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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f2215af | Es que no saben que el unico ordenador inhackeable es el que tiene instalado un sistema operativo seguro y esta encerrado en una caja fuerte de acero enterrada bajo una tonelada de hormigon en el fondo de una mina de carbon protegida por los SAS y un par de divisiones armadas, y ademas esta apagado? | Charles Stross | ||
| 23f3ba2 | We still have cultural attaches?" "We still have pulse-dialing electromechanical Strowger telephone exchanges in the basement"--Lockhart startles me by suddenly rattling off the correct but decades-obsolete terminology--"just in case we experience a need for such equipment. And you are now discovering just why we also have cultural attaches in the embassy in DC." "Ri-ight." I glance at the first boarding pass. "Hey," | Charles Stross | ||
| 7490956 | Los idiotas emiten bogones que hacen que las maquinas se estropeen en su presencia. Los administradores de sistema absorben los bogones, lo que permite que las maquinas vuelvan a funcionar. | Charles Stross | ||
| cdbb91a | Then the red light comes on above the camera, and I'm live on a Monday evening special crisis edition of Newsnight. | Charles Stross | ||
| cda2783 | Our worshipers have met this British agent before. Do not attempt to convert him; bring him alive before Us. He will be of great service in the end times ahead.*** Schiller | Charles Stross | ||
| 183d807 | the defense establishment of the United States of America is so complicated, not to say baroque, that many different agencies can accomplish any given task. Want to invade a small Caribbean island? Who you gonna call: the Army or the Navy's Army, which is to say, the Marine Corps? Want to call in an air strike? You could ask the Air Force ... but the US Navy has lots and lots of fighter jets and tends to get annoyed if they're left out. And.. | Charles Stross | ||
| b5a1bab | There are one and a half billion Muslims on this Earth. A billion and a half Chinese communists, a billion Indian Hindu elephant-worshippers. One point two billion Catholics, misled by the Vatican. And I'm afraid they're all going to go to hell if we don't manage to save them in time. This is a tragedy; the great, besetting tragedy of our age is that at least ninety-five percent of currently living humanity is going to burn in hell. To make.. | Charles Stross | ||
| 429bc37 | As long as you expect someone or something else to take responsibility for you, you're a child. | Charles Stross | ||
| a0f20a6 | now my blood ran cold. Because if there's one thing worse than an IT manager who's feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it's an IT manager who's getting creative. | Charles Stross | ||
| fcf9dcb | But otherwise it's darkness, darkness, as far as the eye can see. | Charles Stross | ||
| ae1b0eb | and go looking for a potted plant that appears hardy enough to survive being irrigated with the stuff. | Charles Stross | ||
| 9561afe | But what are we going to do with a load of guns?" asks Pete. "I don't know, Brains, what are we going to do with a half-track full of guns?" Pinky asks. Brains chuckles. "Same thing we do every night, Pinky--" "Fort up and wait for reinforcements," Pinky says flatly." | Charles Stross | ||
| 38380f4 | There are all sorts of other things, investigations into silent movies and TV serials (I pulled the file on "Quatermass" for shits and giggles--strictly speaking not germane to the project in hand, but I'd hit burn-out by that point and badly needed some relief reading that wasn't the eleventh Harry Dresden novel)." | Charles Stross | ||
| 7a3c0a3 | Martian invasion: sure, the Army understands what it needs to do, if not necessarily how to go about it. Religious apocalypses involving the Four Horsemen: pass the holy water and bend over, here it comes again. But invasion by the armies of Middle Earth--who ordered that? | Charles Stross | ||
| ea221e3 | It's lovely, like the moment of stunned disbelief immediately after you finally snap and tell the world's most annoying office-mate to shut the fuck up--the moment of silence when they have no comeback and you finally had the last word. | Charles Stross | ||
| d81c80b | If they're smart enough to be useful they get ideas about making themselves indispensable--ideas about getting above their station, as you Brits would put it. If they're too dumb to be useful they're a drain on your management time. All corporations are an economy of attention, from the top down. | Charles Stross | ||
| 544efca | By dawn on Sunday he had been awake for over thirty hours, tracking a crisis of ever-expanding but indeterminate scope. A large body of operational research demonstrates that human beings suffer disproportionately from fatigue-induced errors of judgment after twelve hours of concentration at work; while Gerald Lockhart had long experience of pushing himself under crisis conditions, he was about to make a fatal mistake. | Charles Stross | ||
| 1a757d3 | Are you a psychiatrist?" "I don't think so." He shuffles forward, heading towards a side bay that, as I approach it, turns out to be a day room of some sort. "Then I'm not Napoleon Bonaparte!" | Charles Stross | ||
| 5261c28 | I'm going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes. | Charles Stross | ||
| 53047ff | For my sins and because I discovered a wunch of bankers suffering from the syndrome to which we've assigned the keyword OPERA CAPE, I have been seconded to the shiny new exploration phase of DRESDEN RICE, and if you think that code name sounds like it has something to do with the V-word, have a cigar. | Charles Stross | ||
| 4c8edb1 | After a few seconds to savor his self-derailment, Derek gets back on course. | Charles Stross | ||
| 5e78d10 | One moment you're cruising along effortlessly at thirty thousand feet while the cabin crew slosh the whisky around in business class, the next you're in a screaming death-spiral with flames pouring from the hole where the starboard engine was meant to be before some toe-cheese puked a missile up its exhaust. It takes a little time to switch mode from business-as-usual to six-alarms-emergency if you're not primed to expect it, | Charles Stross | ||
| 9429bce | And he's maneuvered Old George into a position where the only way to safety lies through the New Annex. Things are about to get very messy indeed, for blood-on-the-walls values of messy. | Charles Stross | ||
| 783a083 | Give me a bottle of Mountain Dew, an MP3 player hammering out something by VNV Nation, and a crate of Pringles: that's like being at home. Give me root access on a hostile necromancer's server farm, and I am at home. | Charles Stross | ||
| 82ef162 | Imagine, Sir David, the end of all you ever wanted brought about because an idiot banker did not prioritize highly enough a simple request from their master . . . | Charles Stross | ||
| 97796b6 | That's all right, pay no attention to me, just make yourself at home," I tell the self-propelled whoopee cushion, then audit the itemized receipt with a sinking heart. Judging from the bottom line, cats fall somewhere between a new Porsche and a used Lamborghini in running costs, and I've got a nasty suspicion that I'm not going to be able to expense this claim. I mean, I might be able to concoct an experimental protocol that involves hosti.. | Charles Stross | ||
| 2e1489a | Or was it running the world's weirdest Turing-complete variant Dungeons & Dragons campaign using a rule set isomorphic with first-order transdimensional summoning algebra-- | Charles Stross | ||
| 77b4073 | you've got to learn to think like a state if you work in the Civil Service. Organizations are not human beings and they don't obey the same priorities. They're hives. | Charles Stross | ||
| 1dd63bd | the strongest manacles are born in the blood. | Charles Stross | ||
| b270817 | concentrate on my deep breathing and the whole mindfulness shtick and on trying not to casually squeeze the contents of a taxiing aluminum tube of intercontinental goodness into my imaginary mouth--it's a Boeing 777 or Airbus A330 and it's nearly two miles away, a distantly rational part of me realizes-- | Charles Stross | ||
| 2f39638 | reach into my travel bag and pull out my hacked Palm computer, | Charles Stross | ||
| 31ff383 | I know just how devoted to this organisation you are. Draftees back in my day used to understand what they'd got themselves into, but you young ones . . ." 'Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country has ever done for you?' I raise an eyebrow at him. He" | Charles Stross | ||
| 5ee5861 | Very good, Mr. Howard. They were the ones who didn't try to second-guess their commanding officer. Can I suggest that in future you take a leaf from their book and refrain from poking your nose into things you have been told do not concern you? Or at least learn not to be so predictable about it." "Ah--" "Go away before I mock you," he says, sounding distantly amused. I" | Charles Stross | ||
| 1484039 | It's insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window. But sanity | Charles Stross | ||
| e56bbbb | It's almost as if Congress has no idea that a giant occult power struggle for control of the US government is in progress ... or perhaps it's over already, and a ruthless media clamp-down by tongue-eating mind control parasites is the only thing keeping the world from learning about the takeover of DC by gibbering alien nightmares. I | Charles Stross | ||
| 4fb981e | The food's very good," I offer defensively. "It's not that"--she gazes past my shoulder--"it's the culture. It's very Californian. I wasn't expecting the rot to have reached London yet." "We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of colour schemes for your safety and comfort!" "Something like that." A waitron" | Charles Stross | ||
| b3d6bb0 | Some invasions barely warrant the name. | Charles Stross | ||
| 45ab46b | The vampire has just realized she's in a meeting populated exclusively by spooks and people who go bump in the night. | Charles Stross | ||
| 872b973 | Crawling eldritch horrors don't get planning permission unless they're Trump's hairpiece.) | Charles Stross | ||
| 2a94e62 | Emma has switched from sanguine to sanguinary in a matter of seconds, | Charles Stross | ||
| a0d11f4 | the geas in question draws its power from the sum over time of the entire loyal British population's faith in the Crown since that charter was established over four centuries ago. Which adds up to something like ninety million person-centuries-worth of belief. Hence the, shall we | Charles Stross | ||
| 21ae9c3 | If you're a humble believer set on doing your deity's will, then what are you doing spending the take on Lamborghinis and single malt? | Charles Stross | ||
| d1825c7 | All right." Panin sips at his wine. "Excuse me, but--there is a personal connection?" "What?" "You appear unduly upset ..." "Yes." She looks at her hands. "The missing officer is my husband." Panin puts his glass down and leans back, very slowly, with the extreme self-control of a man who has just realized he is sharing a table with a large, ticking bomb. "Is there anything I can do to help?" "Yes." | Charles Stross | ||
| d020135 | See, it's the sudden cognitive whiplash that does it. One moment you're cruising along effortlessly at thirty thousand feet while the cabin crew slosh the whisky around in business class, the next you're in a screaming death-spiral with flames pouring from the hole where the starboard engine was meant to be before some toe-cheese puked a missile up its exhaust. It takes a little time to switch mode from business-as-usual to six-alarms-emerg.. | Charles Stross |