hang v.
1. [very common] To wait for an event that will never occur.
"The system is hanging because it can't read from the crashed
drive". See wedged, hung. 2. To wait for some event to occur; to hang
around until something happens. "The program displays a menu and
then hangs until you type a character." Compare block. 3. To attach a peripheral device, esp. in
the construction `hang off': "We're going to hang another tape
drive off the file server." Implies a device attached with
cables, rather than something that is strictly inside the
machine's chassis.
Node:Hanlon's Razor, Next:happily, Previous:hang, Up:= H
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Hanlon's Razor prov.
A corollary of Finagle's
Law, similar to Occam's Razor, that reads "Never
attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by
stupidity." The derivation of the Hanlon eponym is not definitely
known, but a very similar remark ("You have attributed conditions
to villainy that simply result from stupidity.") appears in
"Logic of Empire", a classic 1941 SF story by Robert A. Heinlein,
who calls it the `devil theory' of sociology. Heinlein's
popularity in the hacker culture makes plausible the supposition
that `Hanlon' is derived from `Heinlein' by phonetic corruption.
A similar epigram has been attributed to William James, but
Heinlein more probably got the idea from Alfred Korzybski and
other practitioners of General Semantics. Quoted here because it
seems to be a particular favorite of hackers, often showing up in
sig blocks, fortune cookie files and the login
banners of BBS systems and commercial networks. This probably
reflects the hacker's daily experience of environments created by
well-intentioned but short-sighted people. Compare Sturgeon's Law, Ninety-Ninety Rule.