Really miss PJ, and would kill to get Groklaw back, especially for this...

I'd been waiting for the reviews to come in on the Sanderson novels before committing myself to reading them, and was pleasantly surprised at how good they ended up being.

That being said even after re-reading the entire series for what seems like the thousandth time I'm still not sure about that myself.

Here's hoping your next adventure lasts as long and has a positive impact on as many people.

For the record, I'm currently playing Minecraft on a private multiplayer server. There are still a bunch of my guildies on Vent raiding every day, but I feel more community playing MC and cancelled my three WoW accounts this month. I hadn't played in a while, and my kids (who shared the other accounts) were playing MC more and more instead of WoW.

Not sure if your comment was intended to be serious, but it's certainly true at my house. I now own 5 MC accounts, 2 from Alpha and will probably pick up a couple more before release for my kids' friends.

I've known Howard for more than a decade. He started out as a local cop who had a hobby working with computers. He was a pioneer in forensic analysis of computer evidence, and was instrumental in establishing the Air Force's information security capability which was arguably the biggest influence on the evolution of today's DoD capability. He started out doing hands on low level hardware and software analysis. He was a hacker in the true sense of the word. I visited his home, and there were always multiple machines strewn about, which he had built himself.

While I doubt he's done much hands-on work in a long time, he understands the issues and problems as they relate to computer crime and network security. He knows everyone worth knowing in the law-enforcement side of security, since most of them worked for him or with him at some point in his career. He also has worked as the security chief for such companies as Microsoft and Ebay and has all the contacts on the commercial side as well.

I have met and gotten to know numerous "security professionals" over the years in classes, conventions, forums, courtrooms, and bars. I haven't met anyone else with Howard's mix of legitimate hands-on experience and political contacts (political as in knowing the right people not political as in democrat and republican). While I don't know who else they were looking at, I'm positive they could have done much worse than Howard.