Quotes from Charles Stross

Shut up. Stand up. Put this on. That's right . . . if you were the kind of man who found it easy to do that kind of thing do you think I'd bother with you?" Her question takes him by surprise, rattling his introspective daze.

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.

It seems I have not been truly myself for a long time," he says, barely whispering, a dry, papery sound like files shuffling in a dead document archive.

It needs to be something associated with a high thaum field. If you could solve a four-element Vohlman tensor in your head, that might suffice—" Alex shuddered. He could do that but it might awaken his V-parasites, which would make him hungry.

Not our circus, not our monkeys," I murmur, and he nods.

Bogons?" "Hypothetical particles of cluelessness. Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting the machinery work again. Hacker folklore

Some of my people are well on their way to becoming formidable practitioners (like Alex, but best not to tell the little oik that).

Brains mouses over one of the images.

and that the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.

Emma has switched from sanguine to sanguinary in a matter of seconds

Rule Number One is don't die. Corollary Number One is don't poke things that will certainly kill you, like high-tension cables and hostile level-six Existential Anthropic Threats.

La culpa es mía por ser el informático del departamento: cuando las máquinas se estropean, agito mi pollo muerto y escribo encantamientos vudú en los teclados hasta que vuelven a funcionar.

The iron law of bureaucracy dictates that most of the people in any large organization will, after a time, be more preoccupied with preserving their own jobs than with fulfilling the mission statement of the agency.

But the de-emphasized had the temerity to try to look after themselves in ways that resisted monetization. Their

By dawn on Sunday he had been awake for over thirty hours, tracking a crisis of ever-expanding but indeterminate scope. A large body of operational research demonstrates that human beings suffer disproportionately from fatigue-induced errors of judgment after twelve hours of concentration at work; while Gerald Lockhart had long experience of pushing himself under crisis conditions, he was about to make a fatal mistake.

the geas in question draws its power from the sum over time of the entire loyal British population's faith in the Crown since that charter was established over four centuries ago. Which adds up to something like ninety million person-centuries-worth of belief. Hence the, shall we

Toma un puro, Sherlock. - Lo siento; sólo echo humo cuando me enchufan a la red eléctrica.

Really?" Professor Skullface blinked at her in confusion. "Why ever not?

Not that she's happy with Bob. Iris still hasn't forgiven him for unintentionally massacring most of her congregation, cocking up a very important summoning which might have shaved four years off the critical path to the New Management, and always being late with his timesheets.

Most demons are as dumb as a sackful of hammers. This does not mean they're safe to mess with, any more than a C++ compiler is "safe" in the hands of an enthusiastic computer science undergrad. Some people can mess up anything, and computational demonology adds a new and unwelcome meaning to terms like "memory leak" and "debugger." Now

the shadow puppet play of televisual hallucinations.

Es que no saben que el único ordenador inhackeable es el que tiene instalado un sistema operativo seguro y está encerrado en una caja fuerte de acero enterrada bajo una tonelada de hormigón en el fondo de una mina de carbón protegida por los SAS y un par de divisiones armadas, y además está apagado?

A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard.

Let me help you with that?" she offered, and slowly leaned in close. PROF. ARTHUR P. MACANDLESS, ST. BRIDE'S CATHOLIC CARE HOME, it read. CONTACT PHONE