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
We know the economics of these startups, Eb says. We begin with nothing but the idea. That’s what the NDA is for—to protect your idea. We work on the idea together—put our brainpower into it—and get s...
We gotta come up with a plan, Shaftoe says. The plan: You live, I die, Goto Dengo says. Fuck that, Shaftoe says. Hey, don’t you idiots know you’re surrounded? We know, Goto Dengo says wearily. We know...
We can’t run this experiment a thousand times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don’t ex...
We are just proceeding adaptively to leverage our core competencies.
Virgil returned to the Operator’s Station and entered a single command. Its effect was to draw together the reins of the eighteen sham programs, to lift out, as it were, all those long machine code se...
Ty got the feeling, from cues in the Teklan’s physique and general style of movement, that he was some manner of Snake Eater.
Topology is destiny,
To Randy the party is like any other: he shakes hands with a few people, forgets their names, finds a place to sit down, and enjoys the wine and the food in blissful solitude.
This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame’s a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels...
They’d never take the standardized tests that they were prepping for. In a way, Amelia had said, this had led to a kind of renaissance in pedagogy. Free from the constraints of racking up high test sc...
Then, just for a blessed few hours, he had climbed out of that chopper into the high, cold, piney air of Bhutan, and gone for a ramble in the king’s Land Rover, and hiked up a misty mountain that had...
The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polishedglass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine,this lens emerges and clicks into place, i...
The suspect had experienced a ballistic interlude earlier in the evening, Miss Pao said, regrettably not filmed, and relieved himself of excess velocity by means of an ablative technique. (describing...
The situation could not possibly be as dire as it seemed or they would all be dead.
The sand was hard-packed and solid and wet, speckled all over with cockle shells in colors and patterns of such profusion and variety that they must have given the first Dutchmen the idea to go out in...
The rough-and-ready intellectual consensus of the mid-Twentieth Century is being pushed out by a New Superstition whose victims can find testimony on the Internet for anything they choose to believe....
The only human in evidence was a white-haired Constable whose belly had created a visible divergence between his two rows of brass buttons. He was bent over using a trowel to extract a steaming turd f...
The number 65,536 is an awkward figure to everyone except a hacker, who recognizes it more readily than his own mother's date of birth: It happens to be a power of 2—216 power to be exact—and even the...
The kind of woman who could pleasantly instruct you to fuck off, dear, and you immediately would because you’d just hate to disappoint her.