I enjoyed both, but I cringe at the thought of a movie version of either. If you have a description-heavy novel that's about 100 pages long, you can just about cram it into a movie. Anything longer, and you have to be quite aggressive about the cutting. Both Anansi Boys and American Gods have splits that would let them work quite well as a miniseries, but I can't imagine them as films without so much abridgement that they may as well be different stories. I've also not read Sandman, so I can't comment on that.

Is it to do with wanting to reduce emissions? I'd have thought it was a much more pragmatic requirement. Fossil fuel extraction costs are going to keep increasing. The costs of alternatives are going to keep decreasing. At some point, they will cross over and at this point the value of stocks in a fossil fuels will suddenly drop. Currently, they are quite high and probably will be for quite a few more years (although increased difficulty in extraction is going to make expensive accidents more common, which won't help). Harvard expects endowments to last a period measured in hundreds of years. Now is probably a good time to start selling off the shares in fossil fuel companies, while there are still people who want to buy them at a high price.

I was thinking about this the other day. The core problem is not lobbying, because it's perfectly sensible that people with an interest in a particular topic would want to talk to their elected representatives about it. The problem is unequal access to lobbying, and that comes from the massive wealth inequality in the USA and the fact that lobbying is expensive. Perhaps a better solution would be for each member of the electorate to have allocated a certain amount of their representatives' time.

For example, each member of the House of Representatives is responsible for approximately 500,000 people. Assume that they spend on average two hours a day talking to their constituents and the rest is spent in committees, or on holidays (since we're talking about an average). That's 2628000 seconds per year, or around 5 seconds per constituent per year (10 seconds per term). If you want to have a five minute conversation with a representative, then you must find 60 people all willing to give you their time allocations. Or 300 all willing to give you 20% of their allocation. If you want to have an hour-long meeting, then that's 720 people who must give up all of their allowance, or 3600 who must give up 20% (or any breakdown).

I'm not sure what testing OpenSSL does, but most protocol tests include a fuzzing component, and if the fuzzer didn't generate heartbeat packets with an invalid length then it's not doing a good job. This sort of code is routinely run by people outside the OpenSSL team to look for vulnerabilities, so I'd hope that they'd do it themselves. Generally, any field that contains a length is used in guided fuzzing, because it's easy to get wrong.

The date that it was added to the OpenSSL codebase is very close to the time when the leaked NSA documents claim that they had a 'major breakthrough' in decrypting SSL. I would imagine that they are not responsible for introducing it, but do have people doing very careful code review and fuzzing on all changes to common crypto libraries, so I wouldn't be surprised if they'd known about it (and been exploiting it) since it was originally released.

In fact, by placing the requirement that someone agrees to the license before using a derived work of the GPL'd software, they are violating the GPL...

The FSF requires copyright assignment for all of their projects, so they do have some quite valuable assets. They provide the original author with a license to sublicense their contributed code under whatever license they choose, but they are the only ones that can relicense the whole. For example, if someone else managed to gain control of the GNU assets then they could legally relicense GCC under an MIT license, allowing its code to be used anywhere.

The point is not that a general malloc() would catch it, but that there are security-focussed malloc() implementations that will. Even valgrind will - it knows that malloc() has special properties and so will object if you derive a valid pointer to the wrong allocation by running off the end of another one. You don't need to use the security-focussed malloc() in deployment (unless you're really paranoid), you just need to support testing with it. Running this code with a malloc() that did aggressive bounds checking would have caught it immediately. That's something a continuous integration system and a test suite ought to have caught.

The same reason that space vehicles and meteors burn the atmoshere when they encounter 'air' at high velocities.

The same thing that destroyed the space shuttle "Columbia"with damaged heat tiles on the wing edge when it re-entered.

I have wondered that same thing from the beginning.

I was thinking they would only be used more along 'line of sight' ranges.

"Line of sight' very loosely defined here! It would still have high velocity at ranges that are occluded by the 'over the horizon' ranges.
Maybe more accurate to call it 'follows Earth's Curvature', or something.

It would be useful info to know what the projectile's velocity is at the stated 100 mile range, to enable calculations for remaing energy.

I know from long range target shooting that projectiles slow down fast.
ex:
a .308 Winchester firing a 150 grain bullet at 2750 feet per second will be travelling less than 1000 fps after only 1000 yards, and remaing energy is far less than at muzzle velocity.
With a 100 yard 'sight in', that same bullet is striking the target about 10 feet below point of aim at around that 1000 yards, and a 10 mile per hour crosswind will deflect it around 2 feet, IIRC.(fuzzy on that memory)

The flames/fireball are similar to the the effects of say, a meteor entering Earth's atmoshere at high velocity...no fuel involved.

No trick here, just super heated air and plasma caused by friction, and maybe some 'fuel' from ablation of sabot and possibly projectile.
Similar principals enable deisel engines to combust fuel without a spark plug...compression causes friction, friction causes heat, ...

Japanese products were initially low quality too. There have been a few interesting books on the subject of the change. In particular, several Japanese companies focussed very heavily on quality control processes for about a decade, which allowed them to dramatically improve their quality. Over the same time, the Japanese people who had been responsible for copying the designs became sufficiently familiar with them that they were able to initially improve them and then produce better ones.

The main factor stopping Russia or China going through the same transition is institutionalised corruption. It's hard to implement good quality control if you can't trust the people doing the inspections not to take bribes...

XP was unfortunate to come out just before computers became fast enough for the vast majority of users. A 1GHz CPU and a reasonable amount of RAM is enough for a huge proportion of computer users. Before that, you'd buy a computer and it would be too slow, but it would be the fastest that you can afford (or that existed) and you'd upgrade when you could afford a replacement, because there'd be something faster out a few months later. By the early 2000s, the new computer wasn't perceptibly faster than the old one, so there was an increasingly small incentive to switch.