And the author of that one *also* does not name the offending company.

Raising the issue in a vacuum is fruitless, because there's no general panacea for corporate security stupidity. Other users won't know until they receive their passwords in the mail that they've opened an account with a company that should be marked "Fail".

So mark them. Here's a good place to start, and the above blogger should have done it also. Otherwise you're just blowing off steam.

This doesn't seem like a tough call. I have four volumes of Knuth on my shelf (just found 4A existed, so its cover is still pretty fresh), and I refer to them frequently. Even the oldest ones (though I did buy a fresh copy of Vol 1 after it was updated). It's my first stop when I need to start researching an algorithm, and often I don't need to go further.

OK, now Thomas Haigh. Googled him. Checked his credentials. PhD dissertation in the sociology of computer science. Umm, OK. Think I'll go analyze this algorithm some more... after I check my Knuth to see whether he's already done it for me.

That sounds charming, but there was no clue during the setup of the new Xbox One that the problem was due to their network failure. The error messages presented to us as we were trying to figure out the setup were that our cables, local network and ISP DNS server were not working. There was no suggestion offered by the box that a server outage was a possibility. Yes, we did go on to other things, but it took us two hours to decide it was likely the problem was not in fact ours.

Your smug superiority is misplaced.

Less merry for adults, too. We got an Xbox One for the grandkids, and I tried to help my son get it sorted for a couple of hours. The situation was magnified by inappropriate error messages from Microsoft pointing fingers at our cables, our network, our ISP's network, and, in short, everything except their own darned servers! A single approximately correct error diagnosis from them (like "Our servers may be knackered. Check back later.") would have redirected our efforts more appropriately.

When I finally stopped checking Microsoft's website and got around to looking at news sites, I told them about the DOS. One of my grandsons said "Think of the children!"

I just did a quick cat / tr / grep / wc on Lord of the Rings, and got:

Fellowship of the Rings: 1361 hyphenated words out of 178,672
The Two Towers: 1047 of 154,403
Return of the King: 829 of 135,285

This guy gets kicked to the curb for 100 hyphens out of 90,000 words? Pooh. It's a matter of style.

Fermi's Paradox: if extraterrestrial life is as common as reasonable estimates in Drake's Equation would suggest, why haven't we seen credible evidence of them yet? This research is an interesting take on the question -- gamma ray bursts might keep knocking civilizations off unless they're far enough out from mass concentrations to avoid the bursts.

I found the full paper at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.2506... and it didn't require a subscription.

I enjoyed Honor Harrington for a while... at least until it devolved into tree-cat fan-fiction. But the parts that appealed to me least were the parts you're referring to. When even the names of her monarchy's opponents were cribbed directly from the French revolutionary leaders I cringed. Other writers also crib a piece of history and file off the serial numbers to disguise their laziness, but Weber doesn't even bother with the file.

I agree that Iain M. Banks's Culture novels show that Stross's goal is at least possible. He did a brilliant job of imagining a distant future that gave me severe culture shock, but was also entertaining and engaging. Books set thousands of years in the future where we have the same viewpoints and aspirations do indeed make it difficult for me to suspend disbelief.

William Gibson's recent "Peripheral" provides two more near-term futures, both of which I would expect Stross to approve - the first perhaps two or three decades ahead that's a (perhaps appropriately) cynical view of the direction our civilizations are going, and the second perhaps a century on from that. With the closer one I could see where it was all coming from, and with the second the protagonist was able to relate better than I was... but then she was a couple of decades closer to it. It seemed to me a real tour de force. Recommended.

Looking back, though, I like to see how various authors did predicting their future in which we currently live. Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer" is still one of my favorites, but didn't work as a crystal ball. One of the Lazarus Long books placed his sidekick and tame math genius Andrew Libby on the spaceship's bridge using his slide rule to work his calculations. Gibson's 1984 "Neuromancer" hasn't held up very well either in this regard.

But Vernor Vinge's groundbreaking 1981 "True Names" still seems spot on to me, except perhaps underestimating the bandwidth that was going to be available. Anonymous hackers mostly stayed ahead of the governments, and Vinge foresaw some of our current network-based threats only a few years after the ARPAnet started spreading out from the universities. Like the protagonist Mr. Slippery, I feel impaired when I'm on a cruise ship with limited bandwidth and can't get instant answers to fleeting questions -- it seems that I'm not as effective a problem solver when I'm unplugged from the Net. Vinge even predicted the role of Homeland Security, though he had the Welfare Department cast in that role: when confronted by the authorities, Roger Pollack said "I do know my rights. You FBI types must identify yourselves, give me a phone call, and--". The response was "Perhaps that would be true, if we were the FBI or if you were not the scum you are. But this is a Welfare Department bust, Pollack, and you are suspected--putting it kindly--of interference with the instrumentalities of National and individual survival." And it keeps getting better. Pardon me, time to go read it yet again.

President Obama has indeed forsworn the moon, and he's the one who tells NASA how to pick targets. In http://www.nasa.gov/news/media... he says "Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before. Buzz has been there. There’s a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do. So I believe it’s more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach -- and operate at -- a series of increasingly demanding targets, while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward. And that’s what this strategy does."

He's the first successful Presidential candidate I've voted for, and I've been voting for one or another of their opponents since 1968, but I was very disappointed with this President's unfocused long-term strategy of finding different balls of matter to plant flags on... once.

Orbiting a few satellites around the Moon is laudable, but they can't be realistically compared to a project like Apollo or a major follow-on like a permanent or semi-permanent Moon base.

CERN said the evidence is five sigma or so for a particle more or less where the Higgs was expected (or perhaps about halfway between where two competing theories expected it), but some now doubt whether the particle CERN found is actually the Higgs. See this recent reassessment: http://sdu.dk/en/Om_SDU/Fakult...

"it does not have any status as anything else." -- not quite true. Perhaps not any *legitimate* status, or *deserved* status, but the IRS granted it tax-exempt status as a religion after a relentless harassment campaign.