I can tell you about my most common mode of USB stick failure, and it's something I never had to worry about with floppies:

Kneeing the damned things such that I break the USB connector while it's plugged into the side of a laptop. OK, so yes, that's my own damned fault. But still, I never did that with a floppy...

But I'm a nerd. The only oven I have in my kitchen is a microwave oven.

Eh, I'm sure that's close enough, what's the worst that couL!JGFnasdj23NT #TR@dna5 m5wv sa3nt34246jnahe5t63qj

I only have my own personal anecdote, but I was the top boy in my highschool class by far. That didn't even get me into the top 10% of my class, though, since the top 10% were all girls. I think the only other boy in the honor society was a boy from the next year's class but I can't remember. (I know who the next highest boy in the school's ranking was but I don't remember whether or not he hit the cutoff for honor society.)

This was during the 90s in a public high school, so it wasn't like the population was simply unbalanced. This is hardly a new problem. Our education system simply doesn't engage with boys and hasn't for years at this point.

If you want links, though, it isn't hard to find them:

Itâ(TM)s Time to Worry: Boys Are Rapidly Falling Behind Girls in School
How to Make School Better for Boys: Start by acknowledging that boys are languishing while girls are succeeding.
Education: Boys Falling Behind Girls in Many Areas (Paywalled, so I have no idea what it says)

Those were just the top results on Google.

Unless something has changed since less than a week ago, if you try and connect to Steam while Steam is down for any reason (say, a DDOS attack, like in this article), you will fail to authenticate and be left in a "logged out" state. At that point there's no way to activate offline mode because you can't connect.

If you were already logged into Steam and attempt to "go offline" it will attempt to authenticate with the Steam servers, and again - if Steam is down, that's the end of that.

This happened less than a week ago. That's not misinformation, that was me trying to open Steam on Saturday to check out the holiday sale.

I can guarantee you that the last time I tried to start Steam without any network connectivity it tried to connect, couldn't, and refused to start in that state. That was a couple of years ago, but it definitely used to be the case that the only way to get Steam to go into offline mode is to already be online. So now whenever I get ready to leave for vacation I make sure to take the laptop offline.

Likewise when Steam was offline this weekend (and it was only down for like a half hour), I would start Steam, it would go to "Connecting...", it would fail, it would bring up the login window with an empty password, and that was that. No way to login, no way to switch to offline mode. So it's possible that it saw the working network connection and decided that since it couldn't contact the Steam servers it wouldn't go to "offline" but I most certainly couldn't do it while it was out. (I think Steam was out in a weird way where the update servers were up and a few game servers were up, but the authentication and store servers were down.)

But I can guarantee you that there was no way to get into offline mode at that time. I suppose I could have tried unplugging my Internet connection but why would I have tried that when it's their servers that are down, not my Internet?

I checked. Steam doesn't have a status page, so you have to rely on Reddit threads. Steam was definitely actually down since other people couldn't get online either. You most certainly cannot start Steam in this state, there's no way to do it, it will be unable to authenticate because it can't contact the servers, so it'll demand you reenter your password. At this point there's now no way to get into offline mode because Steam can't get past the login.

In my past experience with Steam, the only way to get into Offline Mode is to first be online. Apparently you're supposed to know ahead of time when your Internet connection will die for a week.

How long a timeout? Because Steam was down just the other day and the way it reacted was dumping me to the login screen, requiring me to re-enter my Steam password despite it being "saved", and then failing to connect because it was down, at which point it quits.

To get Steam into Offline mode, you must first connect to Steam.

I don't think Mac OS X even has a user-accessible BIOS. I know there's a "special" key combo you can hit to reset whatever they call their equivalent of CMOS settings (it's either NVRAM or PRAM and I have no clue what the difference is or why it matters). (I know this because there's another cute Mac bug that frequently hits my work MacBook where it will forget it has a built-in display because I turned it off while connected to a monitor, so you have to reset it to factory defaults to get it to realize "maybe I should turn on the laptop display.")

Ah, what the heck, I have the sucker sitting right next to me, let's see if you can disable it in ... "thu: no items." Oh.

(And I checked, you cannot access the EFI shell at all on new Macs. So even if it were possible to turn Thunderbolt off there, you can't access it anyway.)

Well, yes, if you can rip open the computer case and install new hardware, you have complete control over the hardware and that's to be expected.

Thunderbolt is more like USB to the user - it's a thing you use to connect untrusted devices to your system. You wouldn't expect that plugging in a USB thumbdrive would magically own your system (well, maybe you should, because it's happened in the past, but I think it's fair to say that it shouldn't). You'd think that plugging in a random Thunderbolt device would be designed to be safe. Apparently not: apparently Thunderbolt is unsafe by design.

The one mitigating factor is that literally no one uses Thunderbolt for anything, so it's not like anyone's likely to be coming across random compromised Thunderbolt devices. Discovering a Thunderbolt device at all would be out of the ordinary.

The OP has it wrong. The theaters would be liable.

Remember the shooting that occurred at a screening of Batman: the Dark Knight? Well, some families of victims are suing the theater and the case is still ongoing. Because there's a chance that the theater may be found liable of not having "enough security" for a random shooting, and because it can be argued that the theaters in this case were "warned ahead of time of a potential attack," they could potentially be found liable should anything happen.

Keep in mind that Sony is only pulling the release after the five largest theater chains refused to show it. And the reason they refused to show it is because they could potentially be liable should anything happen anywhere in any of their theaters. Given the poor reviews the movie is getting they presumably decided that it just wasn't worth any risk as they're probably not going to make much anything off showing it anyway.

Which is exactly how they work on Twitter and Facebook?

Which is why a lot of people stick the hashtags at the end of what they post and not in the middle. The fact that some people "misuse" them (although you can debate that) doesn't mean that they aren't fundamentally different from hyperlinks or they don't serve a useful purpose. They're effectively the <meta name="keywords"> tag in a medium that doesn't accept full HTML.

So basically you're only complaining about the presentation of the hashtag?

You don't understand the point of hashtags. The concept isn't to link to other tags, the concept is to make your post discoverable by other people. They're hashtags, after all, they tag a post as being related to some concept.

They're just like the tags underneath the Slashdot articles that no one pays attention to, like pleasestop and ohnoitsbennett. They're "reverse hyperlinks" if you will, designed not to send you to other pages, but to get you there from other pages.

Oh, no, I'm pretty sure the OP is trolling and that if he checked within iTunes he'd see he still has all his Ramones music. But my guess is that he's backing up from Windows/Mac OS X to Linux or something like that so anything special Mac OS X does for Time Machine wouldn't work, and that he does have an rsync log showing a bunch of files being deleted. It just should also show a bunch of new files with strangely similar names being added at the same time.

I'll bet if you do constantly rsync your iTunes music directory you will see deleted files. Because if you have iTunes set to "manage music" it will rename files according to some scheme that seems to randomly change over time. (Or because you changed some metadata like the song's name.) So it's entirely possible that a whole bunch of files were "deleted" - because iTunes moved them to a different location, and as far as I know, rsync doesn't have the ability to track files being moved around. (And a bit of Googling suggests this is in fact the case and offers some workarounds.)