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c81044d
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I can't predict the future," I said, "but based on what little I know so far, I'm afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing." "Great!" "Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial." That quieted her down a little bit. But after a while, she said: "Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?" "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor." "Okay, I'll go home and see if I can..
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Neal Stephenson |
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f9c9f07
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FORERUNNER (deprecated synonyms: SUICIDE BOMBER, DEAD MAN RUNNING, SCHNEIDER) One who is Sent to a DTAP in which DODO has no Known Compliant Witch, safe house, or other contacts/infrastructure whatsoever. Considered the most elite and difficult-to-recruit subclass of DOer, Forerunners must possess all the skills of a STRIDER (see below) combined with those of a FIGHTER, LOVER, or CLOSER.
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Neal Stephenson |
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8bbe25f
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FIGHTER (deprecated synonyms: CONAN, WARRIOR) One who specializes in missions where, to put it politely, martial attributes are of the essence. Since every DTAP has a unique environment surrounding weapons, fighting styles, and martial culture, competence in fighting is only a part of the skill set required to be a successful Fighter. It is equally important to know how and when to fight.
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Neal Stephenson |
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65eed8e
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The place was famous for always having 'six comely maidens' working there," I said, with air quotes, "'serving the customers ale and aught.'" "What's aught?" asked Tristan. "Whatever you want it to be," I said."
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Neal Stephenson |
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6ca0973
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it was connected, by an underground tunnel and secret passages on every floor, directly to the brewery itself--thus allowing johns who needed to remain anonymous a way to escape if the brothel were raided by the constables.
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Neal Stephenson |
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ead09ad
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Versailles has only existed for seven years. It does not have any ancient traditions. It was made by Colbert, the commoner. It is full of nobles, true; but you fool yourself if you believe that they feel comfortable there -- feel as if they belong. No, it is you, mademoiselle, who are the perfect courtier of Versailles, you whom the others shall envy, once you go there and establish yourself. My father feels himself slipping down, sees his ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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ed0b6f3
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Olivia imagined a D-day-style invasion of the island, gardeners with saws and shovels parachuting out of the sky and storming the beaches--and were being liberated from the thorny or flowery embrace of climbing vines, deratted, reroofed, fixed up, and condoized. Her apartment
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Neal Stephenson |
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6984558
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But if you use shortwave, then you can bounce the information off the ionosphere. This works a good deal better when the sun is not in the sky, sluicing the atmosphere with wideband noise. So radio telegraphers, and the people who eavesdrop on them (what the Brits call the Y Service) are, alike, nocturnal beings.
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Neal Stephenson |
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9996da2
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What else can you tell us about this batna, Surendranath?" "I learnt it from English traders in Surat," said the befuddled Surendranath, "It stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement."
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Neal Stephenson |
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cba2815
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But even if they did have that kind of money rattling around in their pockets, actually spending it would offend their native frugality.
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Neal Stephenson |
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3c96fd4
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I don't think that teenagers are the way they are because of their age. It's because they have nothing to lose. They simultaneously have a lot of time on their hands and yet are very impatient to get on with their lives.
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youth
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Neal Stephenson |
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ee959bf
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As the saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Reader,
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Neal Stephenson |
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35b3430
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Most men would rather be shot through with a broad-headed arrow than be described by you." Eliza could not help laughing."
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Neal Stephenson |
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e424438
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That is a very odd thing to see on the Thames," Daniel remarked. "What flag does she fly?" For van Hoek had unlimbered his prospective-glass. "The double eagle. She is a war-galley of the Russian Navy," van Hoek said. Then, after a moment's pause, he laughed at the absurdity of such a thing."
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Neal Stephenson |
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a569146
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He's rich," Jack muttered to Eliza, "or connected with rich persons." "Yes--the clothes, the coins ..." "All fakeable." "How do you know him to be rich, then?" "In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games." (Jack Shaftoe and Eliza)"
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seventeenth-century
wealthy-men
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Neal Stephenson |
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a2ecd37
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could jab my thumb with it and draw blood. The brown smear across the top of this page can be tested in any twenty-first-century DNA lab. Compare
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Neal Stephenson |
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7f43d5e
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THE RUSSIAN INVASION BEGAN A WEEK LATER, WITH A SPATE OF flights producing what NASA described as "mixed results" and Roskosmos termed "an acceptable fatality rate."
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Neal Stephenson |
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9670df1
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I have let you live, but for one purpose only: so that you can make your way back to Paris and tell them the following: that the deed you are about to witness was done for a woman, whose name I will not say, for she knows who she is; and that it was done by 'Half-Cocked' Jack Shaftoe, L'Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak: Quicksilver!
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Neal Stephenson |
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7fc48bf
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in the informal atmosphere of the Physics Department, appointments were viewed with a certain Heisenbergian skepticism, as though being in the right place at the right time would involve breaking a natural law and was therefore impossible to begin with.
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Neal Stephenson |
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411375d
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All the potential emperors are assholes, and they're all related to each other, it hardly matters which one wins. So
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Neal Stephenson |
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158d8ca
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I heard an older, softer male voice say. I knew that voice had a name attached to it--Yoda? No, Yoda was from Star Wars. Star Wars was on my mind because of R2-D2.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a360e4b
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Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel.
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Neal Stephenson |
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efa5a77
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if Newton is the finger, Leibniz is the stone, and they press against each other with equal and opposite force, a little bit harder every day. RAVENSCAR:
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Neal Stephenson |
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b7c0131
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Grammar is like the walls and bumpers of a pinball machine. Rhetoric is like the flippers of a pinball machine. You control the flippers. The rest of the machine--grammar--controls everything else. If you use the flippers well, you make points. If you fail to image your concepts viably, your ball drops into the black hole of nothingness. If you try to cheat, the machine tilts and you lose--that's like people not understanding your interacti..
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Neal Stephenson |
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6ece15e
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The automatic waffle machine emitted a piercing electronic beep, signaling it wanted to be turned over. Seamus reached out and flipped it. The Four were standing at the complimentary breakfast bar of their hotel in Coeur d'Alene. None of the others had ever seen an automatic self-serve waffle machine before, and so Seamus was giving them an impromptu demo of the best that America had to offer. "I'm"
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Neal Stephenson |
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b003ec7
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The metavirus is everywhere. Anywhere life exists, the metavirus is there, too, propagating through it. Originally, it was spread around on comets. That's probably how life first came to the Earth, and that's probably how the metavirus came here also. But comets are slow, whereas radio waves are fast. In binary form, a virus can bounce around the universe at the speed of light. It infects a civilized planet, gets into its computers, reprodu..
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Neal Stephenson |
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c5e574b
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Anyway, my point is that guys like Flec have a weakness, almost a kind of addiction, for the mystical, as opposed to poetic, way of using their minds. And there's an optimistic side of me that says such a person could break that addiction, be retrained to think like a poet, and accept the fluxional nature of symbols and meaning.
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Neal Stephenson |
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f99fd3f
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When it gets down to it--talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here--once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel--once the Invisible Hand has taken all..
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Neal Stephenson |
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9ceaa11
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He was a sniper scout, and it was in his nature to do crazy shit like this; but it was also part of his training to scan the terrain carefully before venturing in.
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Neal Stephenson |
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5355296
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Boredom is a mask that frustration wears.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a8494ef
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The mind couldn't think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality [...]
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Neal Stephenson |
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c75830d
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Now, there was a time when we believed that what a human mind could accomplish was determined by genetic factors. Piffle, of course, but it looked convincing for many years, because distinctions between tribes were so evident. Now we understand that it's all cultural. That, after all, is what a culture is--a group of people who share in common certain acquired traits.
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Neal Stephenson |
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aff390e
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FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, LISP, Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH. You talk to the computer in one of these languages, and a piece of software called a compiler converts it into machine language.
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Neal Stephenson |
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fd795ba
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Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn't get any work done
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Neal Stephenson |
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78d99c9
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So she spends until about eleven A.M. reading, re-reading, and understanding the new changes in the Project. There are many of these, because this is a Monday morning and Marietta and her higher-ups spent the whole weekend closeted on the top floor, having a
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Neal Stephenson |
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0ab7ba7
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flame within them gets dim with the passage of time. So, if you have the fire, run, since you never know when it may be doused, leaving you stranded in darkness. --John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Step
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Neal Stephenson |
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92ea29e
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The rest is drowned out by sound breaking in through his earphones, coming in from Reality:
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Neal Stephenson |
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f93cd24
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When he came to his senses, he was aware that a large number of telephones were singing their little electronic songs. Including his. The birth cry of a new age. IVY
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Neal Stephenson |
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bf71426
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You're a hacker. That means you have deep structures to worry about, too." "Deep structures?" "Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?" "Sure." "You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them -- the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells -- your bioware selfmodifies -- the software becomes part of the hardwar..
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Neal Stephenson |
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ae1f36b
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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. His autobiographical piece "Growing Up Black and White," published in the Seattle Weekly, was awarded Social Issues Reporting Article of the Year by the Society of Professional Journalists. He lives in..
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Neal Stephenson |
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3b99b60
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added. Apparently a mere two-cab caravan was not enough to trigger Ariane's anxieties, and so the one carrying
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Neal Stephenson |
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20ec894
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Right, by tomorrow morning everyone will have congregated in Le Havre and you can all pile in the car and come back out here together," said Tristan in a rapid monotone, as if needing to rationalize being along with me overnight as nothing more than a matter of logistics. DEAR READER: It was not a matter of logistics."
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Neal Stephenson |
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8e50b8a
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I don't think a Drop Top can can reach an orbit this high, can it?" Dinah asked. "Sean's coming alone. It's some kind of special one-passenger model -- the extra mass is being used for propellant." "And then what? He just goes to an airlock and knocks on the door?" "Basically, yes," Larz said. "What will they do? Tell him to go away?"
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Neal Stephenson |
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c1a7ef3
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I remember asking him, 'Why did you print that stuff out, why not use thumb drives like everyone else,' and he said, 'Owning your own space company brings some perks,' " Dinah said. She found them after a few minutes' rummaging in storage bins: half a dozen three-ring binder, volumes 1 through 6 of the Arjuna Expeditions Employee Manual. The entire stack was a foot thick. Doob whistled. "Given the cost per pound of launching stuff into ..
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Neal Stephenson |