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Zenith Angle
A strange game. The only winning move is .

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last edited by BillSeitz on Jul 2, 2008 7:39 am

enjoyable techno-thriller by ISBN:0-345-46061-8

can read it very quickly

post- [Cyber Security]/[InfoWar] story

buzzwords, real-world characters, and other bits:

p45: : it's phones vs razors - it's our networks vs their death cult

p62: That was the worst part, Robbie: when the politicians make you break your dang tools. (, Lockheed ). To run a you need

p76: Son, I know people from . I've met them. They don't matter in this world. The only way they can matter is to kill themselves inside our our jets and buildings. can't build anything. They can't [InVent] anything.

p92: [GrenDel]/[BeoWulf]

p119: I have learned something important about people who are profoundly . They are unbalanced. That's why they have so much to give. Thyey have to give. They are fighting with some kind of black chasm inside... The top ones get much better than any human being ever needs to be. No mere reward could ever make anybody act to that level of performance. Because it's never about the money, or event the fame. It's all about the inner terror.

p129: The ideal flying assassination weapon for kamikaze terrorists would be a private business jet... But while Joe and Jane Consumer were having their shoes x-rayed at the airport, nobody in federal security was doing anything useful about the stark thread posed by private jets. Private jet owners were America's richest people.

p151: had a horrible knack for asking simple, embarrassing questions that nobody had ever thought about before. Nobody wanted to cross him.

p158: Hickok's professional life was strangely familiar to Van. It was full of small elite teams. Quick, quiet black-ops soldiers who did peculiar things on very short schedules. They never bragged. The American press never printed a word about them. They were very busy guys. They were very much like top-end computer wizards, except for one thing. They were not pale, pudgy hackers wearing glasses.

p159: They used their smarts and knowledge to lop off all time for each other. There was something inhuman about being dutiful workaholics, something that wrecked marriages, shattered failies, and made a man and woman shrivel up inside. It was going to kill them both someday.

p161: Van found it rather weird to meet a no-kidding, real-life general from a "Space Force". It was weirder yet that America's [Space Force] had bases all around the world, with fourty thousand service personnel. America's Space Force was twenty years old. Why had he never seen any Space Force soldiers in any war movies? Or programs, either. Not even The X-Files.

p172: "Oh, so it's game to you, is it? You can't get your big square head around an asymmetric threat, General! No wonder they hit the damn out of a clear blue sky. I'd rather dig ditches in Lebanon than hang out with you pie-eating game-boys."

p173: The fatal error in was that it modeled [Complex Systems] without truly understanding them. Computers simulated complexity (). You might know more or less what was likely to happen. But the causes remained unclear. When a hard-headed, practical man like General Wessler asked him "why", all that Van could do was helplessly wave his hands.

p189: He'd never known, until he stepped behind the curtain of power, that was mostly a matter of keeping up appearances.

p204: pipelines were notorious for exploding.

p240: National people were the wrong people to attempt that security job. A nation, any nation, was just too small... The whole point of the effort was to becomes less American. That was why it was called instead of -Net...It got worse. Even inside American national borders, you couldn't wrap computesr in the red-white-and-blue. Eighty-five percent of the hardware was owned by... multinational private industry that had gone broke... They had tried to build a commercial for-profit . There was nothing commercial about the Internet any more than there was anything national... It had all broken down in a sudden terrible panic in the [Last Mile]. The last mile stood between those great, big, fat, global, huge, empty, terrifying fiber-optic pipes, and the planet's general population. The Net had not just broken. It had been abandoned, cast aside in fear and dread. Because the movie companies, and the telephone companies, and the music companies had suddenly realized that their "" would not remain their property for one pico-second... There wouldn't be a movie business.. There would be no business. Nothing but it, the Net. So the Information Superhighway had just stopped.

p296: Why did never have wars? he wondered. Brazil was a really big country on a big American continent. How come Brazil had no enemies? It didn't make sense... Brazilians didn't [InVent] much. Well, that explained it.

p300: He was running a small Web log... Web logs were in combat for attention. (eek, 2 separate words?) ()... It was hard for a not to drink when he was kept away from the action... Once had had been bright, whimsical, inventive. Now he was dark, dangerous, inventive.

p303: Four people in our family, that is like a little squad (). We'll get really quick, and stop complaining so much from now on. We'll change our lazy habits. We'll get things done whenever they need to get done.

p304: The Terror () was just the Bubble () by another name.

p306: Hope is not the belief that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what we are doing makes sense, no matter how things turn out. ()

[World Com]/ (Mondiale)

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Bill Seitz, fluxent at gmail dot com, Weblog