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This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

Neal Stephenson

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Neal Stephenson
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 31
Author
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Camp Annapolis Junction
Neal Town Stephenson
Stephen Bury
Made
Existed
Things
Faculty
People
Student
Tenured
Burden
Grad
Research
Tiresome
Members
Relieve
Students
Educating
Learn
Burdens

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I think visual literacy and media literacy is not without value, but I think plain old-fashioned text literacy and mathematical literacy are much more powerful and flexible ways to organize your mind.
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The hour of noon has passed,' said Judge Fang. 'Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
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I think that this vein is close to being mined out already, but I'll say that my knowledge of and talent for linguistics are quite limited and I'm not aware of being a hell of a lot more interested in that topic than I am in others.
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It is the fate of operating systems to become free.
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A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.
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...your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
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It is commonly the case with technologies that you can get the best insight about how they work by watching them fail.
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Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, I said. We have a protractor.
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Gold is the corpse of value.
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You don't want your readers seeing easy connections it becomes a distraction.
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Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?' Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.
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Jad said, The leakage was forcing choices, the making of which in no way improved matters. Okay. So we were, in effect, locked in a room with a madman sorcerer. That clarified things a little.
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Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed.
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Any strategy that involves crossing a valley accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.
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The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent.
Neal Stephenson
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Talent was not rare the ability to survive having it was.
Neal Stephenson
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This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
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In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not at a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity : Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist.
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You should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake.
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The mind knows...that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next - that restricts our world's path to points that tell an internally consistent story.
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