Wirth's Law:

Wirth's law is a computing adage made popular by Niklaus Wirth in 1995. It states that "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

Is Wirth's Law still in effect? Most of the examples I've read about are several years old.

ETA: I find it interesting that Wirth's Law was apparently a thing for decades (known since the 1980s, supposedly) but seems to be over. I'm no expert though, I just wonder what changed.

Why did Quirrell allow the unicorn corpses to be found? Why didn't he dispose of the corpse by making it disappear, instead of trying to pass it off as a predator? Would anyone notice if a unicorn vanished without leaving a corpse? ( I suppose they might, since they're medically valuable, but since unicorns are known not to have predators the predated corpse is hardly a good cover, as we saw. Vanishing the corpse would have made it take longer to notice.)

Anyway, this is one of the few times we see Quirrell's plot clearly failing without anyone actually acting to thwart him. Is it plausible that he was actually unable to kill and drink a unicorn without anyone immediately noticing?

Why 5?

"It takes a cracked soul to cast." and "Murder tears the soul." just says that if you've gotten to the point where you could cast it once, that particular pre-requisite is already accomplished, so the work to crack your soul is already put in. It doesn't say anything about removing the requirement of wanting someone dead.

Though, so long as we're looking at evidence, if we take Quirrell at his word, then his ability to cast the spell despite not wanting his opponent dead is pretty strong evidence that the requirement is in fact removed. In fact, we already know that some "requirements" to cast spells are not set in stone: from that same scene, Harry cast the true patronus without the carefully practiced stance and wand twitches, instead merely "one desperate wish that an innocent man should not die -"—but the constant requirement in this case seems to be the thought that accompanies the casting of the spell, which is why I'm hesitant to believe the wish of death is removed from AK's casting requirement.

In addition to my glowing cavy army (er, I mean, my luminosity guinea pigs) I would like a volunteer or three who is not also a guinea pig and who is not already my close personal friend to sanity-check methodologies I develop before I contaminate my glowing cavy army (that is to say, my luminosity guinea pigs) with any input. (Close personal friends may also be consulted but I should probably have at least one or two less interested parties.)

I should stop smoking.

1) I am addicted to nicotine.

2) Nicotine patches are expensive, cigarettes are very cheap.

3) cigarettes supress my appetite and they are cheaper than food. I can smoke 25 cigarettes for the cost of a loaf of bread. it takes me more than a day to smoke that many. if i want to buy things to put on the loaf of bread, we're up to about 3-4 days worth of cigarettes.

4) if i quit smoking i would have more money for food, but not so much more as to make a huge difference.

5) smoking is my only vice and my only luxury.

6) I currently have a 0% chance of becoming pregnant (long distance relationship + we're both girls anyway), so I do not have to worry about harming a fetus. -- i do plan to quit someday before i have children, but that is a few years away yet.

7) i'm in my mid 20s, so the health risks aren't looming large yet. i can quit later.

8) i need something to do with my hands and my mouth. i dont like gum or lollies all that much.

I think the info was sent to Bones rather than her finding it and going back, but your point may still stand. Perhaps "somebody sent something back to Amelia Bones" is vague enough to slip past the filter. There must be some nonzero cutoff, because otherwise the info would affect the whole future (from the point of receiving the info) light come of anyone who got time-traveled info, and the whole earth would be interdicted whenever somebody went back.

If I'm wrong about that, it's possible that either Bones or Dumbledore wasn't thinking, or Dumbledore realized that he was already blocked and that's part of why he decided he wanted the info.

Chapter 61:

So Voldemort is a perfectionist seeking the "most powerful" combination of enemy, servant, and ancestor. Nice and good. But it sounds like if he were maybe a little less perfectionist, he could get any servant (I'm sure Lucius could spare Crabbe or Goyle, or he could just buy a house elf), any enemy (it's not like he doesn't have enough enemies, and anyone who wasn't an enemy before he took their blood would certainly be afterward), and so the only even slightly hard-to-come-by ingredient is the bones of the ancestor. So why in the name of Merlin haven't the bones of all Voldemort's ancestors been dug up and placed in a locked box under Dumbledore's desk? How come Mad-Eye Moody is out guarding the graveyard as if leaving Dark Lord Resurrection Ingredient #3 literally lying in the ground is at all safe?

(even so, an MoR-worthy solution would be for Voldemort to grab a sufficiently old hominid from a museum and assume it was common ancestor to everyone, but it would at least slow him down).