If this isn't being blown out of proportion much, then the worst potential consequence I've thought of so far is political dissidents having their network exposed.

Well, speaking of TV stereotypes, all of my friends who have seen The Big Bang Theory accuse me of being Sheldon. So maybe.

Um, do you watch TV? "Good looking women stereotyped as airheads" was in the first example in the article, and is prevalent throughout Friends. Southerners stereotyped as trailer trash is virtually the premise of King of the Hill. As for the rich folk, I don't think I've ever seen a rich folk not stereotyped that way -- for instance Lois' dad in Family Guy, Mr. Burns in The Simpsons, the villain in any Adam Sandler movie. et cetera.

For math, remember that you'll also need to look at papers published. One of Gauss' works launched the field of intrinsic differential geometry, I think it's title went something like "On the geometry of curves and surfaces." Also Gauss' Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. You might try history books for other good leads -- the standard references in the history of math is Morris Kline's "Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times." Something of Riemann should be important, since he developed multivariable integration.

Sort of. I read Bell's The Development of Mathematics a couple years ago and spoke with a philosophy of math professor about it, who gave me the opinion that I stated above regarding Bell. The book was enjoyable, but in my philosophy professor's opinion at least, not reliable. He recommend Kline's Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, which is 1300 dry pages. Perhaps if you have an interest in a particular episode of math it would be a good book, but I'm pretty sure it was not intended as an actual straight-through read. I don't know any more enjoyable math history read.

An assortment of problems (some more accessible to a high schooler than others, perhaps) with really, really neat proofs.

It's worth noting that E.T. Bell tends to be full of errors, and occasionally just makes sh*t up.

I think your logic is incorrect. The original poster did not say "my server went down around midnight, could this be a coincidence?" rather he said "my server, which has a particularly excellent track record of not going down, did so near midnight with very high precision. Could this not be a coincidence?" Given that this happening at any specific time is very unlikely compared to the relative abundance of rollover errors, this is a very legitimate hypothesis. Furthermore your argument is essentially saying that anything with a non-zero probability of occurring randomly is probably not a coincidence. Otherwise, instead of comparing to some 50 million servers you ought to be comparing to a much smaller number of servers meeting the description of the original poster's. I don't think you pose any legitimate argument that this is coincidental, and it strikes me as very probable that it is not.