By Neal Stephenson
The only thing America does better than anyone else is music, movies, software and high-speed pizza delivery
Cosanostra is run by the mafia
If a pizza takes longer than 30 minutes Uncle Enzo flies to the house, apologizes personally, and gives the person a free trip to Italy.
The enterprise is L Bob Rife’s massive ship. It’s part of the “raft” a bunch of boats sailing together. That’s where they take the infected hackers and draw their blood.
Lagos did some research on informational warfare and tried to sell it to L Bob Rife so he could use it to infect his programmers who he thought were stealing info from him.
”The deliverator wouldn’t drive for CosaNostra any other way. There’s something about having your life on the line. It’s like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear. It’s above competition. You don’t work harder to compete with the guy down the street, you work harder because everything is on the line.”
”When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins”
“But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one’s early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to.”
“Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making 30-year mend feel decrepit”
”It was of course nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe they are too smart to be sexist”
”Juanita hadn’t really changed much at all since those days, just grown into herself. It was he who had changed. Radically.”
“Condense fact from the vapor of nuance”
“Class is more than income—it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships. Juanita and her folks knew where they stood with a certitude that bordered on dementia.”
”Religion is not for simpletons”
“Feds aren’t like that. Feds are serious people. Poli sci majors. Student council presidents. Debate club chairpersons. The king did people who have the grit to wear a dark wool suit and a tightly buttoned collar even when the temperature has greenhouses up to a hundred and ten degrees and the humidity is thick enough to stall a jumbo jet. The kinds of people who feel most at home on the dark side of a one-way mirror.”
”Maybe that’s how great warriors do it. Carelessly not wracking their minds with the consequences.”