eco fucking warrior.
”
”
J. Bree (The Butcher of the Bay: Part I (Mounts Bay Saga #1))
“
Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.
So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.
“We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.
“It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation.
“It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.”
Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.”
“Almost precisely.
”
”
Vernor Vinge (A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought, #2))
“
Gates was, after all, a serial stealer of computer time, and he had manipulated passwords to hack into accounts from eighth grade through his sophomore year at Harvard. Indeed, when he claimed in his letter that he and Allen had used more than $40,000 worth of computer time to make BASIC, he omitted the fact that he had never actually paid for that time and that much of it was on Harvard’s military-supplied computer, funded by American taxpayers.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
“
Wences had first learned about Bitcoin in late 2011 from a friend back in Argentina who thought it might give Wences a quicker and cheaper way to send money back home. Wences’s background in financial technology gave him a natural appreciation for the concept. After quietly watching and playing with it for some time, Wences gave $100,000 of his own money to two high-level hackers he knew in eastern Europe and asked them to do their best to hack the Bitcoin protocol. He was especially curious about whether they could counterfeit Bitcoins or spend the coins held in other people’s wallets—the most damaging possible flaw. At the end of the summer, the hackers asked Wences for more time and money. Wences ended up giving them $150,000 more, sent in Bitcoins. In October they concluded that the basic Bitcoin protocol was unbreakable, even if some of the big companies holding Bitcoins were not. By
”
”
Nathaniel Popper (Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money)
“
Keep Plants Nearby Even if it’s just a small pot of green, plants can actually work wonders for your concentration. This has been proven after two studies performed in 2011 and 2013. According to psychologists from the University of Michigan, plants are part of the “attention restoration theory” which basically means it restores your focus on the work with just one quick glimpse. Don’t forget that the green color of plants is also excellent for the eyes so you’re basically “refreshing” your mind and vision through a simple plant. With you practically rejuvenated, your work productivity should increase.
”
”
Rafael Gurkovsky (Life Hacks: Productivity: Bet You didn't Know It could Do That: Life Hacks that'll Blow Your Mind (diy, how to live, living, be more, inspiration, stress))
“
Security is a big and serious deal, but it’s also largely a solved problem. That’s why the average person is quite willing to do their banking online and why nobody is afraid of entering their credit card number on Amazon. At 37signals, we’ve devised a simple security checklist all employees must follow: 1. All computers must use hard drive encryption, like the built-in FileVault feature in Apple’s OS X operating system. This ensures that a lost laptop is merely an inconvenience and an insurance claim, not a company-wide emergency and a scramble to change passwords and worry about what documents might be leaked. 2. Disable automatic login, require a password when waking from sleep, and set the computer to automatically lock after ten inactive minutes. 3. Turn on encryption for all sites you visit, especially critical services like Gmail. These days all sites use something called HTTPS or SSL. Look for the little lock icon in front of the Internet address. (We forced all 37signals products onto SSL a few years back to help with this.) 4. Make sure all smartphones and tablets use lock codes and can be wiped remotely. On the iPhone, you can do this through the “Find iPhone” application. This rule is easily forgotten as we tend to think of these tools as something for the home, but inevitably you’ll check your work email or log into Basecamp using your tablet. A smartphone or tablet needs to be treated with as much respect as your laptop. 5. Use a unique, generated, long-form password for each site you visit, kept by password-managing software, such as 1Password.§ We’re sorry to say, “secretmonkey” is not going to fool anyone. And even if you manage to remember UM6vDjwidQE9C28Z, it’s no good if it’s used on every site and one of them is hacked. (It happens all the time!) 6. Turn on two-factor authentication when using Gmail, so you can’t log in without having access to your cell phone for a login code (this means that someone who gets hold of your login and password also needs to get hold of your phone to login). And keep in mind: if your email security fails, all other online services will fail too, since an intruder can use the “password reset” from any other site to have a new password sent to the email account they now have access to. Creating security protocols and algorithms is the computer equivalent of rocket science, but taking advantage of them isn’t. Take the time to learn the basics and they’ll cease being scary voodoo that you can’t trust. These days, security for your devices is just simple good sense, like putting on your seat belt.
”
”
Jason Fried (Remote: Office Not Required)
“
told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.
”
”
Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)
“
These operations move memory around, perform some sort of basic math, or interrupt the processor to get it to do something else. In the end, that's all a computer processor can really do. But in the same way millions of books have been written using a relatively small alphabet of letters, an infinite number of possible programs can be created using a relatively small collection of machine instructions.
”
”
Jon Erickson (Hacking: The Art of Exploitation)
Erickson Karnel (Hacking: 4 Books in 1- Hacking for Beginners, Hacker Basic Security, Networking Hacking, Kali Linux for Hackers)
“
It was like I was a basic stoneware coffee mug- one of those you get free from Sports Direct, maybe- and my sister was the fine bone china version.
”
”
Sophie Ranald (The Love Hack)
“
If I had 6 h to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four of them sharpening my axe.
”
”
Patrick Engebretson (The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing: Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing Made Easy)
“
For the past century or so, the basic dilemma of economic policy has been thought to be the one between promoting the increase in total wealth8 (or income) and the equality or fairness of the distribution of that wealth (or income).9 The emphasis between these is also one way to make the economic split into the “right” and “left” wings in politics10 – the right primarily focusing on maximizing total wealth and economic freedom, the left primarily concerned with economic equality and security.
”
”
Tuure Parkkinen (Fixing the Root Bug: The Simple Hack for a Growth-Independent, Fair and Sustainable Market Economy 2.0)
“
Generalized Inventory In this, you could include the basic items that are general to the RV and don’t particularly fit into a separate category, but are essential to a successful trip” A - Awning and fittings, Aluminum foil, Air pumps. B - Books, Brushes and dustpan, Bedding,
”
”
Catherine Dale (RV Living Secrets For Beginners. Useful DIY Hacks that Everyone Should Know!: (rving full time, rv living, how to live in a car, how to live in a car van ... camping secrets, rv camping tips, Book 1))
“
P - Pliers (long nose and round nose) R - Rags. S - Socket set, Screw drivers, Screws - various nuts, bolts, Saws, Sealants. T - Torches, Tapes: electrical, duct, Tire pressure gauge. W - Wrenches, Wire: connectors, cutters, Wheel wrench. It will be heartbreaking if you remember everything on all of your checklists, but forget to do a basic maintenance check in the van to ensure everything is in working order. Again, do this prior to your departure.
”
”
Catherine Dale (RV Living Secrets For Beginners. Useful DIY Hacks that Everyone Should Know!: (rving full time, rv living, how to live in a car, how to live in a car van ... camping secrets, rv camping tips, Book 1))
“
I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century where 800,000 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators’ basic goodness? Wasn’t God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.[11] Were
”
”
Michael Reeves (Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith)
“
But she was barely listening. “There’s this newish thing from Amazon? Called an AMI—an Amazon Machine Image. Basically it runs a snapshot of an operating system. There are hundreds of them, loaded up and ready to run.” Evan said, “Um.” “Virtual machines,” she explained, with a not-insubstantial trace of irritation. “Okay.” “But the good thing with virtual machines? You hit a button and you have two of them. Or ten thousand. In data centers all over the world. Here—look—I’m replicating them now, requesting that they’re geographically dispersed with guaranteed availability.” He looked but could not keep up with the speed at which things were happening on the screen. Despite his well-above-average hacking skills, he felt like a beginning skier atop a black-diamond run. She was still talking. “We upload all the encrypted data from the laptop to the cloud first, right? Like you were explaining poorly and condescendingly to me back at the motel.” “In hindsight—” “And we spread the job out among all of them. Get Hashkiller whaling away, throwing all these password combinations at it. Then who cares if we get locked out after three wrong password attempts? We just go to the next virtual machine. And the one after that.” “How do you have the hardware to handle all that?” She finally paused, blowing a glossy curl out of her eyes. “That’s what I’m telling you, X. You don’t buy hardware anymore. You rent cycles in the cloud. And the second we’re done, we kill the virtual machines and there’s not a single trace of what we did.” She lifted her hands like a low-rent spiritual guru. “It’s all around and nowhere at the same time.” A sly grin. “Like you.
”
”
Gregg Hurwitz (Hellbent (Orphan X, #3))
“
The emotional attachment that links customers to your product, as opposed to any other, translates into sustainable growth. Here are some basic rules to connect, shape, influence, and lead with your brand: Choose your target audience: The surest road to product failure is to try to be all things to all people. Connect with the public: Your objective is to make your audience feel an emotional attachment to your brand. Inspire and influence your audience: An inspirational brand message is far more influential than one
”
”
Fast Company (The Small Business Guide to Growth Hacking)
“
If you want to create a scalable business, you have to understand just how crucial it is to build brand equity. The emotional attachment that links customers to your product, as opposed to any other, translates into sustainable growth. Here are some basic rules to connect, shape, influence, and lead with your brand: Choose your target audience: The surest road to product failure is to try to be all things to all people. Connect with the public: Your objective is to make your audience feel an emotional attachment to your brand. Inspire and influence your audience: An inspirational brand message is far more influential than one that just highlights product feature functions.
”
”
Fast Company (The Small Business Guide to Growth Hacking)