That's better than the U.S./India time difference.

You're quoting A Tale of Two Cities, not War and Peace.

I used to think that way, but my whole working life so far has been the opposite experience. Many, many technically competent people simply don't put any effort into reading and writing. They might have passed the tests in school when they were being graded, but their emails, specs, and source code comments are not up to scratch. Very few people are *good* at writing, of course, but most people don't even proofread.

I was talking about the suggestion that California uses enough water to have a significant effect on Pacific sea levels. My back of the envelope estimate suggests that lowering the Pacific by one inch would take at least ten thousand times as much water as California uses in a year.

All right, I give up. I can't figure out whether you're serious or whether this is a parody. Help me out?

If your primary security concern is a federal subpoena, you have already made far greater errors than picking the wrong email provider.

ALPS keyswitches work well for gaming and they're much less noisy than buckling springs. You can find used Dell AT101Ws all over the place.

Kilobyte-quantities of EEPROM are cheap enough that the package is probably a non-trivial part of the cost. The die cost is not the only lower bound on the price of a memory IC.

Those were generic examples. A better one for a mobile device might have been that the contacts on the charging port wears out. Based on the rest of your post I'm skeptical that you know anything about the components used to make Kindles, but I didn't design it so I won't speculate further.

I apologize for the LCD/E-Ink confusion. But it doesn't make a difference because neither of them are designed to last for 100 years. According to the company, they expect that "over 90% of E Ink displays will last more than 10 years with typical usage", where "typical usage" is defined as room temperature. Kindles are rated for operation between 0 - 35 C (32 - 95 F), and discussion on Amazon suggests that this is a real limitation. That range is similar to what LCDs can handle. I suspect that both are limited by a chemical breakdown process (which would happen exponentially faster at higher temperatures) but I don't know enough about displays to say for sure.

If you think that a space probe is in any way comparable to a consumer e-reader, then I'm afraid you don't understand anything at all about electronics or engineering. Had you kept reading on Wikipedia, you might have found stuff like this:

Voyager-1 was designed from the ground up for reliability in a hostile environment. I can't find a price for the hardware itself, but you can bet it was a more than $100, probably by several zeros. And even so, it's looking like the power supply will fail before it turns 100. A Kindle is nowhere near that level of reliability. It doesn't need it and nobody wants to pay for it.

Many thanks to you and blueg3 for providing a better summary. These terrible analogies for quantum mechanics are always more confusing than helpful.

On what do you base that statement? Consumer-grade electronic devices are not designed to last that long. Electrolytic capacitors leak, electrodes corrode, copper in IC traces migrates and shorts out, batteries wear out. I don't know about LCDs, but I'm sure they have long-term failure modes too, especially if they're exposed to sunlight. The whole device will be exposed to temperature extremes due to the lack of air conditioning in a survival situation. I'll buy 20-30 years. But 100? No way.

Power is usually described as going in or out.

So which manufacturers have give you the best and worst results?

Yeah, but the poll is about the ALA's Banned Books Week. You would expect totalitarian regimes to ban books; the point of Banned Books Week is that people try to do it in America too.

The American Library Association maintains lists of the most frequently challenged books (i.e. the ones people try to ban). Although 1984 shows up on the list of challenged classics, there is only one challenge listed -- someone in Jackson County, Florida in 1981 thought that it was "pro-communist and contained explicit sexual matter". The first part shows a massive failure of reading comprehension, not actual hostility towards the content. 1984 doesn't show up in the top 100 challenged books lists for 1990-1999 or 2000-2009.

1984 is definitely worth reading, and since its story features a banned book its presence in the poll makes a certain amount of sense. But it's not a great example of a challenged book, and the presence of several other dystopian works makes me wonder what the poll writer was thinking. Book banning in the U.S. is not a top-down government-led project to turn people into sheep for a New World Order. It's a bottom-up process where private citizens (mainly parents) try to "protect" children and teenagers from what they see as objectionable content.

As can be seen from the top 100 and top 10 by year lists, sexual content in books targeted at teenagers is the biggest concern. Most of the challenges are to fictional books, but a few non-fiction sex ed books make the list. The 2011 list even has a book for kids about what happens when their mom gets pregnant! Aside from sex, it seems like drug and alcohol use, offensive language (particularly racial slurs), and "religious viewpoint" (probably criticism of religion/Christianity) are popular reasons for challenging books.

The Handmaid's Tale prominently features all of those subjects, and is an excellent book as well. The first-person narrative really drives home the crushing horror of the setting. If you're looking for some dystopian fiction to read, I highly recommend it.