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b71ce89
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The Barkers are gratuitously radical, however--for example, they believe that Government and Church should have naught to do with each other, and that all slaves in the world should be set free.
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Neal Stephenson |
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9c25e7a
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Until that time, we have more than enough people to create healthy non-inbred children just by the usual process of fucking each other.
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Neal Stephenson |
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980de71
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they didn't even try to arrest her in a gentlemanly way.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d6954aa
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Your mistake," Ng says, "is that you think that all mechanically assisted organisms -- like me -- are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we were before."
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Neal Stephenson |
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5673de4
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Y.T. knows he's a computer guy because he has long hair in a ponytail and he's wearing jeans and he seems gentle.
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Neal Stephenson |
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dd3b33d
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signaled
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Neal Stephenson |
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73f18bd
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but not subjecting him to the tiresome demands of polite social interaction.
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Neal Stephenson |
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968a5e1
|
He seemed not to know that he was quite handsome.
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Neal Stephenson |
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763533a
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Tekla wanted to slap her so much that her hand actually twitched.
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Neal Stephenson |
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48b26f1
|
Medical research conducted during the Iraq War has confirmed that immediate administration of morphine following a traumatic event can prevent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
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Neal Stephenson |
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701952a
|
Since the military part of town could not tolerate disarray and the commercial part found it unprofitable, all of the chaos had been pushed into the old town, which had become the kingdom of broken plans and improvisations
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Neal Stephenson |
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a5684c6
|
Hackworth took a bite of his sandwich, correctly anticipating that the meat would be gristly and that he would have plenty of time to think about his situation while his molars subdued it. He did have plenty of time, as it turned out; but as frequently happened to him in these situations, he could not bring his mind to bear on the subject at hand. All he could think about was the taste of the sauce. If the manifest of ingredients on the bot..
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nanotechnology
science-fiction
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Neal Stephenson |
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7ca3068
|
It was possible to look at actual smartphones and tablets and laptops that had been manufactured on Old Earth. They did not work anymore, but their technical capabilities were described on little placards. And they were impressive compared to what Kath Two and other modern people carried around in their pockets. This ran contrary to most people's intuition, since in other areas the achievements of the modern world - the habitat ring, the Ey..
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Neal Stephenson |
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7abcb83
|
So, let me guess," she says, "you are the guy doing the software." "Yeah," he admits, a little defensive, "but the software is the only interesting part of this whole project. All the rest is making license plates." That wakes her up a little. "Making license plates?" "It's an expression my that my business partner and I use," Randy says. "With any job, there's some creative work that needs to be done-new technology to be developed or whate..
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Neal Stephenson |
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b43b89f
|
The world of physical objects seemed to have been made solely for the purpose of giving the men around Grandma something to do with their hands; and not, mind you, for any practical reason, but purely so that Grandma could twiddle those men's emotional knobs by reacting to how well or poorly they did it.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d0b214b
|
Near Amy, Randy can see another silt-covered boulder near the surface, maybe six feet away. He gathers himself and leaps towards it. But it topples under the impact of his foot and sends him splashing full-length into the streambed. When he sits up and gets a look at it, the boulder turns out to be a squat cylindrical object about as big around as a dinner plate and several inches thick. 'Randy, what you're looking at is a Nip anti-tank min..
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Neal Stephenson |
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2c59708
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No intelligent person in Blue believes that, of course.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f3bb64a
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The Walmart was like a starship that had landed in the soybean fields.
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Neal Stephenson |
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090ba45
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Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn't afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology. You simply couldn't go to a gun range without being cornered by a man who..
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Neal Stephenson |
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1902f2e
|
On certain hilltops grew spruce forests, as fine and dense and soft-looking as the pelts of Arctic mammals. When the wind gusted through these, a sound issued from them that was like icy water hurrying over sharp stones. But most of the land was covered with heather, gone scab-colored for the winter. There the wind was silent, except for the raucous buller that it made as it banged around in the porches of Daniel's ears like a drunk burglar..
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Neal Stephenson |
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5b90b60
|
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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c7747b8
|
hydrological warfare.
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Neal Stephenson |
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6232d13
|
Her coverall darkens, the colors shimmer through the electropigment like an oil slick, and then it's black.
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Neal Stephenson |
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ec6a00b
|
Wiener dog underwent explosive decompression, scared a baby.
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Neal Stephenson |
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e0de56b
|
What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective re..
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Neal Stephenson |
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3f3eac1
|
Desktops encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on a piece of paper that only you get to see?
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Neal Stephenson |
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22ab52e
|
The problem of distributing bathroom tissue to workers presents inherent challenges for any office management system due to the inherent unpredictability of usage--not every facility usage transaction necessitates the use of bathroom tissue, and when it is used, the amount needed (number of squares) may vary quite widely from person to person and, for a given person, from one transaction to the next. This does not even take into account the..
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Neal Stephenson |
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01114d6
|
Private Hott is with God now--or wherever people go after they die," says Enoch "You can call me Brother" Root. "What kind of an attitude is that!? Course he's with God. Jesus Christ! 'Wherever they go when they die.' What kind of a chaplain are you?"
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Neal Stephenson |
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4bbc73b
|
many of you who have excess U.S. currency to get rid of have been trying to kill two birds with one stone by using old billions as bathroom tissue. While creative, this approach has two drawbacks: 1) It clogs the plumbing, and 2) It constitutes defacement of U.S. currency, which is a federal crime. DON'T DO IT.
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Neal Stephenson |
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79cad23
|
Paris to Jack and most others, then, was a network of deep trenches with vertical walls, and a few drafty battlements atop those walls--otherwise, the world's largest collection of closed and locked doors.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f213920
|
chanson de geste
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Neal Stephenson |
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ee84e9f
|
What's it like working for Mr. Freeze?" "I was going to say the Penguin," Dinah said, "but people in Seattle don't carry umbrellas."
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Neal Stephenson |
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0b77809
|
From long experience in places like Afghanistan and Chechnya, Sokolov recognized, in the black jihadist's movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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cebc1d9
|
Then he walked home and died.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a4439a9
|
Coals gleamed in the hearth and the air was fragrant with pine branches, frankincense, and lapsang souchong tea. It was New Year's Day.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f603e2f
|
The correct way to think about intelligence, in this case, is as a human quality shared by just about everyone, at least until it gets beaten out of us. Not a special gift that is bestowed on only a few. And secondly that it is a functional trait that most people find some way of using in their careers, or whatever it is that they spend their days doing. Sometimes, this trait is put to use doing theoretical physics, but much more often, it'..
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Neal Stephenson |
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245c3f7
|
If Tombstone is shut down and grabbed by the cops before Randy can erase those traces, they will know he has logged on at the very moment that Tombstone was confiscated, and will put him in prison for tampering with evidence. He very much wishes that Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe could somehow be made aware of what a ballsy thing he is doing here. But then Doug has probably done all kinds of ballsy things of which Randy will never be aware, and..
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Neal Stephenson |
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2dfdfb3
|
The only human in evidence was a white-haired Constable whose belly had created a visible divergence between his two rows of brass buttons. He was bent over using a trowel to extract a steaming turd from the emerald grass. Circumstances suggested that it had come from one of two corgis who were even now slamming their preposterous bodies into each other not far away, trying to roll each other over, which runs contrary to the laws of mechani..
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Neal Stephenson |
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0261d54
|
If the math works, why then you should be sure of yourself. That's the whole point of math.
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Neal Stephenson |
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286fa9c
|
given all the other changes he's gone through, why the hell shouldn't he become a cigarette smoker while he's at it? Maybe next week he'll be shooting heroin. For something disgusting and lethal, cigarettes are amazingly enjoyable.
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Neal Stephenson |
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b004e24
|
As to Constantinople. That jewel in the crown of the Byzantine Empire. That continent-straddling stronghold of the Eastern Orthodox Church. That famously inviolable walled city ruled by generations of interbred usurping nut-jobs a pantheon of families so tortuously intertwined as to be the basis of our modern adjective byzantine.
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Neal Stephenson |
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96af99f
|
To paraphrase Tolstoy, all rich places were alike, but each poor place was poor in its own way.
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Neal Stephenson |
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9c5a949
|
All philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the only world -- hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world." "Well, as a computer geek, I have to believe in the binary universe." The Librarian raises his eyebrows. "How does that follow?" "Sorry. It's a joke. A bad pun. See, computers use binary code to represent inf..
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Neal Stephenson |
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eb1b26a
|
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 languages.
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Neal Stephenson |