You give Pope Francis too much credit. His office is a carbon copy of the office of the high priest, and is a mockery of anything Jesus stood for. Nearly every organized Christian sect starts with rejecting "Part 2" nearly fully, by grossly misinterpreting it.

So, quantity over quality? Really?

All that tells me is that you are probably unemployed.

You forgot to mention why. Why at least 20? Why both fiction and non-fiction? Assuming that everything you read is well-written, what is wrong with only reading blogs and periodicals? What is wrong with only reading non-fiction? What is wrong with only reading fiction? What is wrong with only reading and writing personal correspondence? What is wrong with not reading anything thick for 2 years while writing your own novel?

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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.