Young, lavishly bearded tech entrepreneurs were trudging forlornly down the hallways, laden with computers, printers, high-end coffeemakers, and foosball tables. Like digital Okies they loaded their s...
You may have envisioned half a dozen potential markets for your product, but as soon as you open your doors, one just explodes from the pack and becomes so instantly important that good business sense...
You have responsibilities now, Bob. You must lose this naïve understanding of violence! You are embarrassin’ me in front of the lads! You can’t play by their rules or they’ll win unfailingly! You don’...
You have criminals? Of course. But the mere fact that Quin responded in this way caused Orolo to jump to a new leaf of the questionnaire. How do you know? What?! You say of course there are criminals,...
You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin, and our feeble university men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That’s how the popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long,...
You bent my words again, says Goto Dengo. You spoke crooked words and I straightened them,
Yes. It’s really only since wireless networks got fast enough to stream pictures to portable devices that everything changed, Enoch said, and enabled each individual person to live twenty-four/ seven...
Why would that cause him to pack up his bolt, chord, and sphere, and hurry to Ecba, of all places?
Why couldn’t I fill my hard drive with random bytes, so that individual files would not be discernible? Their very existence would be hidden in the noise, like a striped tiger in tall grass. And we co...
When later generations come to read about our history they will think they are reading a romance, and not believe a word of it.
What’s it like working for Mr. Freeze? I was going to say the Penguin, Dinah said, but people in Seattle don’t carry umbrellas.
What, not coins in the bank? Does your purse hang as flaccid as a gelding's scrotum?
What is BFR? asked Pete Starling. For the graph’s vertical scale was labeled thus. Bolide Fragmentation Rate, Doob said. The rate at which new rocks are being produced. Is that a standard term? Pete w...
What he wasn’t so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all...
What do you think Orolo saw, when he looked out thus? Fraa Jad asked. He was a great appreciator of beauty and loved to look at the mountains from the starhenge, I said. You think he saw beauty? That...
What are you doing? Dengo would ask him. Observing, father would say. But how long can you observe the same thing? Forever.
What are letters?Kinda like mediaglyphics except they’re all black, and they’re tiny, they don’t move, they’re old and boring and really hard to read. But you can use ’em to make short words for long...
Well, ‘vacuum with a sparse dusting of probability waves’ is an accurate description of just about everything in the universe,
Well, it seems that this process you call consciousness is somewhat more complex than you perhaps gave it credit for at first, Orolo said. One must be able to take in givens from sparse dustings of pr...
We say of some Nations, the People are lazy, but we should say only, they are poor; Poverty is the Fountain of all Manner of Idleness. —DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce