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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
Cases
Technology
Commonly
Best
Technologies
Work
Insight
Fail
Watching
Case
Failing

More quotes by Neal Stephenson

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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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...your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
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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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This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.
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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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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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I feel that I am entitled to trample all other considerations into the dirt in my pursuit of a satisfying pun.
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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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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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I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
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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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All people have religions. It's like we have religion receptors built into our brain cells, or something, and we'll latch onto anything that'll fill that niche for us.
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It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for.
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The less attractive the character, the more I enjoyed writing them. Officious bureaucrats and PowerPoint weasels are where it's at for me.
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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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When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.
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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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Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs, I said. We have a protractor.
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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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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.
Neal Stephenson