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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

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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
Case
Failing
Cases
Technology
Commonly
Best
Technologies
Work
Insight
Fail
Watching

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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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Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, I said. We have a protractor.
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Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.
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That's funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we'd just tell him 'nice proof, Fraa Bly' and start believing in God.
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It is the fate of operating systems to become free.
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She's not afraid. She's wearing a dentata.
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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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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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... when I saw any of those kinds of beauty I knew I was alive, and not just in the sense that when I hit my thumb with a hammer I knew I was alive, but rather in the sense that I was partaking of something--something was passing through me that it was in my nature to be a part of.
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That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things.
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Gold is the corpse of value.
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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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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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It would be quite unusual for me to get deep into a project and then shitcan it. One of the advantages of having done this for a while is that I have a better sense than I used to of when something is or isn't working. Until I developed that sense, this was a pretty dicey career for me, both in terms of paying the rent, and emotional wear and tear.
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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 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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I am on an expense account that would blow 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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Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.
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As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another.
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