Otto von Bismarck quipped, Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.
Leon's life was all about discipline. He'd heard a weight-loss guru once explain that the key to maintaining a slim figure was to really listen to your body and only eat until it signaled that it was...
It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.
It was considered insanely hard to poison a computer's BIOS remotely, but if I was going to rebuild a computer that had been fatally pwned, ignoring the BIOS would be like changing all your house lock...
In short: if I’m wrong, I promise that I’ll be wrong in a well-informed and interesting way.
In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent. That’s pretty ra...
If you wanted your bug fixed, you should really check it in depth.
If you want, you can make him seem erratic and unreliable so they get rid of him. You can manufacture crises that might make one side or the other reveal the identities of other spies. In short, you o...
If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot...
I waited outside her door while she went into her room and moved around. She opened her door, holding her laptop in one hand and its battery in the other.
I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out a band of orcs, playing rock-paper-scissors with each orc to determine who would prevail in combat. This is a lot more exciting than...
I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.
He’d heard of it. It gave you ironic distance—a very now kind of high. Conspiracy people thought it was too zeitgeisty to be a coincidence, claimed it was spread to soften the population for its miser...
He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was young. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental...
From there, it was time for dinner: roaring fires, meat popping on spits, tofu sizzling on skillets ((it's northern California, a vegetarian option is not optional), and a style of eating and drinking...
Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird an...
But what if all the workers we went to said the same thing? What if, everywhere he [the boss] went, there were workers saying, 'We are worth so much,' and 'We will not be treated this way,' and 'You c...
But if you're not prepared to learn from the teachers that life gives you, you'll always be ignorant.
Beneath the red crosses was another insignia: CHP. California Highway Patrol. They were State Troopers.
Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it.