"Reverse engineering enables us to shortcut all the business of waiting for one of those horribly few… — Douglas Adams
"Reverse engineering enables us to shortcut all the business of waiting for one of those horribly few spaceships that passes through your galactic sector every year or so to make up its mind about whether or not it feels like giving you a lift. You want a lift, a ship arrives and gives you one. The pilot may think he has any one of a million reasons why he has decided to stop and pick you up. The real reason is that I have determined that he will."
"This is you being extremely vain, isn't it, little bird?"
Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
The thing they wouldn't be expecting him to do was to be there in the first place. Only an absolute idiot would be sitting where he was, so he was winning already. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.
