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Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them librarians.

Charles Stross

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Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
Pharmacist
Science Fiction Writer
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Charlie Stross
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More quotes by Charles Stross

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I suspect losing paper maps but gaining GPS and online maps is a similar step function: maps still exist, but they're vastly more useful, not to say permanently up to date, in their new form. Again, I won't be shedding any tears, but I'll keep a paper road atlas in the back of my car for another few years, I think, Just In Case.
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Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.
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Humans are just barely intelligent tool users Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.
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The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.
Charles Stross
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[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]
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--but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.
Charles Stross
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Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)
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Any replacement to the current copyright position (life plus 70 years) needs to have an answer lined up for this, and similar, messy edge cases.
Charles Stross
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Back in the pre-internet age there were pirate publishers, especially in the third world, who would print physical copies of books, sell them, and never inform the author/their agent/their publisher just trousering the money. I think we can agree that this was piracy?
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Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.
Charles Stross
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I write almost entlirely on Macs, because: Windows gives me hives.
Charles Stross
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Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.
Charles Stross
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I drink tea pretty much continuously at a rate of around 1 imperial pint/hour, which sort of enforces screen/keyboard breaks.
Charles Stross
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Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism at worst, it's being unoriginal.
Charles Stross
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I have not watched the TV show. I do not generally watch TV sci-fi drama shows. They make me itch.
Charles Stross
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I have a CS degree and a history that includes working as a software developer and being a computer magazine columnist back during the 1990s. I guess I simply paid attention to the social effects of the IT revolution as I lived through it.
Charles Stross
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The one thing that does happen, every time, though, is that I never get to write a book until I've already been thinking about it for a period of months to years.
Charles Stross
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Personal pride is probably a bad guide to merit.
Charles Stross
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I reckon I can count on 30 more writing years, averaging a book a year (I can't keep up the 2-2.5 a year I used to do these days). And these days I've gotten round to wondering, for each new idea, do I want to be remembered for this? before I get to the point of spending a year on it.
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I'm an atheist .I was raised in British reform Judaism, which is not like American reform Judaism, much less any other strain of organised religion. So: no cults here.
Charles Stross