That's not quite backed up by history. He was pretty darn fast for the first three books, but then it all kind of fell apart. Personally I would say that the first three are very equivalent in terms of quality and I (again, IMHO) continue to enjoy them over several rereads. I have not had any inclination to reread Feast or Dance, though I've had other people tell me that reading them back-to-back was more fulfilling than with a six year gap! My introduction to the series was through the Daenerys chapters from AGOT published as a Novella in Asimov's. I've been reading the other books as soon as they came out, so my perspective is perhaps different from someone who got their first read through in in larger chunks.

Book 1 (AGOT) -- 1996
Book 2 (ACOS) -- 1998 (2 yr)
Book 3 (ASOS) -- 2000 (2 yr)
Book 4 (AFFC) -- 2005 (5 yr)
Book 5 (ADWD) -- 2011 (6yr)
Book 6 (TWOW) -- ?? (at least 5yr)

I definitely agree that he's killed off most of his interesting and fun characters, introduced a bunch of boring plotlines ("I am Darkstar--and I am of the night--and I'm mysterious and cool!"), and written himself into an awkward place!

It's been years since I read the entire Dune series as a teenager (I've subsequently reread the first several times), but I remember enjoying God Emperor more than any book other than Dune. I can't say I remember much about it, but given your post, I'm inclined to go back and reread the rest.

That's pretty much exactly what Jordan did.

So that was at least five years ago. I'm not a big fan of the macabre speculation around his health and calculating the odds of his dying vs finishing the series first, but what does seem clear is that he has either written himsef into a wall and doesn't know where to go or he's just bored with writing the books. Can't say I blame him on either side. If I could build a turret on my house, buy a customized Tesla, and fly around the world to meet legions of fans, I would probably be doing that instead too!

I've read other articles that discuss a similar modification that causes mosquito offspring to be almost entirely male. This has two huge advantages. First, male mosquitos don't bite. Second, after several generations, there is a greatly reduced female population which causes the overall population of mosquitos to crash.

Mosquitos aren't a keystone species in any ecosystem where they live. They aren't the only (or even primary) insect that pollinates a certain plant (e.g., honeybees and almonds). They aren't the only food source for other species. They're just kind of...there...and a huge nuisance for people! If they disappear, other insects will easily whatever small void they leave--at least that's the theory!

I say eradicate the damn things! And get rid of ticks next!

I don't understand the point of your post at all? Yes, other nations have games that are similar to Chess (and that are genetically related to Chess--think 4th cousins twice removed) but that are not Chess and are not even called Chess!

Chess != Shogi != Shatranj != etc...

I was expecting this to be about slashdot.

PGP/GPG is much easier to use these days than it was in the 90's. Plugins exist for many mail clients that do the heavy lifting in the background.

Friends and family are surely tired of my tinfoil hat, they just do not seem to care about their privacy. Many say the "I have nothing to hide" line.

Slower photons in fiber optics means a slower, more relaxed pace for my web browsing.

That's no longer true.

The Catalyst drivers have made *huge* gains over the past year to year and a half, both in terms of performance and stability.

Civ V and the recent Civ-BE preview run just fine on my HD 7870.

... the oldest goatse in history.

I'm in a military.

Starfleet - especially the Starfleet of ST2 - is *unquestionably* a military.

Gene said a lot of things, but trek grew well beyond his initial creation and took on a life of its own. You can't argue using dogma.

Commodore BASIC, Turbo Pascal, M6800 Assembly (wonderful!), 8088 Assembly (horrible!), C, SQL, M68k Assembly, AREXX, perl, sh, Javascript, Java, php. I've dabbled in others (I can crank out a VB macro if need be), but those are my core fluencies.

The assembly was very useful in learning how the CPU actually works, and proved very useful for understanding industrial/microcontroller stuff later on, but with CPUs these days being vastly more complex than an 8088 or an M6800, I don't know if it could be dumbed down enough. Perhaps on a virtual machine or something?

Turbo Pascal was an absolutely brilliant language to learn on, and it is a shame Pascal seems to have fallen out of favour. It was powerful enough to write workable programs on, but simple enough to keep a new student from wandering off the cliff edge.

If I was teaching, I'd use perl:

- perl supports multiple syntaxes so you can teach the simple stuff in a straightforward manner
- The fact that it identifies variables and in which context they are being used is a brilliant way to help students separate out what bits are variables/arguments and what bits are code
- The C and sh bits are gateways into C and sh - "C lite"
- You can do some really powerful and *useful* programs in perl, which teaches that programming isn't just the creation of monolithic apps, but a *process* that can be used to solve a single specific problem.
- perl has native regular expressions, and teaching pattern matching opens up a whole new world of problem solving techniques

I can see homework like "Take the provided text file, and write a program that takes it as input and prints out the sentence that has the most vowels in it" or "Write a program that prints a list of the songs in your music library, ordered by date of album release". These programs are easy to write in perl, fun, challenging, and *useful*.

Phenom II x6 1090t, Radeon HD 7880, 12 GB DDR2 (it's an AM2+ board), Ubuntu 14.04 32 bit. Runs flawlessly for me.

Excellent! It took me straight to The Black Hole game. Thanks!