Look at your hand. That's not your hand now, that's your hand a tiny fraction of a second ago.

If we don't die off in a billion years. In a billion years I'm sure we'll have infected most of the solar system with life.

Thanks, so far the book itself looks good and I'll get the problems with Lulu ironed out.

you're blazing through some action scenes in just a sentence or two.

Entirely true. The plan is to write a quick novella and expand it, pretty much like with Nobots. What's at slashdot of Nobots is maybe 20,000 words, the finished book (not counting stuff like the table of contents or notes) is 42,042 words.

I'll appreciate those notes, and thank you!

I just called it "tanks", modeled it from games I'd played in arcades. There's a Windows tanks game from a decade ago that's very similar, except it's in color (the computer I wrote it for was black and white only). The Windows tanks game weighed in at over 4 megabytes, mine was probably less than 400 bytes including timing loops to slow it down enough to be playable. This was 1983 on a really primitive TS-1000, 1 mHz Z-80 CPU and 4k of memory.

As to favorite tanks games, I haven't really played many in the last ten years, but there was a first person shooter tanks game in the arcade at Disney World in the early '80s that was awesome (I worked at Disney then, spent a lot of time in that arcade). It steered with two sticks like a real tank.

It probably doesn't have as good a display or as good a camera

No, the display is only 720p, which is plenty on a four inch screen. 1080p on that phone would be like putting a 440 cubic inch engine in a car; the car would be capable of doing 175 mph but you can't really use that extra power. Camera is 5.5 megapixels, yours is probably 8. But someone at Felbers with an older iPhone was oohing and aahing over the pictures on mine.

I doubt it's as snappy to do things like display mail without a wireless connection.

It will not only display email (same yahoo account I've had for a decade) whether or not wifi is on, it beeps when a new email comes in.

What feature does yours have that would warrant spending the money on it?

I don't need a case for my phone, if it breaks then so what? I'd hate to break a $600 phone but I can easily replace the one I have.

Similarly, my mother-in-law has one of those $90K cars, and it's very nice. It's a noticeably more comfortable ride than my '08 Civic, which is probably more comfortable than your Chrysler.

It's not a $90k car, but my sister got a new Lexus and my brother in law gave me a ride in it, the old Concorde was a lot more comfortable than her Lexux. It was probably a $30k-40k car new, I paid $10k. They sell houses, so they have to look prosperous so the Lexux makes sense in their case.

This means that you will not understand why companies win and lose, and if you ever get into the business side it will almost certainly hinder you badly.

Business does not interest me. I retire next February, comfortably, I might add. Once you spend it it's gone. Sorry if it offends you, but wasting money is stupid unless you're Bill Gates or Larry Ellison.

Exactly why it's so hard to write a good book without an editor. But editors are expensive.

And with that limited set of actual useful use cases, how much benefit is there in centralizing it, or adding voice control.

A agree about the centralization, but as to voice control, I see you never had children. "Shut off that light, dammit! I have to PAY for electricity, should I take it out of your allowance?"

You might be lucky to get 16 BYTES per second

Early DOS viruses, written in assembly, measured in the dozens of bytes. Hell, you can boot a computer with a single interrupt, that takes six bytes. At 16 bytes per second you could transmit your virus in under 15 seconds.

Of course, to infect the computer with sound it's going to need to already be infected to infect it, the first infection being the code that actually receives and executes the code in the second infection.

Wraiths, mummies and ghouls would like to know when they'll get their turn.

Well, the Venusians are pretty ghoulish in Nobots, and the Martians call them ghouls... I guess if it becomes a best seller you'll see a lot more ghoul books.

A high-frequency sound has also the benefit of travelling long distances in air.

Actually, you have that backwards. The higher the frequency the more directional it is, but lower frequencies take more power.

It has not been my experience that computer speakers are capable of making sounds much outside the range of human hearing, nor computer micophones capable of picking such sounds up.

300 samples sounds like a click, and using assembly you can write viruses that small. You could hear it if you were aware of it, but it wouldn't stand out.

That said, I'm skeptical too.

Sure, you could get information across an airgap this way, but could you get enough information across to be worthwhile?

Yes. If you use assembly you can make tiny programs that run blazingly fast. I wrote a fully operational two player battle tanks game back in 1983 that was only a few hundred bytes long. Back in the late eighties there were complete viruses that were measured in the tens of bytes.

Actually, you'll find that a significant portion of self-published authors is very concerned with quality control... We self-published writers try very hard to escape the reputation of uploading unedited garbage.

You could have fooled me.

Editors aren't cheap. It would have cost me $1000 to have Nobots professionally edited, so I just proofread the thing, fixing mistakes, a few hundred times.

Publishing a book is expensive without any professional services, at least hardcover and paperback (e-books are a lot cheaper).