Not necessarily--not all magnetic thin films are the same. Ones capable of storing a higher density of magnetic patterns have a higher coercivity (i.e., it takes a higher magnetic field strength to change the magnetization). The write heads in drives designed to write on lower coercivity media aren't strong enough to write on the high coercivity media. Which is why you can't use a 5.25" HD (1.2MB) floppy in a DD (360KB) drive.

Which is why they cleaned the floppy drive before putting the disks into it. "The primary concern was damage to the disks during the reading process. While impossible to eliminate without using extremely expensive equipment well beyond the reach of involved parties, it was believed this risk could be minimized by using a recently cleaned and tested floppy drive for copying ..." -- from the report detailing what they did.

Not sure why there seems to be this assumption that because they made an "image" of the disks, they must not have used a regular Amiga floppy drive. These days I often make images of hard drives... I don't take the platters out in a clean room and use some special microscope to do it. I plug in the drive as normal and use software. Similarly, they imaged the floppies by using a regular Amiga floppy drive, albeit connected to a fancier floppy controller card that can even image disks that may have errors.

And that's exactly what they did. They imaged the floppies with KryoFlux connected to a known-good, clean, Amiga floppy drive. TFA has a link to the technical details.

Obligatory comment on Slashdot articles about IPv4 exhaustion or IPv6:

$ host -t aaaa slashdot.org
slashdot.org has no AAAA record

No, it says, "Coverity did not find the heartbleed bug itself", which very clearly means that Coverity did not find Heartbleed. And Coverity themselves confim that Coverity does not detect the problem (though in response, they've added a new heuristic that does detect it, but no word on how the new heuristic affects the false positive rate).

It's not exactly the IRS's service; it's offered by the Free File Alliance, "a nonprofit coalition of industry-leading tax software companies partnered with the IRS to provide free electronic tax services."

I use them too... definitely beats driving to the main post office at midnight to make sure the return (or extension) is postmarked in time. :)

So, no thanks to TFA, I found the actual bug report, and it turns out the guy went public less than 2 days after reporting the bug to Google. Talk about impatient. And it's not true that "Google issued a low-priority label to the bug when he reported it, until he wrote about it on his blog and the post started picking up steam on social media". It's true that it was originally given a low-severity label at first, it was bumped to medium a day-and-a-half later, then up to high a few hours after that--around the same time that he went to reddit about it. Not exactly sure if it was before or after, since I don't know the timezone of the times reported on Chrome's issue tracker, but one of the comments from Google says that they had already bumped the severity rating before they knew about him going public.

The Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas at Austin is another good source for map scans; most are in the public domain. According to their FAQ, out of the ~250,000 maps they have, 54,751 are scanned and online.

OK, but vaccines for kids don't normally contain a mercury compound as a preservative either.

Whoops, by John Weldon, not Josh.

"To Be", by Josh Weldon. (Also available in crappy Youtube quality)

What does NFC have to do with anything? What Walmart wants is the contact chip, not contactless. And their terminals have supported those for years... However, I've never gotten one to read my EMV card (supposedly they do work in some stores that have a significant number of international customers).

First 3 numeric digits? There are only 3 digits in all (and 3 letters).

They don't cost any more than non-chip cards. I requested EMV cards from both Citibank and Bank of America (via online account management) and didn't have to pay anything.

You don't trust yourself? And even if you don't, how does that reveal info on who is running the hidden service? Of course you know your own entry point into the Tor network; the Tor client even shows you. netstat shows you. But if you want to find/sue the person running the hidden service, you need to find that person's entry point.