[jiggawatts]

I keep telling people that a hundred buses will let you take a hundred times more people, but nobody will get to their destination a hundred times faster.

Inevitably this comment is followed by quiet blinking as they digest this and then this question: “Are you saying we need to scale up one hundred times bigger?”

Sigh…

[QuercusMax]

Really makes one wonder what kind of thought process these people go through, and what kind of education they actually had.

[teddyh]

On two occasions I have been asked, — “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

— Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), chapter 5, Difference Engine No. 1