Daniel Beardsall

“It would be interesting to keep a running log of predictions and see if we can spot the absolute corkers when they are still just pert little buds. One such that I spotted recently was a statement made in February by a Mr. Wayne Leuck, vice-president of engineering at USWest, the American phone company. Arguing against the deployment of high-speed wireless data connections, he said, “Granted, you could use it in your car going sixty miles an hour, but I don’t think too many people are going to be doing that.” Just watch. That’s a statement that will come back to haunt him.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“I have to own up and say that, much as I love my PowerBook, which now does about 97.8 percent of what I used to use the lumbering old desktop dinosaurs for, I’ve given up trying to use it on planes. Yes, yes, I know that there are sorts of power-user strategies you can use to extend your battery life—dimming modes, RAM disks, processor-resting, and so on—but the point is that I really can’t be bothered. I’m perfectly capable of just reading the in-flight magazine if I want to be irritated.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“When you live alone, you even forget what it is to tell a story: plausibility disappears at the same time as friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness. But on the other hand, everything improbable, everything which nobody would ever believe in a cafe, comes your way.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“Lots of people are not in the business you think they’re in. Xerox, for instance, is in the business of selling toner cartridges. All that mucking about they do developing high-tech copying and printing machines is just creating a commodity market in toner cartridges, which is where their profit lies. Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programmes to their audience, they’re in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time