We need a +1 PWND moderation here.

I read Books 1, 2, and 3 all pretty much around the same time. Five years later, when Book 4 came out, I'd forgotten who most of the characters were and found I didn't really care about them when I read it; I skipped Book 5.

The Hugo Award Nominees reading package last year includes the entire Wheel of Time series (which I thought was a classy move by the publisher, and a nice contrast to Orbit Books including only excerpts for their three nominees.) (If you're a member of the appropriate Worldcon, you're eligible to vote for the Hugos, and in recent years they've provided an electronic package of most of the written and graphical works that are nominated.) The bad part about this is that the tablet I use for reading has the bloody entire bloody Wheel of bloody Time series on it, and I'm about 90% of the way through :-)

I hadn't read it before Jordan died, and probably that wasn't my birthday anyway, so for me it wasn't the worst birthday present ever; for that one I'll have to thank my little brother for giving me chicken pox when I was 10. There wasn't a vaccine for it back then, but there is now, and if your parents didn't give you the vaccine and other kids didn't give you the disease, trust me, it's one of the vaccines you want to get. (I also got measles the hard way, but I was young enough I don't remember it very well. Got the polio vaccine, though, unlike a neighbor's kid who was a couple of years older and had to use crutches.)

@NeilHimself wrote a nice, sensitive blog post about the position writers are in with their stories and their lives, but the tl;dr punch line is (rot13 for spoiler) Trbetr E.E. Znegva vf abg lbhe ovgpu.

Yeah, I probably should have blamed a different one of the non-length-limited strXXXX() functions, but strcmp() will still do Bad Things if you hand it one or two non-null-terminated pointers.

And yes, stderr would have been the better choice, but the important thing is to replace the implementations of dangerous functions with something that fails safely, and if you can't do it at compile or link time, it's still safer to do it at run time than to run the unsafe version.

is there an unknown benefit of having a blood-borne disease vector?

Yes, and he just told you, but you weren't listening. Having a blood-bourne disease vector has the benefit of staying the wrathful hand of Gaea.

Are you trying to persuade us that this disease is somehow important enough to be a bad thing, or are you making your argument to a god?

If you're so intimately familiar with a values and agendas of the gods, then on humanity's behalf I request that you also please explain to Cthulhu that the stars aren't right.

There are so many layers of stupid in this story, it's hard to address one of them without the embarrassing feeling that someone might read a rebuke of one stupidity, and take it as an implicit acceptable of the rest of the stupidity that you didn't address. If you argue too hard that Yog-Sothoth made a mistake in designing camels, somebody might think you're a creationist.

From the point of view of a malevolent user who intends to use the device to harm someone, why would they want your malware?

From the point of view of a benevolent user, why would they want your malware?

What will happen in the marketplace, if a benevolent user is persuaded to run your malware and then has a problem and finds out that it was due to the malware?

What's so special about the security needs of people in a capital, compared to people everywhere else? And is this special need, really a function of where they happen to be at a moment, or is it based on what their powers and responsibilities (and presumably, replacement cost) are?

I am leaving a few dozen obvious things out because it's tiring to enumerate. That my original point: don't think that just because I missed a totally-obvious way that the idea is stupid, as meaning I would debate one of these points from the premise of accepting a lot of other stupidity. It's not even something I disagree with or think is a bad strategy or an us-vs-them thing. It's just a totally dumb idea, a loser no matter how you look at it and no matter what your agenda is.

You call them worthless but then in the very same sentence you admit that they are all-powerful.

Error. You are proceeding from a healthy input of facts. The constraints of the thread are to proceed from a health input of science fiction.

This is how we're going bring our keepers to their knees, and eventually break out of the Matrix. We spend imaginary money on imaginary storage and then put all sorts of high-entropy stuff on it and run calculations to verify that it's really working, but they have to spend actually real resources, to emulate it.

Sloppy calculation tip: 24*365 = 10000.

If you're Sloppy enough to accept that premise, then at 10 cents/KWHr, a Watt costs a dollar per year. It makes your $28 turns into $32, but hey, close enough. When I'm shopping, I can add up lifetime energy costs really fast, without actually being smart. Nobody ever catches on!

Yeah- now in reality that doesn't happen. The whole lone programmer thing is almost completely a myth- pretty much all non-trivial programs are worked on by a team. At the absolute best you'll get someone who comes up with a new algorithm to do something by himself, but even then it will be one part of a larger whole that will need to be worked on by the full team.

Both. But in this case I meant the second one. In reality Lisp is dead as a doornail, and the rest of the functional languages with it.

It took my friends months to find working 8" floppy drives they could take to Guatemala to decode the files the police and army had created during the dirty wars there. I don't want to have to buy a 9-track tape drive to read the one 9-track tape I have (if I find it again, and if it's still even readable.) (I gave away the Sun cartridge drive along with the Sun-2.)

Much more reliable to copy the data every couple of years to some current medium, knowing that Moore's Law means that it's not going to cost much and the only problems will be data formats, not media formats.

No, they don't. But a lot of academics like to think they do.