>I get the impression that most people who recommend the Dragon book haven't read it.
These days you can usually tell that they haven't read it if they refer to it as "the Dragon book" and don't say anything about the edition. The same thing goes for "Knuth", "the Appel book", etc.
>It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part of a character in a spy novel.
In that case we should be able to figure out his key and decrypt the file. The key in the spy novels is always something you feel like you should have seen coming, something predictable.
Do you get the oil by sucking on an actual cod liver?
Note that regular unrefined cod liver oil is very high in vitamin A, so you can kill yourself by drinking enough of it(see hypervitaminosis A). Vitamin A pills contain trivial amounts though(to stop people from killing themselves I am told), so the cod liver oil is a nice way to go if you feel that you need to supplement for some reason. And of course you also get the D, some nice fatty acids, and maybe a little mercury too.
Based on my experience I think that's easily explained by population density, amount of space available per capita, etc. If anything I see hackeresque spirit as more pronounced in rural areas. They aren't forced by necessity into a shared space like those in the city though, and maybe they don't consider the benefits of a shared space being that important.
The Europe situation seems more interesting. Look at the numbers(per capita) for The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and then France. The first three have many hacker spaces per capita. France is much lower. I'd expect that(from past experience), but don't have any good ideas about why it is.
To further malign him of course.