Charles Stross quotes - page 7

I head off to the conference room for the Ways and Means Committee meeting-to investigate new ways of being mean, as Bridget (may Nyarlathotep rest her soul) once it explained it to me. (Charles Stross)
The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn't just want to be free-it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors.
Charles Stross
Most of what we get up to in the Laundry is symbolic computation intended to evoke decidedly nonsymbolic consequences. But that's not all there is to...well, any sufficiently alien technology is indistinguishable from magic, so let's call it that, all right? You can do magic by computation, but you can also do computation by magic. The law of similarity attracts unwelcome attention from other proximate universes, other domains where the laws of nature worked out differently. Meanwhile, the law of contagion spreads stuff around. Just as it's possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it's possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep.
Charles Stross
I stare longingly at the bare chunk of space on the desktop. There may be a keyboard stitched into the lining of my cummerbund, but without a machine to plug it into it's about as much use as a chocolate hacksaw.
Charles Stross
Yup, that pretty much confirms the diagnosis. This is the desk of a diseased mind, hugely ambitious, prone to taking insanely dangerous risks. He's not ashamed of boasting about it-he clearly believes in better alpha-primate dominance displays through carpentry.
Charles Stross
Nobody taught me how to say no when a beautiful naked woman begs me to take my clothes off.
Charles Stross
My stomach flip-flops. No electronics? That's heavy. In fact it's more than heavy: to compute is to be, and all that. I don't mind going without clothes, but being without a microprocessor is truly stripping down. It's like asking a sorcerer to surrender his magic wand, or a politician to forswear his lies.
Charles Stross
In this line of work, too much paranoia can be worse than too little.
Charles Stross
I'm still wearing my shoes, I realize. And I'm still wearing this fucking suit. I didn't even take it off for the flight-I must be turning into a manager or something. I have a sudden urge to wash compulsively. At least the tie's snaked off to wherever the horrid things live when they're not throttling their victims.
Charles Stross
Not only is the past another country, it's one that doesn't issue visas.
Charles Stross
I have a feeling that a bored Ramona would be a very bad girl indeed, in a your-life-insurance-policy-just-expired kind of way. (Charles Stross)
PowerPoint is symptomatic of a certain type of bureaucratic environment: one typified by interminable presentations with lots of fussy little bullet-points and flashy dissolves and soundtracks masked into the background, to try to convince the audience that the goon behind the computer has something significant to say. It's the tool of choice for pointy-headed idiots with expensive suits and skinny laptops who desperately want to look as if they're in command of the job, with all the facts at their fiddling fingertips, even if Rome is burning in the background. Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface...
Charles Stross
I'm only twenty-eight: I'm too young to die and too old to drive fast.
Charles Stross
Some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by architecture students.
Charles Stross
Bet you he's a smart sociopath, the kind that does well in midlevel management, all fur coat and no knickers-and willing to shed blood without a second thought if it's to defend his position.
Charles Stross
Didn't they know that the only unhackable computer is one that's running a secure operating system, welded inside a steel safe, buried under a ton of concrete at the bottom of a coal mine guarded by the SAS and a couple of armoured divisions, and switched off?
Charles Stross
Do you want me to strangle him now, or wait till he's finished annoying you?
Charles Stross
It turns out you left something rather important off your career plan: for example, there's no ticky-box on the diagram for HAVING A LIFE-TASK COMPLETED. And so you kept putting it off, and de-prioritized it, and put it off again until the law of conservation of shit-stirring dragged it front and centre and lamped you upside yer heid, as your clients might put it.
Charles Stross
Imagine a world where speaking or writing words can literally and directly make things happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreak unbelievable havoc, but where with the right spell you can summon immensely powerful agencies to work your will. Imagine further that this world is administered: there is an extensive division of labour, among the magicians themselves and between the magicians and those who coordinate their activity. It's bureaucratic, and also (therefore) chaotic, and it's full of people at desks muttering curses and writing invocations, all beavering away at a small part of the big picture. The coordinators, because they don't understand what's going on, are easy prey for smooth-talking preachers of bizarre cults that demand arbitrary sacrifices and vanish with large amounts of money. Welcome to the IT department.
Charles Stross
Things have gone downhill since Mom decided a modal average dose of old-time religion was an essential part of her upbringing, to the point that absolutely the best thing in the world Tante Annette could send her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn't work, Mom will take her to Church tonight, and she's certain she'll end up making a scene again. Amber's tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing rapidly, and while building up her memetic immunity might be the real reason Mom's forcing this shit on her-it's always hard to tell with Mom-things have been tense ever since she got expelled from Sunday school for mounting a spirited defense of the theory of evolution.
Charles Stross
Quote, the viability of a postsingularity economy of scarcity is indicated by the transition from an indirection-layer-based economy using markers of exchange of goods and services to a tree-structured economy characterized by optimal allocation of productivity systems in accordance with iterated tit-for-tat prisoner's dilemma. Money is a symptom of poverty and inefficiency. Unquote. (Charles Stross)
It's amazing how much work you can get done in three days if you hold a blowtorch to each end of the candle.
Charles Stross
I'm not a politician, even though I play-act one when the boss tells me to-I'm allowed to change my mind when my understanding of the facts changes.
Charles Stross
See? Interstellar colonization is easy! You just need to devote a visible percentage of the resource of an entire interplanetary civilization to it for several hundred years, placing it in the tireless and efficient hands of robots ordered to strive for the goal for as long as it takes.
Charles Stross
The number one crime in any age: offending the money.
Charles Stross