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636fe9e
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But Raz, you are educable, you can learn 'this kind of thing,' if by that you mean how to maneuver an S2-35B and how to assemble a Cold Black Mirror. You've spent your whole life, ever since you were Collected, becoming educable.
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Neal Stephenson |
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e6915ea
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It registered on the mind as a blunt impression that could be talked about only by smearing it into some gray word like "complicated."
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Neal Stephenson |
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37d765b
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I'm surprised at you! If it will take ten years to make the machine with available technology, and only five years to make it with a new technology, and it will only take two years to invent the new technology, then you can do it in seven years by inventing the new technology first!
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Neal Stephenson |
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2e398bd
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the typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god's wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him--the helpless, innocent victim, that is--into let's say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish of turtle food ju..
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Neal Stephenson |
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b13e6a5
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When it gets really intolerable, he goes to the latrine (so that the staff will not break in on him at an inopportune moment) and executes a Manual Override.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c530512
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there are no jaded, bored people in the high-tech industry, in the land of really good hardcore geeks. They all have a kind of intensity about what they're doing that makes it impossible for them to be bored or passionless. They are pretty driven, and they get a lot of joy from what they do, and it comes through,
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Neal Stephenson |
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0a7a045
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For like a lot of young Moirans, Kath Two didn't even try to establish a fixed home. With a home came a social circle, and perhaps a family.
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Neal Stephenson |
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273fad3
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In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c82c4b3
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Kath Two wondered, as she always did, whether the people of the Epic would have said and done some of what they had, had they known that, five thousand years later, billions of people would be watching them on video screens, citing them as examples, and quoting them from memory. Over the first few decades on Cleft, the cameras had died one by one. Depending on how you felt about ubiquitous surveillance, the result had either been a new Dark..
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Neal Stephenson |
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face211
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DMS is energetic and enterprising to a degree that from time to time leaves certain persons (e.g. those burdened with a petty fear of death or torture) uneasy (see my prior speculation as to possibility DMS may have been born with a redundant Y chromosome).
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Neal Stephenson |
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21f704a
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The nuggets themselves are pillow-shaped and vaguely striated to echo piratical treasure chests. Now, with a flake-type of cereal, Randy's strategy would never work. But then, Cap'n Crunch in a flake form would be suicidal madness; it would last about as long, when immersed in milk, as snowflakes sifting down into a deep fryer. No, the cereal engineers at General Mills had to find a shape that would minimize surface area, and, as some sort ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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5a16529
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There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won't fall down or airplanes that won't suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes wh..
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Neal Stephenson |
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ba3c50e
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this is how it's done, you pile one thing on top of the next and you keep it up and keep it up--sometimes the galleon sinks in a typhoon, you don't get your slab of granite that year--but you stick with it and eventually you end up with something sooo big.
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Neal Stephenson |
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072390c
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Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop" seems kind of overly deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half-witted surrender to bald teleology."
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Neal Stephenson |
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a90cf0a
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Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work.
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Neal Stephenson |
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606c371
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Commuters lining up at the tube stations, waiting to cross the Causeway into Greater Shanghai, seen only as a storm front of neonstained, coal-scented smog that encompassed the horizon.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c5d1818
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The result, a few moments later, was that the glider came snapping over the top just as its connection to the last flynk was severed. In a few seconds it had been hauled two thousand meters straight up and let go with a velocity of a few hundred kilometers per hour. Meanwhile, every other flynk in the chain had decoupled itself fore and aft, causing the entire chain to disintegrate into a linear cloud of identical fragments, each headed in ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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be60c1d
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Like a horseman who reins in a wild stallion that has borne him, will he, nill he, across several counties; or a ship's captain who, after scudding before a gale through a bad night, hoists sail, and gets underway once more, navigating through unfamiliar seas- thus Dr. Daniel Waterhouse, anno domini 1685, watching King Charles II die at Whitehall Palace.
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opening-sentences
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Neal Stephenson |
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ce453f9
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overestimating the intelligence of the enemy is, if anything, more dangerous than underestimating it.
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Neal Stephenson |
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ff9c4b3
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Our brains are flies, bats, and worms that clumped together for mutual advantage. These parts of our brains are talking to each other all the time. Translating what they perceive, moment to moment, into the shared language of geometry. That's what a brain is. That's what it is to be conscious.
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Neal Stephenson |
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657c609
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Everything from the brim of this hat to the hem of her dress was too complex for Daniel's eye to comprehend--he was like an illiterate savage staring at the first page of an illuminated Bible--but
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Neal Stephenson |
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9eae0cd
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They were planning some sort of real estate development on the edge of the city--probably on that few acres of pasture out back of the Waterhouse residence. They would put up town-houses around the edges, make the center into a square, and along the square Sterling would put up shops. Rich people would move in, and the Waterhouses and their confederates would control a patch of land that would probably generate more rent than any thousand s..
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Neal Stephenson |
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007fa19
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It is easy to be eyes and ears. It is harder to be fists and feet.
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Neal Stephenson |
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61c356f
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Better to lurk, observe, and merge,
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Neal Stephenson |
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0d7c24f
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Water, blackstrap molasses, imported habanero peppers, salt, garlic, ginger, tomato puree, axle grease, real hickory smoke, snuff, butts of clove cigarettes, Guinness Stout fermentation dregs, uranium mill tailings, muffler cores, monosodium glutamate, nitrates, nitrites, nitrotes and nitrutes, nutrites, natrotes, powdered pork nose hairs, dynamite, activated charcoal, match-heads, used pipe cleaners, tar, nicotine, single-malt whiskey, smo..
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Neal Stephenson |
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8370764
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The Victorian system used Darwinian techniques to create killers adapted to their prey, which was elegant and effective but led to the creation of killers that were simply too bizarre to have been thought up by humans, just as humans designing a world never would have thought up the naked mole rat.
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Neal Stephenson |
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fd33c0c
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He looked behind him at the unadorned outer walls of the Septizodium. He stood in an alley, one of the many unmarked and unmemorable gaps between buildings in Rome. The door through which he had stumbled wasn't a real door, but a clever panel of stone. Any other time, he would never have noticed it against the mottled background of the surrounding stone, but it hung open now, and a column of black smoke spiraled up from it. There were other..
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Neal Stephenson |
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c5d12e4
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with the perky vigor of a man who had sat through one too many free webinars about the importance of networking.
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Neal Stephenson |
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190eeb5
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All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout,..
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Neal Stephenson |
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5289382
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Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad. The parents can't, and needn't, know every last little thing.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c0f3391
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If he had thought about this, it would have bothered him, because sigmaself > sigmaother has troubling implications--particularly if the values of these quantities w.r.t. the all-important sigmac are not fixed. If it weren't for this inequality, then Waterhouse could function as a totally self-contained and independent unit. But sigmaself > sigmaother implies that he is, in the long run, dependent on other human beings for his mental clarit..
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Neal Stephenson |
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a93d72d
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Gratitude and obedience. At The Frogs, the relationship between a knight and the people was clearly understood.
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Neal Stephenson |
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8f53b9d
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MEN WHO BELIEVE that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Bobby Shaftoe has learned most of his practical knowledge--how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip--from the latter type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can even see the desp..
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Neal Stephenson |
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044e017
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When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves. The
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Neal Stephenson |
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fd702e1
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The modern world's hell on haiku writers: "Electrical generator" is, what, eight syllables? You couldn't even fit that onto the second line!"
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Neal Stephenson |
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462821d
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This one was called Ark Madiba, after a Moiran biologist of the Fourth Millennium who had in turn been named in memory of a hero of Old Earth.
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Neal Stephenson |
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5b0da95
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I was wondering when I was going to end up like this.
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Neal Stephenson |
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91deaa8
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You may have envisioned half a dozen potential markets for your product, but as soon as you open your doors, one just explodes from the pack and becomes so instantly important that good business sense dictates that you abandon the others and concentrate all your efforts.
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Neal Stephenson |
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50195d4
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No wind stirred the scene, and the pluming smoke billowed and roiled at its own whim. The plain near the bridge had been flattened by the passage of so many horses and men that it was nothing more than a flat field between the high banks of the river and the verge of a narrow band of trees that demarked fallow fields to the west. There was no shelter on this plain--it was exposed ground that Dietrich had hoped to cover swiftly before his Mo..
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Neal Stephenson |
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eb50d6f
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One of the soldiers slapped Gansukh on the legs with the shaft of his spear, and the Mongol warrior rolled away from the blow, getting his legs under him. Even though Gansukh didn't understand a word of what was being said, the message was clear. Clenching his teeth, Gansukh wobbled to his feet, and as he stood upright, one of the other soldiers whacked him across the back, causing him to stumble and nearly fall.
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Neal Stephenson |
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462025a
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Whether or not this was a valid theory, the fact was that Aida swallowed it hook, line, and sinker and used it to inform her genetic strategy in the Great Game. And to the extent that the Four bothered to develop counterstrategies, they had to take it into account.
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Neal Stephenson |
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84f7896
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I hate e-mail," John says. Harvard Li stares him in the eye for a while. "What do you mean?" "The concept is good. The execution is poor. People don't observe any security precautions. A message arrives claiming to be from Harvard Li, they believe it's really from Harvard Li. But this message is just a pattern of magnetized spots on a spinning disk somewhere. Anyone could forge it."
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Neal Stephenson |
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2af29fa
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So now, when the people of Earth looked up into the night sky at the place where they ought to have seen the moon, they saw instead this slowly tumbling constellation of white boulders.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c96c2b2
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Microsoft is ten times smarter, a hundred times more aggressive, and bound by no particular rules. It gives Randy a little frisson just to imagine Harvard Li's situation: being chased across the planet by Microsoft's state-of-the-art hellhounds.
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Neal Stephenson |