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415b871
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He had always admired his colleagues in the life and earth sciences who could hit the road on short notice with a fully stocked backpack and live rugged adventuresome lives in exotic locales. But he had admired them from a distance.
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Neal Stephenson |
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aa16fc6
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I think I'm in love," she said. He clapped a bag over his mouth and threw up."
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Neal Stephenson |
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7c9bab8
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In a hypothetical, extremely simple Cloud Ark consisting of only two arklets, only one calculation needed to be performed: namely, the calculation that answered the question "Will Arklet 1 bang into Arklet 2 if both stay on their current courses?" In a three-arklet cloud, it was also necessary to figure out whether Arklet 1 would collide with Arklet 3, and whether 2 and 3 were going to collide. So, that was a total of three calculations. If..
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Neal Stephenson |
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8647d15
|
The cloud, in other words, became not just a physical cloud of flying objects in space but a computational cloud as well, a free-floating, self-regulating Internet.
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Neal Stephenson |
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cea4b15
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GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f004f53
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Through the uneven morning mist, she could make out the ruin of the monastery on the northern verge. The broken, roofless walls of outbuildings stretched south of the main ruins in a broken curve. Birches and a few young oaks had grown up where monks had likely once raised vegetables. The rest of the clearing was filled with grass and brambles cut through with newly blazed paths. Four lean-tos had been erected just beyond the stone fence of..
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Neal Stephenson |
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f94292c
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Swords don't run out of ammo," Hiro shouts."
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Neal Stephenson |
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76cb602
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The campfires provide enough plain old regular visible light to show this sorry affair for what it is: a bunch of demented Boy Scouts, a jamboree without merit badges or hygiene.
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Neal Stephenson |
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7ad0fc9
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When the gangplanks are drawn in from the stone edge of the Bund, they are cut off from a whole world that they'll never see again, a world where they were kings. Now they are Marines again.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a05dfb5
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Why bother to have a technical term for a religious ritual?
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Neal Stephenson |
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97f8125
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He was tempted to add something like I am allowed to coin terms but didn't want things to get snarky this early in the meeting.
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Neal Stephenson |
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08045e7
|
The narration had lasted for the better part of an hour despite Markus's increasingly frequent and obvious glances at his Swiss watch, and left all the others in a strange combination of spellbound, bored, horrified, and bemused.
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Neal Stephenson |
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0862895
|
If he lived by a simple code of ethics, it was not an end in itself, but a way to get something done without selling his soul or destroying his reputation. It was a tool to be wielded like a shovel or a stick of dynamite. Tools were for building things; and pride was something you could feel after the fact, when you stood back, looked at what you had built, and passed it on to your children. Dinah
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Neal Stephenson |
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673e5cb
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Randy grinds his teeth for about a mile, and then says, "If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this incredibly narrow laser-beam focus on one tiny little subject and think about nothing else." "Whereas women can't?" "I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I'm characterizing here, as the female approach, is ess..
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Neal Stephenson |
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39f000b
|
As we learned in Vietnam, high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to psychoactive drugs.
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Neal Stephenson |
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9387a06
|
Apple has always insisted on having a hardware monopoly, except for a brief period in the mid-1990s when they allowed clone-makers to compete with them, before subsequently putting them out of business. Macintosh hardware was, consequently, expensive. You didn't open it up and fool around with it because doing so would void the warranty. In fact, the first Mac was specifically designed to be difficult to open--you needed a kit of exotic too..
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Neal Stephenson |
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149fe54
|
Well, 'vacuum with a sparse dusting of probability waves' is an accurate description of just about everything in the universe,
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Neal Stephenson |
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e8fe9e6
|
What is your name?" Ariane asked him. The kid put up his deflector screens and said, "Einstein." Silence then. When no one laughed, he stood straighter and drifted closer."
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Neal Stephenson |
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a988acf
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channeling Mongolian warriors. In 2007 Cooper fought a Chinese long-sword instructor on a Hong Kong rooftop--he never thought the experience would help him write battle scenes. In addition to being a member of the Mongoliad writing team, Cooper has written articles for various magazines.
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Neal Stephenson |
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848a9ab
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The old neighborhoods of Shanghai, Feedless or with overhead Feeds kludged in on bamboo stilts, seemed frighteningly inert, like an opium addict squatting in the middle of a frenetic downtown street, blowing a reed of sweet smoke out between his teeth, staring into some ancient dream that all the bustling pedestrians had banished to unfrequented parts of their minds.
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Neal Stephenson |
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e4ce9bb
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For a fraction of a second he was a yellow blossom of flame in the stream of light, and then he was one with it. All that remained of what he'd been was a wisp of steam coiling above the torrent of fire.
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Neal Stephenson |
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62b99e9
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The temptation to cocoon in a microhotel pod on the slab, to eat hot noodles from a cup and watch videos, was strong.
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Neal Stephenson |
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85a2610
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The only reason no one ever did it with humans is because it seemed ethically dodgy, as well as completely unnecessary given the willingness of men to impregnate women every chance they got.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a4f01b8
|
This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f31fec2
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He was forty-seven years old but in dim light could have passed for thirty.
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Neal Stephenson |
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60dace6
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it would make things much simpler for a man like him if he knew she were unavailable.
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Neal Stephenson |
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8d10e1e
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But in the time-honored manner of most human males, he allowed his eyeballs to swivel her way so that he could check her out, then turned his head so that he could check her out better.
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Neal Stephenson |
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01a427c
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The situation could not possibly be as dire as it seemed or they would all be dead.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f2c8cc4
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The damn bells kept ringing through the fog. Bud mumbled a command to his music system, a phased acoustical array splayed across both eardrums like the seeds on a strawberry. The volume went up but couldn't scour away the deep tones of the carillon, which
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Neal Stephenson |
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e517763
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Each breaker, she supposed, was as unique as a human soul. Each made its own run up onto the shore, being the very embodiment of vigor and power at the start. But each slowed, spread thin, faltered, dissolved into a hissing ribbon of gray foam, and got buried under the next. The end result of all their noisy, pounding, repetitious efforts was the beach. Seen through a lens, the particular arrangement of sand-grains that made up the beach pr..
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Neal Stephenson |
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32b981f
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Certain objects that are supposed to (a) remain horizontal and (b) support heavy things have ceased to do either.
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Neal Stephenson |
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5495d19
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If I had a copper for every fly that swarms on you, beast, I'd buy the Spanish Empire! You smell worse than Vera Cruz in the springtime, and there is more filth clinging to your body than most animals shit in a year. Truly you must have sprung fully formed from a heap of manure, as flies and Popes do--may God have mercy on my soul for saying that!
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Neal Stephenson |
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465ef26
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Extramuros: (1) In Old Orth, literally "outside the walls." Often used in reference to the walled city-states of that age. (2) In Middle Orth, the non-mathic world; the turbulent and violent state of affairs that prevailed after the Fall of Baz. (3) In Praxic Orth, geographical regions or social classes not yet enlightened by the resurgent wisdom of the mathic world. (4) In New Orth, similar to sense 2 above, but often used to denote those ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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01417b9
|
Is power like the vis viva and the quantite d'avancement? That is, is it conserved by the universe, or is it like shares of a stock, which may have great value one day, and be worthless the next? If power is like stock shares, then it follows that the immense sum thereof lately lost by B[olingbroke] has vanished like shadows in sunlight. For no matter how much wealth is lost in stock crashes, it never seems to turn up, but if power is conse..
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power
slavery
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Neal Stephenson |
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d182216
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Between these efforts he sent the following, loosely connected string of comments and observations Bob's way: "You have responsibilities now, Bob. You must lose this naive understanding of violence! You are embarrassin' me in front of the lads! You can't play by their rules or they'll win unfailingly! You don't engage in courtly play-fightin' with one such as this. You get a great friggin' tree-branch and keep hittin' him with it until he d..
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Neal Stephenson |
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0649544
|
Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses--viruses generated from within itself.
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Neal Stephenson |
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2d2e002
|
She turns the speedometer off. Running totally black now. Precipitating her way toward the sweet 'crete of the creek bottom like a black angel who has just had the shroud lines of her celestial parachute severed by the Almighty. And when the wheels finally meet the pavement, it just about drives her knees up through her jawbone. She finishes the whole gravitational transaction with not much altitude and a nasty head of dark velocity.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d0c27cc
|
There is an informational entity known as the metavirus, which causes information systems to infect themselves with customized viruses. This may be just a basic principle of nature, like Darwinian selection, or it may be an actual piece of information that floats around the universe on comets and radio waves -- I'm not sure. In any case, what it comes down to is this: Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become in..
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Neal Stephenson |
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a225144
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Who is going to fight them off, Randy?" "I'm afraid you're going to say we are." "Sometimes it might be other Ares-worshippers, as when Iran and Iraq went to war and no one cared who won. But if Ares-worshippers aren't going to end up running the whole world, someone needs to do violence to them. This isn't very nice, but it's a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligen..
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Neal Stephenson |
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45956ed
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Testaceous turbinated exanguious animals--
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Neal Stephenson |
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61e7096
|
This is an incredibly realistic training exercise--even down to the point of using ethnically correct pilots, and detonating fake explosives on the ships. Lawrence heartily approves. Things have just been too lax around this place.
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Neal Stephenson |
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46e55fb
|
Two days later a Scout simply disappeared without explanation, possibly the victim of a micrometeoroid, or even of suicide.
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Neal Stephenson |
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6699f35
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Meetings had never been her strong suit. She felt like she was playing an away game whenever she sat down in a conference room. Her awareness of this got in the way and turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Neal Stephenson |
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730d08d
|
It wasn't only the Lorites who said that is not a new result. People re-invented the wheel all the time. There was nothing shameful in it. If the rest of us oohed and aahed and said, "Gosh, a wheel, no one's ever thought of that before," just to make that person feel good, nothing would ever get done."
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Neal Stephenson |