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765d053
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The important thing is, Hiro, that you have to understand the Mafia way. And the Mafia way is that we pursue larger goals under the guise of personal relationships. So, for example, when you were a pizza guy you didn't deliver pizzas fast because you made more money that way, or because it was some kind of a fucking policy. You did it because you were carrying out a personal covenant between Uncle Enzo and every customer. This is how we avo..
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Neal Stephenson |
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0c695ed
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The place was empty 'cause of the Hanging. I didn't want to stay and--" "And what?" "Get more ahead of the others than I was already." "If you are ahead, the correct thing is to get used to it--not to make yourself into an imbecile. Come, you belong in school."
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Neal Stephenson |
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cf48481
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but she didn't really hit her stride until she got to the Georgian period, at which point she worked herself up into a froth explaining the shortcomings of that syphilitic monarch, which had inspired the right-thinking Americans to break away in disgust.
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Neal Stephenson |
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fa77833
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Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. 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. When it gets down to it--talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all our technology into..
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Neal Stephenson |
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2a0a397
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When you say 'plugged it in,' could you please tell me everything you plugged into it?" Peter had now dropped, improbably, into a polite, clinical mode, like a customer service rep in a Bangalore cubicle farm."
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Neal Stephenson |
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c5243d9
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The color of the land fades gradually from dark jungle green to pale green and then a sere reddish-brown as the tail extends from the fat center of the island out to the end, and the soil becomes dryer.
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Neal Stephenson |
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255f83a
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I am what I am," Ty said. "And what is that?" Ariane asked. "A bartender. Always happy to make new acquaintances." He nodded at Bard. "Or to provide guests with drinks. Anyone thirsty?" --
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Neal Stephenson |
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2070d16
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His real job--the job that the Owners paid him for--was to be an observer of the human condition as it was so richly displayed from day to day within these walls.
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Neal Stephenson |
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1874b8e
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But the Owners really valued the Crow's Nest partly as a cultural institution and partly because it gave them access to the sort of information about the lives, thoughts, and deeds of important persons that could only be had in a bar.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f80a825
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Far to the east, just above the horizon, was an especially big dot of light, like the clasp on a necklace. That would be the colossal structure of the Eye, currently stationed above the Atlantic.
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Neal Stephenson |
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bd2f26f
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Rife's key realization was that there's no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV--which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite--the people who go into the Metaverse, basically--who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer langu..
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Neal Stephenson |
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dad5a1f
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Downtown is before them, as high and bright as the aurora borealis rising from the black water of the Bering Sea.
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Neal Stephenson |
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8b1e5c0
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They were like three-year olds who shove pencils in their ears, discover that it hurts, and stop doing it. Lawrence's first year went by almost instantly. Time just blazed by. Nowhere could be sunnier, more relaxing, than Hawaii.
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Neal Stephenson |
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ada6d91
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He was wearing a suit that appeared to have been constructed by 1) Dressing him in a blouse with twenty-foot long sleeves of the most expensive linen. 2) Bunching the sleeves up in numerous overlapping gathers on his arms. 3) Painting most of him in glue.
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Neal Stephenson |
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5dbf376
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But this is how history is done now. People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes.
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Neal Stephenson |
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376e2bb
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What makes you think they're spying on you?" "Voco. An aut where a fraa or suur is called out from the math--Evoked--and goes to do something praxic for the Panjandrums. We never see them again."
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Neal Stephenson |
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7405f68
|
A honeybee cruising for nectar is pretty despite its implicit threat, but the same behavior in a hornet three times larger makes one glance about for some handy swatting material.
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Neal Stephenson |
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86f5fc9
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Ng blows out more smoke, thinking. "As we learned in Vietnam, high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to psychoactive drugs. Like LSD, which can convince people they can fly--causing them to jump out of windows--weapons can make people overconfident. Skewing their tactical judgment. As in the case of Fisheye."
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Neal Stephenson |
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3cd28bb
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its speedometer. But the bamboo grove in Bobby Shaftoe's haiku has not been added just to put a little Oriental flavor into the poem and wow the folks back home in Oconomowoc.
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Neal Stephenson |
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6c3c262
|
It being the 1970s, and Chet being a high school dropout with a damaged brain, he could not help but perceive something huge in this discovery. Nor could he avoid coming to the conclusion that the mistake he had made on that beautiful moonlit night had been a sort of message from above, a warning that, during the grubby, day-to-day work of small-town pot dealing, he had been failing to attend to larger and more cosmic matters.
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Neal Stephenson |
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bbf1261
|
That was his youngest. Hadley, the girl in the middle, was in Berkeley; she'd been doing volunteer work for an organization in Oakland and had a lot of free time.
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Neal Stephenson |
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1815c88
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He raised his eyebrows briefly. Since this was the only plausible way of moving something that huge, he didn't consider it worthy of an extended answer.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d215e62
|
One of the great virtues of Confucianism was its suppleness. Western political thought tended to be rather brittle; as soon as the state became corrupt, everything ceased to make sense. Confucianism always retained its equilibrium, like a cork that could float as well in spring water or raw sewage.
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Neal Stephenson |
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4b1e09d
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realizes that this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world. You're in this place. There's other people all around you, but they don't understand you and you don't understand them, but people do a lot of pointless babbling anyway.
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Neal Stephenson |
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1a30bd4
|
AMONGOL, KNOCKED INTO a cook fire during the initial surge of horsemen, had lived long enough to run--shirt and hair on fire--into the rows of tents. Rutger assumed he had died from the burns, but before he had expired, the flames had leaped from him to several tents. The fire was spreading, and a haze of ash and embers was starting to fill the air. A storm of glittering snow.
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Neal Stephenson |
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66316e2
|
CRACKING A WHIP MADE OF SMALL ROBOTS JOINED END TO END into a long, flexible chain was neither an especially bad nor an especially good way of engaging a foe in ambot-based combat. Extensive studies conducted within Blue military research labs had concluded that, on average, it was somewhat less effective than the more obvious procedure of just shooting individual ambots out of katapults. A dissenting opinion held that such studies were fla..
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Neal Stephenson |
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9ee64a5
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Put ... the troll ... down ... and slowly back away.
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ied
doll
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Neal Stephenson |
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fcf1354
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Due diligence people are easy to manipulate. You just have to act really diligent. They eat it up.
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Neal Stephenson |
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1d560bd
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Scholars of economic history have worked up numbers suggesting that Britain spent more on maintaining its empire than it gained from exploiting it.
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Neal Stephenson |
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b54e944
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There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of spatial information that it owns--all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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108eb72
|
My lady," Percival began. He had called her that yesterday, and she had guessed it was some kind of elaborate sarcasm. But this didn't seem like the time for unpleasant jibes. Maybe it was just the way he'd been raised. Cnan wished she could meet Percival's mother. "I cannot recommend that you remain in that position," he said, "considering that hostile archers, in large numbers, are about to surround you."
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Neal Stephenson |
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4f84f7e
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The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has b..
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Neal Stephenson |
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2c4f1ab
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How could a man become a god?" Nell asked. "By living in an extremely pragmatic society," said Constable Moore after some thought"
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Neal Stephenson |
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3d2c597
|
Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one will want to commit genocide in the future.
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Neal Stephenson |
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036a6d6
|
What should we be doing in the meantime?" "All of the things you will look back on fondly later when you have not been able to do them for a long time."
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Neal Stephenson |
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f78f9e0
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When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins. Hiro
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Neal Stephenson |
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4d00cc0
|
Domingo regarded the man for a moment before answering. "The Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae do not hire themselves out as caravan guards," he said finally. "There are several hundred men-at-arms in Barcelona who would satisfy your needs." "I know none of them," Jacobi replied. "Nor their reputations." Domingo made a noise in his chest and idly reached over to scratch the end of his shortened arm. Andreas had only been at the Shield-Brethren..
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Neal Stephenson |
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c1e83cd
|
Spoken like a true Nipponese," Enoch says bitterly. "You never change." "Please make me understand what you are saying." "What of the man who cannot get out of bed and work, because he has no legs? What of the widow who has no husband to work, no children to support her? What of children who cannot improve their minds because they lack books and schoolhouses?" "You can shower gold on them," Goto Dengo says. "Soon enough, it will all be gone..
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Neal Stephenson |
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74c16b4
|
THE ROUGH TIMBERS of the monastery wall were aged and warped, and there were numerous gaps and holes in the wood. Covered in pitch, they were a poor defensive barrier, if they had ever been intended as such. Cnan and Finn approached the wood cautiously and dared to peek through the gaps. Whereupon
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Neal Stephenson |
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ca6ad2d
|
Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in-between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past.
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Neal Stephenson |
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06b1e6b
|
The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.
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Neal Stephenson |
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923a8e6
|
If the gathering had included more veterans of that elongated state of low-intensity warfare known as Society, this observation would have been keenly made by those soi-disant sentries who stood upon the battlements, keeping vigil against bounders who would struggle their way up the vast glacis separating wage slaves from Equity Participants.
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Neal Stephenson |
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7cfc402
|
Shaftoe and Bischoff are trudging through the dark Swedish woods like a pair of lost souls trying to find the side entrance to Limbo.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d90616b
|
And this all fits very well with the modern way of thinking about stuff in which all you need to do, in order to attain a sense of personal accomplishment and earn the accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate an ability to slot new examples of things into the proper intellectual pigeon-holes.
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Neal Stephenson |