Too contrived. The only book one needs is the UTF specification.

For me personally, A Confederacy of Dunces is easily worth the rest of the list. READ IT!

If the point is to expose oneself to good art and literature, then some parts of the Bible should be avoided. I won't name bad books, and I won't name all the good ones, but these are my favorite from the literary point of view:

1. Genesis
2. Exodus
3. Job
4. Proverbs
5. Ecclesiastes
6. Song of Songs
7. Wisdom
8. Sirach
9. Ezekiel
10. Daniel
11. Luke
12. John
13. Acts
14. Hebrews
15. James
16. Jude

Second. I am not sure it helps anything, but it is one of the best epics you will read.

Have you tried NOT reading it, though? May be you should doing THAT before you pass judgement. As an ardent admirer of the work of all three men in the title, I suspect my mind was spared from yet another piece of quasi-philosophical pulp.

It is important to distinguish between the form factor of the iPad, and the iPad itself. The former may well be extremely useful in education. But the iPad is not, as it is not indented to be an educational tool. It is not even intended to be a tool that is useful to the end user, other than by accident. It is a spy box, designed from the ground up to be both addictive and manipulative, with the purpose of ruining the end users' privacy and then scamming them.

This is a problem with smoking, not with tobacco.

A great list. To add, there ain't nothing wrong with tobacco that ain't also wrong with alcohol. Just like any other toxic and extremely addictive drug, it should be 100% legal, but regulated tightly: tax it as much as the market will bear, forbid all ads, mandate plain brandless packaging.

Almost everyone needs anonymity, at least some of the time. The more people use Tor (without cheating), the more robust is the network, so your uppity attitude is completely out of place. Tor is for lulz as much as it is for freedom fighting.

But most likely, one part of the NSA wrote the malware, another part found out about it, and then both the malware and an attempt to stop it failed due to their utter incompetence.

Actually, his first sentence makes a cognitive leap from observing an involuntary visceral reaction to the Valve branding, to concluding that it is now time for some new underwear. An average slashdot moderator is not in the habit of thinking this far ahead.

gnasher719 gave a nice answer, and I just want to add more. For statistical purposes, a true and fair RNG printing a string of zeroes and ones would at the very least print a normal number, and to test for that, one would have to count the frequencies of substrings of every length, in every base, which of course can be done, but may get expensive if one wants a lot of confidence.

What gnasher719 calls cryptographical randomness cannot be tested in practice, but in theory, one can run the countable set of all computer programs in parallel, and see whether they can predict the digits of the RNG sequence with probability better than 1/2. Of course, this is completely intractable in the foreseeable future, with or without functional quantum computers.

IANAL, but I think if one doesn't sign for it, and there are no witnesses to receiving, then saying "I don't recall getting any playstations" should provide a solid defense.

A lot of Web sites are simply broken. I routinely see commercial Web sites that display a blank page even after I "temporarily allow all this page" several times, so as to unblock everything (Firefox haters?). For my money, any Web site that could easily provide its functions without JavaScript, but doesn't, is broken. The ones that don't care to fail gracefully are even more broken. And then there are Web sites that are completely FUBAR, no matter how you look at them. Welcome to the Web :)