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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.
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
Design
Equations
Movement
Govern
Principles
Electric
Use
Discover
Boring
Figure
Exciting
Openers
Figures
Electrons
More quotes by Neal Stephenson
One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for may people, is not that he's socially inept - because everybody's been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.
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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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Talent was not rare the ability to survive having it was.
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If the item of stolen property had been anything other than a book, it would have been confiscated. But a book is different - it is not just a material possession but the pathway to an enlightened mind, and thence to a well-ordered society.
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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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Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.
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They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.
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Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.
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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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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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Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.
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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?
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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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Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion? Juanita shrugs. What's the difference?
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If you sincerely believed in God, how could you form one thought, speak one sentence, without mentioning Him?
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If you are a professional writer - i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed - Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter it simply makes everything else vanish.
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Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, I said. We have a protractor.
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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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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.
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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.
Neal Stephenson
