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Am I a technocrat? Im just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?

Neal Stephenson

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Neal Stephenson
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 31
Author
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Science Fiction Writer
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Camp Annapolis Junction
Neal Town Stephenson
Stephen Bury
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The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening, Miss Pao said, regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique.
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How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?
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It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.
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It is the fate of operating systems to become free.
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I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
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And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.
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I just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption.
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The story is everything, so it always begins with a story.And research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much.
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They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.
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Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.
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...your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
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Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.
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It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
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Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.
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I actually don't think that there is a connection between the survival instinct and a hunger for immortality.
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Ninety-nine percent of everything that goes on in most Christian churches has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all notice this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in people's minds.
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When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
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