Impressively quick

There's something really rather refreshing about a computer that can, after a unscheduled loss of power, be brought back into production in under four hours...

Overlooking the flaws?

David Weber, over on Tor, has some interesting ideas about why people sometimes overlook some of the mistakes made by his characters:

The problem is that when you create a smart, capable, ultimately successful character, the mistakes they make have to be credible ones for that character to have made. Competent people make competent mistakes. They don’t just wake up one morning and say “I know! I think I’ll do something really stupid today! What the heck, at least it’ll be different!” Based on the information they have, and the resources available to them, they’ll usually make the right decisions. You can give them incomplete information, or cause their resources to be somehow flawed, in which case the battle plans they make, the decisions they reach, are going to be unsuccessful in terms of accomplishing the desired result. But the decisions themselves are going to make perfectly good sense.

A second, but associated problem, is that if the character acts consistently with his or her own qualities and personality, then a wrong decision—a mistake—may not be recognizable by the reader as such. Honor’s decision to shoot the commander of Blackbird Base out of hand in The Honor of the Queen comes to mind, for example. There’s no question that the guy had it coming, and there’s also no question that the decision to kill him was totally in keeping with Honor’s personal sense of honor. There’s also no question, however, that it would have been a clear-cut and flagrant violation of military law, that it would have destroyed her professionally (and probably personally, once she realized what she’d done), and that it would have been at least as wrong as it would have been right. Yet because the reader understands why she’s doing it, and because it’s such an inevitable consequence of who she is (and because readers like her), I keep having people look at me blankly when I point to it as an enormous mistake on her part. In fact, it was one which was avoided only because Scotty Tremaine physically knocked her weapon aside even as she squeezed the trigger. Or, put another way, she did shoot a POW out of hand; she simply missed her shot because of unforseen interference.