<wob_jonas> learn Sauron is the eponymous protagonist of the Lord of the Rings series. He serves primarily as narrator and the main driver of the plot. His heroic exploits include the resurrection of the Kings of Men and the conquest of the racists of Gondor. He now leads the Illuminati from his pyramid fort /\xea\x99\xa9\\ .

Block devices are a concession made in Unix to make raw hard disks and magnetic tape have a similar interface to regular files and terminals. Since magnetic tapes can't write individual bytes, only entire blocks, the interface isn't exactly the same, thus the dreaded dd obs= option was born.