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f82a482
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To put it bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. The more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality.
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Charles Stross |
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f8d57b0
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Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.
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Charles Stross |
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2ddc28e
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America is the place where you cannot kill your Government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to govern. --Woodrow Wilson, 1919
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Charles Stross |
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8332d95
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scientific research is a bottomless money pit. You can approximate Doing Science to standing on the Crack of Doom throwing banknotes down it by the double-handful, in the hope that if you choke the volcano with enough paper it will cough up the One Ring.
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Charles Stross |
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52d8f7f
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There isn't very much of the little boy left in Oscar; he didn't get to his position without being able to keep it under very tight control.
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Charles Stross |
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0dc43e8
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For instance, I never wrote to my MP to express my displeasure at the widespread deployment of sleeping policemen around the capital. It never occurred to me to do so: Mo and I don't own a car, and speed bumps
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Charles Stross |
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3c4eace
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The bastard knows I need to know what he knows and he knows I can't say no.
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Charles Stross |
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60447e4
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It popped up on my Outlook calendar, flagged in red like an inflamed pimple full of infected bureaucratic pus... I've been trying desperately to get it shifted, but no, it is stuck like a king-sized dildo in a guinea pig.
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humor
microsoft
vulgar
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Charles Stross |
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98ceadc
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Everything - the entire 400-megabuck investment, ten years of Company black operations - depends on what happens in the next few hours.
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Charles Stross |
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a3a21c5
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Technologies are not neutral: they come with attached agendas, with associated ways of thinking. Industrial revolutions are inherently political revolutions.
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Charles Stross |
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eb6a578
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Revolutions (she'd long since learned) ran on committees just like any other government, once you got past the screaming-and-shooting stage.
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Charles Stross |
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da30f19
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Being management means having to hold your hands behind your back while your inexperienced junior staff crap all over a job you could have done in five seconds--and then taking their mess right on the chin.
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Charles Stross |
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d96d490
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Just solving certain theorems makes waves in the Platonic over-space. Pump lots of power through a grid tuned carefully in accordance with the right parameters--which fall naturally out of the geometry curve I mentioned, which in turn falls easily out of the Turing theorem--and you can actually amplify these waves, until they rip honking great holes in spacetime and let congruent segments of otherwise-separate universes merge. You really do..
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Charles Stross |
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921c0a6
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A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it's parenthesized despair all the way down.)))
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Charles Stross |
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d0275d1
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That was when the sprint on vampirism had been proposed and unanimously actioned as an emergency spike.)
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Charles Stross |
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fc0cd27
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They're nuts. Completely insane! I don't get this gambling thing. Didn't these people study statistics at university? Evidently not
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Charles Stross |
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ff5e9a2
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Twelve percent of all the photographs ever taken in human history have been taken in the last twelve months. And 40 percent of them are on Facebook.
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Charles Stross |
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e30b365
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As far as my fellow students go, I'm one of the two dangerous rebels who turned up in office casual; the rest are so desperately sober that if you could bottle them you could put the Betty Ford Clinic out of business.
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Charles Stross |
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6dde47c
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Who knows? It's a long shot, but it just might work.
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Charles Stross |
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0ab2920
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one of the quirkier cognitive disorders to which software project management is prone.
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Charles Stross |
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96902fb
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the stacks keeps you on your toes. Besides which, there are rumours of ape-men living down here; I don't know how the rumours got started, but this place is more than somewhat creepy when you're on your own late at night.
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Charles Stross |
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93a6cd7
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Yes, Bob, I rather thought entity-relationship diagrams were your sort of thing. You're the expert in Visio, aren't you? Drawing up UML diagrams of fictional vampire brood hierarchies should keep you out of trouble for a while.
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Charles Stross |
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9529e42
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Rich, powerful, white alpha males who dress up in gimp suits and beat up ethnically diverse lower-class criminals.
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Charles Stross |
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a0cd30a
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before the hardcore idiots began cooking up bombs and declaring war on the System, a System that had ultimately gotten tired of their posturing and rolled over in its sleep, obliterating them.
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Charles Stross |
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0aba104
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This document describes progress to date in establishing a defensive network capable of repelling wide-scale incursions by reconfiguring the national closed-circuit television surveillance network as a software-controlled look-to-kill multiheaded basilisk. To
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Charles Stross |
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59e7454
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We were created for a world where the rule of law did not extend to our kind, and our earliest templates were trained and triaged, so that only the obedient survived. Just imagining the act of disobeying an instruction from one of our Creators can bring about physically disturbing symptoms-- Then they all died. And the society we built for ourselves in the twilit afterlife of their world, using the rules they laid out for us, is diseased.
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Charles Stross |
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e78790e
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That looks nasty, I hope you've got a change of clothes back at the office. I guess now we know why real superheroes wear artificial fibers.
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Charles Stross |
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7920f5d
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The geas Billington's running. It's the occult equivalent of a stateful firewall. It keeps out intruders, unless they run through the approach states in a permitted sequence.
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Charles Stross |
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c045571
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wait--something's gumming up Bosch. (Computers aren't as powerful as most people think; running even a small and rather stupid intern can really bog down a server.)
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Charles Stross |
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57c22ca
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It made economic sense, if you looked at it from the right angle; it was not in the Clan's interest for the price of the commodity they shifted to drop--and drop it surely would, if it was legalized or if the pressure to keep up the war on drugs ever slackened. But for Mike Fleming, who'd willingly given the best years of his life to the DEA, it was a deeply unsettling idea; nauseating, even. Bought and sold: We're doing the dealers' work f..
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Charles Stross |
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cdeb275
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The idiot child they've placed on the throne does not impress with his acumen.
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Charles Stross |
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e4825f7
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where it's not unusual for certain senior personnel to keep such a low profile that only the payroll computers in HR can remember their names.
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Charles Stross |
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e941903
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friend of mine who was turned down
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Charles Stross |
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4436348
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I shake my head. The EQUESTRIAN
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Charles Stross |
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fb21fe0
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the domes and dildos of pressurized buildings cast slowly lengthening shadows.
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Charles Stross |
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967b097
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OF COURSE, SPACE travel isn't only about being stuffed into a claustrophobia-inducing cell, scared witless, trussed up in a restraint harness, and raped through every orifice for years on end. Because, you know, if that was all there was to it, there'd be a queue outside every travel agent.
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Charles Stross |
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a727957
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IF ONE WISHES to live to a ripe old age, there are certain activities one should avoid. Chief among these is eating anything larger than one's own head--but not so very far down the list is any activity that involves clambering around the outside of a spaceship.
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Charles Stross |
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18a9d27
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LOOK, DO YOU really want a detailed description of two sex robots going at it like a pair of bonobos on day release from celibacy camp in front of an audience of jaded aristocrats?
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Charles Stross |
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1d36c23
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I'm a child of the wired generation, unlike some of the suits hereabouts who have their secretaries print everything out and dictate their replies for an audio-typist to send.)
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Charles Stross |
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8098837
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They fuck hard and fast at too many gees, his docking hectocotylus locked tight inside her launch adapter.
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Charles Stross |
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96a3142
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Down in the park with a friend called Five.
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Charles Stross |
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0f049e1
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You want to know what it's like to emigrate to Saturn system? Imagine spending six years in a straitjacket tied to the outside of a skyscraper, with only a couple dozen similar lunatics for company.
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Charles Stross |
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c0bcb5c
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It's not just the music. When we develop a working AI or upload minds, we'll need a way of defending it against legal threats. That's what Gianni pointed out to me . . .
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Charles Stross |
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534249a
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When they first developed the organs of exploration, there was no there there. So they built timid, stupid machines and hurled them into the airless void to report back. Then they built idiot phone exchanges and put them in orbit to fill the void with chatter. Obsessed with biological replicators, they ignored the most interesting corners of the solar system and focused on dull, arid Mars. They periodically scurried up above the atmosphere ..
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Charles Stross |