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fe712c3
|
pauses for a moment to get the answer queued up in his output buffer.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f538093
|
This is why he hates business. He wants to tell everyone everything. He wants to make friends with people.
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Neal Stephenson |
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9df4f7f
|
With any job, there's some creative work that needs to be done--new technology to be developed or whatever. Everything else--ninety-nine percent of it--is making deals, raising capital, going to meetings, marketing and sales. We call that stuff making license plates.
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Neal Stephenson |
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047da8a
|
He is sure that this would elevate his stature beyond that of dull software boy.
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Neal Stephenson |
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4e1e153
|
If you are that much of a control freak, what sexual preferences does that translate into?" "I hope I'll never know. I suppose you would want to dominate a woman." "Wrong!" Avi said. "Sex is more complicated than that, Randy."
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Neal Stephenson |
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4b60a69
|
He perfectly fits the profile of a Hut 8 man, who need not know anything except pure math.
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Neal Stephenson |
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cbac7da
|
You heard of Mary Jane?" Root asks. Shaftoe--role model, leader of men--stifles the impulse to say, Heard of her? I've fucked her!"
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Neal Stephenson |
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b0f5ad6
|
Actually, they have not been talking so much as mentioning certain ideas and then leaving the other to work through the implications. This is a highly efficient way to communicate;
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Neal Stephenson |
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8cdcf1b
|
Eb closes his eyes, which is what he does during memory access,
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Neal Stephenson |
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101a26e
|
We know the economics of these startups," Eb says. "We begin with nothing but the idea. That's what the NDA is for--to protect your idea. We work on the idea together--put our brainpower into it--and get stock in return. The result of this work is software. The software is copyrightable, trademarkable, perhaps patentable. It is intellectual property. It is worth some money. We all own it in common, through our shares. Then we sell some more..
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Neal Stephenson |
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a593ec2
|
if any of them notice you and, for some reason, object to your little plan, whatever the fuck it is, then by all means kill them. And if that doesn't work, please, by all means, kill yourself, because you'll probably do a neater job of it than the Fascists will.
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Neal Stephenson |
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cc1ad86
|
Avi, with his genius for imagining the most horrific conceivable worst-case scenarios, demanded that they have their own machine, and that Randy and the others go through its kernel code one line at a time to verify that there were no security holes. In
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Neal Stephenson |
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252fbfe
|
mailing list, which is where all of the cool guys like John Cantrell hang out to discuss the very latest hashing algorithms and pseudo-random-number generators.
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Neal Stephenson |
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2d36a2e
|
mathematics professor in Russia slugging it out with another mathematics professor in India, kilobyte for kilobyte, over some stupefyingly arcane detail in prime number theory, while an eighteen-year-old, tube-fed math prodigy in Cambridge jumps in every few days with an even more stupefying explanation of why they are both wrong.
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Neal Stephenson |
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7e20fb8
|
He divides his time between thinking about sex and thinking about mathematics.
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Neal Stephenson |
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9a51c53
|
It's as though anyone who argues clearly can't be trusted--that's the opposite of what reasonable people ought to think. That attitude is common even among faculty here, and I'm just at a loss to understand. I can't talk like a mongoloid pig-sticker on a three-day drunk just so I'll sound like one of the boys. God knows I can't support any position, only the right position. If it's not right, the words won't make it so. That's the value of ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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16b1093
|
They were assembling a rocket there. It was a big rocket. It all more or less made sense. There was no cargo too big to be barged up the Columbia River and then trucked the last few miles to Moses Lake. There was no airplane that couldn't be accommodated by that runway. There was no object that the aerospace machine shops of the Seattle area couldn't build. And from this latitude, the same as Baikonur, a well-worn and understood flight ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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59ef9a3
|
But at last I came to understand that I was making it too complicated. For you, this is no mingling at all; for you the Book of Revelation, the ramblings of Hermes Trismegistus, and Principia Mathematica are all signatures torn from the same immense Book.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d2adc50
|
Da5id Meier, supreme hacker overlord, founding father of the Metaverse protocol, creator and proprietor of the world-famous Black Sun, has just suffered a system crash. He's been thrown out of his own bar by his own daemons.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d20ac3f
|
The mysterious Enoch Root meets 8-year-old Benjamin Franklin, Boston, 1713: "Do I look like a schoolmaster to you?" "No, but you talk like one." "You know something of schoolmasters, do you?" "Yes, sir," the boy says, faltering a bit as he sees the jaws of the trap swinging toward his leg. "Yet here it is the middle of Monday--" "The place was empty 'cause of the Hanging. I didn't want to stay and--" "And what?" "Get more ahead of th..
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colonial-america
educataion
gifted
intelligence
massachusetts-bay-colony
school
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Neal Stephenson |
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f3abc52
|
Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. 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.
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Neal Stephenson |
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bae46de
|
The old stars-and-moons act was a good way to farm the unduly trusting. But the need to raise money in the first place seemed to call into question one's own ability to turn lead into gold. ("Enoch in Boston, 1713")"
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alchemy
charlatans
wizards
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Neal Stephenson |
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ff37d3c
|
If you think of the Greek gods as real supernatural beings who lived on Mount Olympus, no. But if you think of them as being in the same class of entities as the Root Rep, which is to say, patterns of neurological activity that the mind uses to represent things that it sees, or thinks it sees, in the outside world, then yes. Suddenly, Greek gods can be just as interesting and relevant as real people. Why? Because, in the same way as you mig..
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Neal Stephenson |
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72389fa
|
The uniform has a hundred pockets, big flat pockets for deliveries and eensy narrow pockets for gear, pockets sewn into sleeves, thighs, shins. The equipment stuck into these multifarious pockets tends to be small, tricky, lightweight: pens, markers, penlights, penknives, lock picks, bar-code scanners, flares, screwdrivers, Liquid Knuckles, bundy stunners, and lightsticks. A calculator is stuck upside-down to her right thigh, doubling as a ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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a336956
|
This is not a Nora Roberts novel.
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Neal Stephenson |
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2de27d9
|
Empty boxes, old newspapers, a milk jug, and a wine bottle." "You're identifying the contents of the garbage bag?" "No dead cats. Or live ones." "Maybe it's a Schrodinger's Hefty bag." I"
|
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Neal Stephenson |
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b561fd0
|
some manner of cause-and-effect relationship existed between the rise of scientific knowledge and the decline of magic.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a5ea647
|
The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very important. Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that counted: balky, unreliable, underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was responsive. Every pebble on the road was felt in the bones, every nuance in the pavement transmitted instantly to the driver's hands. He could listen to the engine and tell what was wrong with it. The steering responded immediately to command..
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Neal Stephenson |
|
56443e2
|
Smart, rabidly paranoid people are the backbone of cryptology,
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Neal Stephenson |
|
19832ab
|
And he'd realized computers could be a tool to unite society.
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Neal Stephenson |
|
1e21ff4
|
the basic premise of Eutropianism is that technology has made us post-human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net, and headed towards omnipotence. Now, the first people to talk that way were libertarians.
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Neal Stephenson |
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bf26b46
|
He gazes up at the ceiling of the chapel through half-closed eyes and thanks God for having sent him what is obviously a German spy and an angel of mercy rolled into one adorable package.
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Neal Stephenson |
|
a231b85
|
Why couldn't I fill my hard drive with random bytes, so that individual files would not be discernible? Their very existence would be hidden in the noise, like a striped tiger in tall grass. And we could continually stream random noise back and forth to each other.
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Neal Stephenson |
|
445b3a9
|
Van Eck phreaking,
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Neal Stephenson |
|
93a974f
|
He is disappointed because he has solved the problem, and has gone back to the baseline state of boredom and low-level irritation that always comes over him when he's not doing something that inherently needs to be done, like picking a lock or breaking a code.
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Neal Stephenson |
|
0e818e3
|
us--I looked at that beautiful snow-capped mountain and named it Eliza. Because it was warm, fertile, and beautiful below, while being a bit frosty and inaccessible at the top--yet possessing a volcanick profile foretelling explosions--
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Neal Stephenson |
|
9926d58
|
But our relationship to these infinite pasts and futures isn't random--plausibility throws its weight around, per some freaky quantum mechanics stuff that Dr. Oda calls Feynman Diagram History Pachinko.
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Neal Stephenson |
|
8c09d27
|
Virgil returned to the Operator's Station and entered a single command. Its effect was to draw together the reins of the eighteen sham programs, to lift out, as it were, all those long machine code sections and interleave them into one huge powerful program that seemed to coalesce out of nowhere, having already penetrated the Worm's locks and defenses. This monster program, then, had calmly proceeded to wipe out all administrative memory an..
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Neal Stephenson |
|
6c7caf9
|
Men sailed jachts across the sea and gave them to her, just to get her attention. And so perhaps her fires had been banked by choice; she'd had the sound judgment to know when to draw back, and let her investments and her children grow, and her plans come to fruition. Daniel
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Neal Stephenson |
|
4ae6455
|
One of my professors has interesting things to say about the similarity between the way organ pipes are controlled by keys and stops, and the way random-access memory bits are read by computers.
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Neal Stephenson |
|
46f3904
|
The Pudgelys and the Pinkhearts and the Roundasses are all staring at her, slackjawed. She has just enough residual energy to swing into their driveway. Her momentum carries her to the top. She stops next to Mr. Pudgely's Acura and Mrs. Pudgely's bimbo box and steps off her plank. The spokes, noting her departure, even themselves out, plant themselves on the top of the driveway, refuse to roll backward. A
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|
Neal Stephenson |
|
8faaa17
|
You've probably heard the expression that the Industry feeds off of biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean.
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|
Neal Stephenson |
|
b546da2
|
The stars' positions were randomly generated, a fact that drove Pluto crazy.
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Neal Stephenson |
|
6bddeb1
|
Indeed, cousine, I should rather you were a sincere Satanist than a pretend one; for the former recognizes God's majesty, and may be reformed, while the latter is an atheist, and doomed to the Lake of Fire.
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Neal Stephenson |