Made Redundant Quotes

Do you feel that?’ He flattens my palms on his chest and holds them there firmly. ‘It was made to love you, Ava. For too long it was useless, redundant, not required. Now it’s gone into overdrive. It swells with happiness when I look at you. It splinters with pain when we fight. And it beats wildly when I make love to you. Maybe I go overboard with my love, but that’s never going to change. I’ll love you this fiercely until the day I die, baby. Children or not.

My love is made out of three things: the dawn, the sunrise, and redundancy. I poured you two glasses, which can easily and efficiently be drunk out of one cup.

Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement

Do you feel that?’ He flattens my palms on his chest and holds them there firmly. ‘It was made to love you, Ava. For too long it was useless, redundant, not required. Now it’s gone into overdrive. It swells with happiness when I look at you. It splinters with pain when we fight. And it beats wildly when I make love to you.

I wish you wouldn't indulge him," said the Prince Regent, whose name was also George (Kell found the Grey London habit of sons taking father's name both redundant and confusing) with a dismissive wave of his hand. "It gets his spirits up." "Is that a bad thing?" asked Kell. "For him, yes. He'll be in a frenzy later. Dancing on the tables talking of magic and other Londons. What trick did you do for him this time? Convince him he could fly?" Kell had only made that mistake once.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you. Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. [from, Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming]

Do you feel that?’ He flattens my palms on his chest and holds them there firmly. ‘It was made to love you, Ava. For too long it was useless, redundant, not required. Now it’s gone into overdrive. It swells with happiness when I look at you. It splinters with pain when we fight. And it beats wildly when I make love to you. Maybe I go overboard with my love, but that’s never going to change. I’ll love you this fiercely until the day I die, baby. Children or not.’‘Do you feel that?’ He flattens my palms on his chest and holds them there firmly. ‘It was made to love you, Ava. For too long it was useless, redundant, not required. Now it’s gone into overdrive. It swells with happiness when I look at you. It splinters with pain when we fight. And it beats wildly when I make love to you. Maybe I go overboard with my love, but that’s never going to change. I’ll love you this fiercely until the day I die, baby...

The white woman across the aisle from me says 'Look, look at all the history, that house on the hill there is over two hundred years old, ' as she points out the window past me into what she has been taught. I have learned little more about American history during my few days back East than what I expected and far less of what we should all know of the tribal stories whose architecture is 15,000 years older than the corners of the house that sits museumed on the hill. 'Walden Pond, ' the woman on the train asks, 'Did you see Walden Pond? ' and I don't have a cruel enough heart to break her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds on my little reservation out West and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane, the city I pretended to call my home. 'Listen, ' I could have told her. 'I don't give a shit about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories around that pond before Walden's grandparents were born and before his grandparents' grandparents were born. I'm tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too, because that's redundant. If Don Henley's brothers and sisters and mothers and father hadn't come here in the first place then nothing would need to be saved.' But I didn't say a word to the woman about Walden Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted that I thought to bring her an orange juice back from the food car. I respect elders of every color. All I really did was eat my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out another little piece of her country's history while I, as all Indians have done since this war began, made plans for what I would do and say the next time somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.

Animals in pens have lots of time to develop theories", said the Cow, "I've heard more than one clever creature draw a connection between the rise of tiktokism and the erosion of traditional Animal labour. We weren't beasts of burden, but we were good reliable labourers. If we were made redundant in the workforce, it was only a matter of time before we'd be socially redundant too.

Amora of Nornheim," Odin said, his voice the one he used for court meetings and assemblies, though there was no one else present. The resonance made the room feel even emptier. "You have been charged with treason, theft, destruction of a sacred relic and robbery. Do you have anything to say for yourself?" With her head still bowed, she replied, "The charges are a bit redundant." At his side, Loki felt Thor stiffen. Odin's brow creased. "Excuse me?" "Are not theft and robbery the same, my king?" she asked. "I think you're trying to inflate the list of charges against me with synonyms.

The workings of the sensory systems are particularly baffling, because they can achieve far more sophisticated feats of pattern-recognition than the best and most expensive man-made machines; if this were not so, all typists would be redundant, superseded by speech-recognizing machines, or machines for reading handwriting.

Animals in pens have lots of time to develop theories," said the Cow. "I've heard more than one clever creature draw a connection between the rise of tictokism and the erosion of traditional Animal labor. We weren't beasts of burden, but we were good reliable laborers. If we were made redundant in the workforce, it was only a matter of time before we'd be socially redundant too. Anyway, that's one theory. My own feeling is that there is real evil abroad in the land. The Wizard sets the standard for it, and the society follows suit like a bunch of sheep. Forgive the slanderous reference," she said, nodding to her companions in the pen. "It was a slip.

While he was in the neighbourhood he went to New York for the – surely redundant by now – ceremonial visit of the next prime minister to Rupert Murdoch. Back home in the Spectator Australia he laid it on thick again: “Along with the commander of the First AIF, Sir John Monash, and the penicillin inventor, Lord Florey, he is one of the Australians who have made the most difference in the world.

all intents and purposes is colourless, redundant and hackneyed. Almost any other expression would be an improvement. ‘He is, to all intents and purposes, king of the island’ (Mail on Sunday) would be instantly made better by changing the central phrase to ‘in effect’ or removing it altogether. If the phrase must be used at all, it can always be shorn of the last two words. ‘To all intents’ says as much as ‘to all intents and purposes’.

The brain is connected to the sense organs—eyes, ears, taste-buds, etc.—by means of cables called sensory nerves. The workings of the sensory systems are particularly baffling, because they can achieve far more sophisticated feats of pattern-recognition than the best and most expensive man-made machines; if this were not so, all typists would be redundant, superseded by speech-recognizing machines, or machines for reading handwriting. Human typists will be needed for many decades yet.

Experiential versus the God eye! Possessing ‘ego vision’, a person’s view through her/his physical eyes is quite versatile; able to discern wide and varied vistas over huge distances or scrutinizing the minutest of details. Ego’s very nature: capable of relatively expansive, detailed, and yet individualistic perspective is crucial. Separating itself out from the God Force, ego extracts infinite unique experiences, integral to humanity’s process of spiritualizing matter. Incarnating on the earth, achieving individualism is therefore critical for attainment of divinity. Individualism may cause momentary estrangement from the God Self. However, this person has forgotten that they are everything in the mirror, the ‘sliver’ and the ‘ball of light’,” continues Kuan Yin. During this complex passage Lena was inundated by infinite rapid-fire visuals: emanations from the God Mind. “Further and unfortunately, wrong assumptions are made about suffering. Some individuals even believe that it is required, that suffering brings one closer to salvation. Quite the contrary,” disputes Kuan Yin, “the God Force likes to play. Therefore, if all individuals could unite creating a real sense of community many problems could be healed. The God Force is separate and not separate, whole and not whole at the same time. Really, it is not ‘sliceable’, not reducible. Even when it is sliced into individual energies, it does not diminish the total God Force or the power of the individual. Each of you has the potential for the God Force potency. However, no individual can overcome the God Force. There is a misinterpretation, (by some) that Satan is as powerful as God. Limited energy cannot live on its own. Every experience must exist and yet they (the limiting forces) can never exist on their own. Limited energy, then, is the experience of the absence of the God Force. Therefore, there is no need to fear it. Those choosing such experiences have a need to understand how it feels to believe evil powers exist. Again, I say those who pursue this route are taking it too personally. They believe the story they’ve made up about themselves. It is similar to a person going into an ice cream store and only choosing one flavor from many. Preoccupied with tasting that flavor for a very long time, they are probably quite sick and tired of it. Still, they don’t want to believe there are any other flavors available. The ‘agreement’, then, is to continue to believe in that particular flavor. Here’s where reincarnation and its opportunity for experiencing a vast array of perspectives, “agreements”, enters in. Another life offers another opportunity, a chance to ‘switch flavors’ so to speak. Taking oneself too personally, however, can cause a soul to get caught up, stuck in redundancy: in a particular (and perhaps unfortunate) flavor. In such instances, the individual is forgetting one has the ability to choose his or her flavors, lives,” contends Kuan Yin.

The relationship between the Sophotechs and the men as depicted in that tale made no sense. How could they be hostile to each other?” Diomedes said, “Aren’t men right to fear machines which can perform all tasks men can do, artistic, intellectual, technical, a thousand or a million times better than they can do? Men become redundant.” Phaethon shook his head, a look of distant distaste on his features, as if he were once again confronted with a falsehood that would not die no matter how often it was denounced. In a voice of painstaking patience, he said: “Efficiency does not harm the inefficient. Quite the opposite. That is simply not the way it works. Take me, for example. Look around: I employed partials to do the thought-box junction spotting when I built this ship. My employees were not as skilled as I was in junction spotting. It took them three hours to do the robopsychology checks and hierarchy links I could have done in one hour. But they were in no danger of competition from me. My time is too valuable. In that same hour it would have taken me to spot their thought-box junction, I can earn far more than their three-hour wages by writing supervision architecture thought flows. And it’s the same with me and the Sophotechs. “Any midlevel Sophotech could have written in one second the architecture it takes me, even with my implants, an hour to compose. But if, in that same one second of time, that Sophotech can produce something more valuable—exploring the depth of abstract mathematics, or inventing a new scientific miracle, anything at all (provided that it will earn more in that second than I earn in an hour)—then the competition is not making me redundant. The Sophotech still needs me and receives the benefit of my labor. Since I am going to get the benefit of every new invention and new miracle put out on the market, I want to free up as many of those seconds of Sophotech time as my humble labor can do. “And I get the lion’s share of the benefit from the swap. I only save him a second of time; he creates wonder upon wonder for me. No matter what my fear of or distaste for Sophotechs, the forces in the marketplace, our need for each other, draw us together. “So you see why I say that not a thing the Silent One said about Sophotechs made sense. I do not understand how they could have afforded to hate each other. Machines don’t make us redundant; they increase our efficiency in every way. And the bids of workers eager to compete for Sophotech time creates a market for merely human work, which it would not be efficient for Sophotechs to underbid.

That’s what the history books say . . . but history books are written by the victors. The official history of emotion research, from Darwin to James to behaviorism to salvation, is a byproduct of the classical view. In reality, the alleged dark ages included an outpouring of research demonstrating that emotion essences don’t exist. Yes, the same kind of counterevidence that we saw in chapter 1 was discovered seventy years earlier . . . and then forgotten. As a result, massive amounts of time and money are being wasted today in a redundant search for fingerprints of emotion.

The Christian story is both mythological and historical. That is because it concerns the historical incarnation of the One whom all myths represent. Thoth, Hermes, Apollo, and a hundred other gods are images of the Logos or Mediator whom Christians believe was born as a human child, died on a Cross, and rose from the dead two thousand years ago. 'By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God' (1 John 4:2-3). Nor does a 'literalist' belief in historical incarnation render imagination and the use of symbolism redundant - if anything it legitimizes them.

That was the end of my adventure in Central America. By the lakeshore in Granada, Nicaragua, I decided to turn for home. I wondered what Cortes would have said if, when he set out in the wake of Columbus, he had foreseen the beach outside Granada. He knew in his bones of the glory to come, would he have known about its eclipse? A Church without the True Cross, unable to protect its buildings from earthquake or idolatry; the gold and silver mines exhausted; the children of the Conquest reduced to beggary, placing their trust in the redundant theories of a Victorian economist; the empire overwhelmed by its own pagan and monstrous child. What a fool time has made of Cortes and his pretensions. He should have turned back to Cuba, to his dice and his saints and his women, and left the Indians with the Gods they honour, against all the odds, to this day.

Performance measure. Throughout this book, the term performance measure refers to an indicator used by management to measure, report, and improve performance. Performance measures are classed as key result indicators, result indicators, performance indicators, or key performance indicators. Critical success factors (CSFs). CSFs are the list of issues or aspects of organizational performance that determine ongoing health, vitality, and wellbeing. Normally there are between five and eight CSFs in any organization. Success factors. A list of 30 or so issues or aspects of organizational performance that management knows are important in order to perform well in any given sector/ industry. Some of these success factors are much more important; these are known as critical success factors. Balanced scorecard. A term first introduced by Kaplan and Norton describing how you need to measure performance in a more holistic way. You need to see an organization’s performance in a number of different perspectives. For the purposes of this book, there are six perspectives in a balanced scorecard (see Exhibit 1.7). Oracles and young guns. In an organization, oracles are those gray-haired individuals who have seen it all before. They are often considered to be slow, ponderous, and, quite frankly, a nuisance by the new management. Often they are retired early or made redundant only to be rehired as contractors at twice their previous salary when management realizes they have lost too much institutional knowledge. Their considered pace is often a reflection that they can see that an exercise is futile because it has failed twice before. The young guns are fearless and precocious leaders of the future who are not afraid to go where angels fear to tread. These staff members have not yet achieved management positions. The mixing of the oracles and young guns during a KPI project benefits both parties and the organization. The young guns learn much and the oracles rediscover their energy being around these live wires. Empowerment. For the purposes of this book, empowerment is an outcome of a process that matches competencies, skills, and motivations with the required level of autonomy and responsibility in the workplace. Senior management team (SMT). The team comprised of the CEO and all direct reports. Better practice. The efficient and effective way management and staff undertake business activities in all key processes: leadership, planning, customers, suppliers, community relations, production and supply of products and services, employee wellbeing, and so forth. Best practice. A commonly misused term, especially because what is best practice for one organization may not be best practice for another, albeit they are in the same sector. Best practice is where better practices, when effectively linked together, lead to sustainable world-class outcomes in quality, customer service, flexibility, timeliness, innovation, cost, and competitiveness. Best-practice organizations commonly use the latest time-saving technologies, always focus on the 80/20, are members of quality management and continuous improvement professional bodies, and utilize benchmarking. Exhibit 1.10 shows the contents of the toolkit used by best-practice organizations to achieve world-class performance. EXHIBIT 1.10 Best-Practice Toolkit Benchmarking. An ongoing, systematic process to search for international better practices, compare against them, and then introduce them, modified where necessary, into your organization. Benchmarking may be focused on products, services, business practices, and processes of recognized leading organizations.

We say “universe” and the word makes us think of a possible unification of things. One can be a spiritualist, a materialist, a pantheist, just as one can be indifferent to philosophy and satisfied with common sense: the fact remains that one always conceives of one or several simple principles by which the whole of material and moral things might be explained. This is because our intelligence loves simplicity. It seeks to reduce effort, and insists that nature was arranged in such a way as to demand of us, in order to be thought, the least possible labor. It therefore provides itself with the exact minimum of elements and principles with which to recompose the indefinite series of objects and events. But if instead of reconstructing things ideally for the greater satisfaction of our reason we confine ourselves purely and simply to what is given us by experience, we should think and express ourselves in quite another way. While our intelligence with its habits of economy imagines effects as strictly proportioned to their causes, nature, in its extravagance, puts into the cause much more than is required to produce the effect. While our motto is Exactly what is necessary, nature’s motto is More than is necessary,—too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything. Reality, as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant. Between this reality and the one constructed by the philosophers, I believe he would have established the same relation as between the life we live every day and the life which actors portray in the evening on the stage. On the stage, each actor says and does only what has to be said and done; the scenes are clear-cut; the play has a beginning, a middle and an end; and everything is worked out as economically as possible with a view to an ending which will be happy or tragic. But in life, a multitude of useless things are said, many superfluous gestures made, there are no sharply-drawn situations; nothing happens as simply or as completely or as nicely as we should like; the scenes overlap; things neither begin nor end; there is no perfectly satisfying ending, nor absolutely decisive gesture, none of those telling words which give us pause: all the effects are spoiled. Such is human life.

They had made everything she took for granted redundant, like cooperation and manners and civility and privacy and laws. Silly things that pinged out easily like old light bulbs.

I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.” Alas, those not-yet-imagined new jobs for horses never arrived. No-longer-needed horses were slaughtered and not replaced, causing the U.S. equine population to collapse from about 26 million in 1915 to about 3 million in 1960.55 As mechanical muscles made horses redundant, will mechanical minds do the same to humans?

For the first time in his life, it occurred to Benjy that being mounted was a humiliation. He understood why others did it and he would certainly have mounted any other dog weaker than himself, but this new feeling of shame, changed him. He began to think about it. For instance, it occurred to him on day while Frick was atop him that if the point were to demonstrate that one had the power to mount another, the point did not need to be made over and over. The point being made once or twice, it became obvious or redundant, a mere reflex to which smaller dogs like himself were forced to submit. He submitted without resistance, accepting his place in the echelon. After all, he believed with all his soul that the social order was the most important thing. And yet…

I tried to force something more definable out of myself, a few tears or a sob. The best I could manage was an anemic self-pity just before the pills kicked in and made manufacturing emotion redundant.

Timing and execution made all the difference. We earned most of our money on the first one hundred stations we bought—numbers 20 to 118. Why? Because after that the rest of the industry caught on, competition for stations increased, and prices went up. However, we continued to acquire even then, albeit at a slower rate, because of the economies of eliminating redundancies within a large portfolio in geographic concentrations and because our average price per station remained so low. But it was the first-mover advantage that made Jacor a lead dog—and a home run. Within three years, we went from 20 stations to 243. Jacor

Too many people had been made redundant by the quick and aggressive development of AI, with little guidance from leaders on new pathways to employment. Cascading failures led to a high suicide rate. Some began calling for the repeal of UBI. By 2028, social media was consumed by the Great Debate over the pros and cons of UBI. The Senate and the House sank into protracted back-and-forth warfare over a proposed plan to abolish UBI. “The

Power levels were dropped so low that even voice communications were difficult. Removing carbon dioxide from the air was another serious problem. Lithium hydroxide normally did the job but there wasn’t enough of it. The only additional supply they had was in the Command Module, and its canisters were cube-shaped whereas the Lunar Module’s sockets were cylindrical. It looked like the men would suffocate before they made it back. In one of the most inspired brainstorming sessions of all time, engineers on the ground got out all the kit that the crew would have available. They then improvised a ‘mailbox’ that would join the two incompatible connections and draw the air through. The air was becoming more poisonous with every breath as the astronauts followed the meticulous radio instructions to build the Heath Robinson repair. Amazingly, it worked. They would have enough clean air. But they weren’t out of the woods yet. They needed to re-enter the atmosphere in the Command Module, but it had been totally shut down to preserve its power. Would it start up again? Its systems hadn’t been designed to do this. Again, engineers and crew on the ground had to think on their feet if their friends were to live. They invented an entirely new protocol that would power the ship back up with the limited power supply and time available without blowing the system. They also feared that condensation in the unpowered and freezing cold Command Module might damage electrical systems when it was reactivated. It booted up first time. Back to Earth with a splash With Apollo 13 nearing Earth, the crew jettisoned the Service Module and photographed the damage for later analysis. Then they jettisoned the redundant Lunar Module, leaving them sitting tight in the Command Module Odyssey as they plunged into the atmosphere.

After more of this redundant lunacy, Felicity breezed downstairs beautifully made up, coiffed, and smelling of jasmine or something all too alluring, kissed the kids, and muttered a brisk goodbye that I just barely heard over the sound of my scouring. She obviously must have forgotten that I was to rub shoulders with royalty this morning, because her only words to me were, “Can you strain that broth I made last night?” As the front door slammed I prayed for her train to be delayed.

So this made-up religion--" "I didn't say made-up. I said brand new. 'Made-up religion' is redundant.

Quiz show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.

The Pseudocode Programming Process Have you checked that the prerequisites have been satisfied? Have you defined the problem that the class will solve? Is the high-level design clear enough to give the class and each of its routines a good name? Have you thought about how to test the class and each of its routines? Have you thought about efficiency mainly in terms of stable interfaces and readable implementations or mainly in terms of meeting resource and speed budgets? Have you checked the standard libraries and other code libraries for applicable routines or components? Have you checked reference books for helpful algorithms? Have you designed each routine by using detailed pseudocode? Have you mentally checked the pseudocode? Is it easy to understand? Have you paid attention to warnings that would send you back to design (use of global data, operations that seem better suited to another class or another routine, and so on)? Did you translate the pseudocode to code accurately? Did you apply the PPP recursively, breaking routines into smaller routines when needed? Did you document assumptions as you made them? Did you remove comments that turned out to be redundant? Have you chosen the best of several iterations, rather than merely stopping after your first iteration? Do you thoroughly understand your code? Is it easy to understand?

Jennings, who came in second, added a personal note on his answer to the tournament’s final question: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” He later elaborated, “Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the twentieth century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of ‘thinking’ machines. ‘Quiz show contestant’ may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I’m sure it won’t be the last.

In somebody’s mind, some upper-level suit that was looking at the bottom line and all those red numbers, it made more sense to unload five employees who collectively made a hundred thousand a year and ruin five lives, than it did to get rid of one job-redundant, mid-level manager earning the same amount.

solidarity is now broken, and every worker is alone, facing the blackmail of merit, the humiliation of failure, the threat of being made redundant. What follows is a sense of guilt, anxiety and reciprocal resentment for the perceived mutual inability to help each other, to build solidarity. This is how the heavy architecture of shared depression is built.

Libraries must continue to make the shift toward the digital and away from print. The shift should not be overnight, but it should be made steadily and with great care. Libraries can and should de-accession physical materials much more aggressively than they do today, especially to save space and money when these materials are redundant with other local collections or digital forms of access to them.

Standing in his shuttered factory, made redundant by coolie labor in China, Tom McGregor said that "American consumers want to buy things at a price that is cheaper than they would be willing to be paid to make them.

There is a need for promoting women's sexual agency in today's society, because if it wasn't an issue, terms such as 'female sexual empowerment' would be made redundant. The fact that we merely have this vocabulary is indicative of that.

Past age fifty-five, I experienced the advancement of exquisite fabric choices, paint distinctions that were celestial in scope, yet so many other man-made objects, such as people, became drab, redundant and boring.

Storm’s Fast-Flux and Conficker’s Domain-Flux In 2007, security researchers identified a new technique used by the infamous Storm botnet (Higgins, 2007). The technique, named fast-flux, used domain name service (DNS) records to hide the command and control servers that controlled the Storm botnet. DNS records typically translate a domain name to an IP address. When a DNS server returns a result, it also specifies the TTL that the IP address remains valid for before the host should check again. The attackers behind the Storm botnet changed the DNS records for the command-and-control server rather frequently. In fact, they used 2,000 redundant hosts spread amongst 384 providers in more than 50 countries (Lemos, 2007). The attackers swapped the IP addresses for the command-and-control server frequently and ensured the DNS results returned with a very short TTL. This fast-flux of IP addresses made it difficult for security researchers to identify the command-and-control servers for the botnet and even more difficult to take the servers offline. While fast-flux proved difficult in the takedown of the Storm botnet, a similar technique used the following year aided in the infection of seven million computers in over two hundred countries (Binde et al., 2011). Conficker, the most successful computer worm to date, spread by attacking a vulnerability in the Windows Service Message Block (SMB) protocol. Once infected, the vulnerable machines contacted a command-and-control server for further instructions. Identifying and preventing communication with the command-and-control server proved absolutely necessary for those involved with stopping the attack. However, Conficker generated different domain names every three hours, using the current date and time at UTC. For the third iteration of Conficker, this meant 50,000 domains were generated every three hours. Attackers registered only a handful of these domains to actual IP addresses for the command-and-control servers. This made intercepting and preventing traffic with the command-and-control server very difficult. Because the technique rotated domain names, researchers named it domain-flux. In the following section, we will write some Python scripts to detect fast-flux and domain-flux in the wild to identify attacks.

Oh, on the stranger-than-fiction front…Actually nothing is stranger than fiction. You may well have ‘troubling dreams’, these days, but you’re not going to wake up ‘transformed into a gigantic insect’. And such lines as no writer could invent a character more outlandish than our would-be president and our would-be president has made satire redundant are almost touchingly naive. One thing literature can do, and has always done and will always go on doing (with no particular exertion), is conjure up characters stranger than Trump. As for satire: while turning him into art, would Swift, Pope, Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, or Don DeLillo, say, feel that there was nothing to add?

By contrast, the first determination of the exact amino-acid sequence of a protein by Sanger”—the sequencing of bovine insulin between 1949 and 1955—“was absolutely essential. One could not even have begun to think seriously about the genetic code until it had been revealed, to begin with, that a protein is beyond the shadow of doubt a polypeptide in which the amino-acid residues really are arranged in a definite, constant, genetically determined sequence—and yet a sequence with no rule by which it determined itself. So that therefore it had to have a code—that is, complete instructions expressed in some manner—to tell it how to exist, you see. Suppose that instead Sanger had found—and that’s what many biochemists would have guessed, in those days, that he would find—that there were general rules of assembly, that a polypeptide was made of a repetitive sequence of amino acids, for example lysine, aspartic acid, glutamine, threonine, repeated however many times. Then that would have been a chemical rule”—of the kind that governs the assembly of sugars into monotonous polysaccharides, for example—“and so you didn’t need a genetic code. Or you needed only a partial code. But Sanger’s discovery, since it revealed a sequence that had no rule, where—” The sequence was full of information, I said, nowhere redundant, no part of it predictable from other parts. “Exactly,” Monod said. “And so to explain the presence of all that information in the protein, you absolutely needed the code.

Amen,’ I say, a second after everyone else. Now that I’m unemployed, I could do with some money—Oh, no. What would Alex make of me being unemployed? Well, I was made redundant. I’m sure he’ll understand.

The potential for experiencing pleasure is without limits, and the well of previously unknown beauty essentially bottomless. For—when free from modern life’s clouding distractions, and released from its obstinate grasp—one can tune into nature’s wavelength and experience her every breath, from the bobbing flight of a wagtail to the thundering cascade of a waterfall, as a new thrill. In these timeless moments, as one receives pulse after exhilarating pulse from the ecospheric orchestra, philosophy becomes redundant, just as life’s meaning is made abundantly clear.

I was the first to arrive, and Bill was in the process of cleaning his barbecue. He looked about forty, and he told me that he and Violet had been on the island for three years, ever since he’d been made redundant from his job in Sydney. Apart from helping Tom out when he needed it, he and Violet managed a group of four holiday cabins for an absentee owner, and also ran a low-key café in the holiday season. They loved it and intended to stay until the kids had to go to secondary school

The other major oil industry suppliers were similarly weary, trying to shore up earnings by slashing jobs, trimming project costs, and squeezing their own customers and suppliers wherever they could. (The wildcatters had it worse: many of the mom-and-pop operators of the American oil patch started to file for bankruptcy.) One year later, GE would merge its oil and gas unit into the oil-field giant Baker Hughes, keeping for itself a more than 50 percent stake in the company and spinning out a new public company to be run by Simonelli, under GE’s control. The transaction eased GE’s exposure to the ongoing oil rout and gave the new company, dubbed “Baker Hughes, a GE company,” vast new areas of redundant employees and operations to eliminate. With Baker Hughes, GE changed its tone a bit. The deal was transformational, but in which intended direction wasn’t made clear. GE execs like Bornstein would proclaim that the deal gave them “optionality,” but the reality was that investors were left in the dark on the strategy: Was GE doubling down on oil? Or was it preparing to exit the industry? The idea of holding such a long-term option was nice, but the game pieces in the positioning were people, and those who didn’t leave their job had no idea where the future of the company might be. The new arrangement didn’t spare Lufkin. The historic foundry was closed. The city’s annual financial report now just shows a blank line when listing the company’s employment tally, evidence of the more than four thousand jobs that evaporated after GE came to town. Between two Mondays—the day GE announced it was coming to Lufkin and the day the company said it would move on, leaving a shuttered foundry at the center of town—just 868 days had passed.

To many intellectuals such as Celsus, the whole idea of a ‘Creation myth’ was not only implausible but redundant. During this period in Rome, a popular and influential philosophical theory offered an alternative view. This theory – an Epicurean one – stated that everything in the world was made not by any divine being but by the collision and combination of atoms. According to this school of thought, these particles were invisible to the naked eye but they had their own structure and could not be cut (temno) into any smaller particles: they were a-temnos – ‘the uncuttable thing’: the atom. Everything that you see or feel, these materialists argued, was made up of two things: atoms and space ‘in which these bodies are and through which they move this way and that’. Even living creatures were made from them: humans were, as one (hostile) author summarized, not made by God but were instead nothing more than ‘a haphazard union of elements’. The distinct species of animals were explained by a form of proto-Darwinism. As the Roman poet and atomist Lucretius wrote, nature put forth many species. Those that had useful characteristics – the fox and its cunning, say, or the dog and its intelligence – survived, thrived and reproduced. Those creatures that lacked these ‘lay at the mercy of others for prey and profit . . . until nature brought that race to destruction’.

Good grief, man; the Culture’s been a spacefaring species for eleven thousand years; just because you’ve mostly settled down in idealized, tailor-made conditions doesn’t mean you’ve lost the capacity for rapid adaptation. Strength in depth; redundancy; over-design. You know the Culture’s philosophy.

Routine was a system, a machine that would make me, well. Where before I had noted the ease with which routine arose, here, I felt its implacability, it's remorselessness and determination. It was a schedule designed to stifle possibility, because an excess of possibility had made me ill. At night, the lights in my room snapped off and told me that it was time to sleep. In the morning they flared and told me it was time to wake. After I woke I showered. After I showered I ate. Then I washed down a rainbow of pills and went to my first class or session. My body was irrelevant, my desires redundant and discouraged. To each external stimulus, only a single, pre-approved response was acceptable. (p.319)

Since the capitalist system defined itself as thoroughly rational, there was no longer, ironically enough, any need for a philosophy that pointed out what was intellectually and morally correct, or what was irrationally and morally reprehensible. Questions like this were believed to be perfectly well handled by science, the market and representative democracy. Totalistic philosophy had, in other words, made itself redundant. Because totalistic thought was intimately connected to the abolished Aristotelian/ Ptolemaic world-view, a fact which its practitioners refused to see, it could be reduced to a sort of therapeutic museum activity. To acknowledge the need of a new world-view would undermine the whole of their activity, and not many thinkers were willing to pay that price. Particularly not in a society where social exclusion meant rapid transportation to the proudest invention of the humanist sciences: the mental hospital.

Southern Literary Messenger, that old Village denizen Edgar Allan Poe had made a different kind of prophetic guess. As an attempt pre-emptively to render redundant most of the nonsense that would be written about Dylan and poetry, it has not been bettered. There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few. In speaking of song-writing, I mean, of course, the composition of brief poems with an eye to their adaptation for music in the vulgar sense. In this ultimate destination of the song proper, lies its essence — its genius. It is the strict reference to music — it is the dependence upon modulated expression — which gives to this branch of letters a character altogether unique, and separates it, in great measure and in a manner not sufficiently considered, from ordinary literature; rendering it independent of merely ordinary proprieties; allowing it, and in fact demanding for it, a wide latitude of Law; absolutely insisting upon a certain wild license and indefinitiveness — an indefinitiveness recognized by every musician who is not a mere fiddler, as an important point in the philosophy of his science — as the soul, indeed, of the sensations derivable from its practice — sensations which bewilder while they enthral — and which would not so enthral if they did not so bewilder.

The difficulty is that we get ourselves caught in a double bind: we work so hard that we do not allow ourselves time to dream, and therefore we continue to work hard because we have not had the time to dream up an alternative. If you are ever sacked or made redundant, then I suggest you thank the good Lord above.

And then one day the river dried up: their shared world of imagination ceased, and the reason was that one of them – I can’t even recall which one it was – stopped believing in it. In other words, it was nobody’s fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist. I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living. Without their shared story, the two children began to argue, and where their playing had taken them away from the world, making them unreachable sometimes for hours at a time, their arguments brought them constantly back to it. They would come to me or to their father, seeking intervention and justice; they began to set greater store by facts, by what had been done and said, and to build the case for themselves and against one another. It was hard, I said, not to see this transposition from love to factuality as the mirror of other things that were happening in our household at the time. What was striking was the sheer negative capability of their former intimacy: it was as though everything that had been inside was moved outside, piece by piece, like furniture being taken out of a house and put on the pavement. There seemed to be so much of it, because what had been invisible was now visible; what had been useful was now redundant. Their antagonism was in exact proportion to their former harmony, but where the harmony had been timeless and weightless, the antagonism occupied space and time. The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public: when peace becomes war, when love turns to hatred, something is born into the world, a force of pure mortality. If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse. And what is astonishing is how much detail it gathers to itself, so that nothing remains untouched by it. They were struggling to free themselves from one another, yet the very last thing they could do was leave one another alone. They fought over everything, disputed ownership of the most inconsequential item, were enraged by the merest nuance of speech, and when finally they were maddened by detail they erupted into physical violence, hitting and scratching one another; which of course returned them to the madness of detail again, because physical violence entails the long-drawn-out processes of justice and the law. The story of who had done what to whom had to be told, and the matters of guilt and punishment established, though this never satisfied them either; in fact it made things worse, because it seemed to promise a resolution that never came. The more its intricacies were specified, the bigger and realer their argument grew. Each of them wanted more than anything to be declared right, and the other wrong, but it was impossible to assign blame entirely to either of them. And I realised eventually, I said, that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more, that was the point. There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.