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"As opposed to illiteracy, where you can't read, aliteracy means that you can but you just can't be bothered. They say aliteracy is on the rise these days."
- Peter Watts
 |
| Smart Pizza Box | ||
| A container with microprocessor-based data processing capabilities built-in to the box. |
Every aspect of the CosaNostra Pizza business has been optimized. Gone are the cheap cardboard boxes - how can you tell anything about the history of your order? If you've been guaranteed a pizza in thirty minutes, a guarantee that states that the company CEO (Uncle Enzo) will personally fly to your crummy little house to apologize, you need a box you can trust, a box with a smart microprocessor running a computer read-out and a time-stamp.
| The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator's head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator's car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box's builtin RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down. |
| From Snow Crash,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Bantam in 1992 Additional resources -
|
That's right; when you join the organization, you become part of the family. " A really scary, twisted, abusive family."
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and Technology by Neal Stephenson
Tech news articles related to Snow Crash
Tech news articles related to works by Neal Stephenson
Smart Pizza Box-related
news articles:
- Pizza Computer Is One Smart Box
- Green Box 'Futuristic' Pizza Box
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| Marie Curie's Papers Still Radioactive |
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SF writers popularized and elaborated on this idea a generation before the first patents were filed.
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