unless you've vacuum-sealed those mason jars or have a dedicated fridge with redundant power (lol), the humidity is probably doing more harm than the (semi-)controlled temperature is helping. a merely closed jar is not "sealed," even with one of those rubber rings.

also i'm imagining your jar of thumb drives sitting in the fridge. what the fuck? do you ever use them? or is this long-term storage? if you do use them, you are of course letting the jar come to ambient temperature in a dry location each time you take them out of the fridge, right? otherwise it's all kind of pointless.

you'd best watch out, you only have 4226 hours left on that drive! ;-)

all media lost data. it's just a matter of managing the loss rate.

That's all too true, and this is described in The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright (who later wrote Going Clear about Scientology). The big Q paid a decent wage with health benefits and a hefty compensation package to your family, especially upon "martyrdom." The fanatics were in the top-middle of the organization; the rank-and-file were mostly just desperate young males with a lot of social/familial obligations and nothing to lose. Depressing, really.

So we agree that it's not patent trolling. Great.

You can keep on making up whatever justifications you want in order to keep swaying with the popular opinion.

what patent troll? in fact, what patents?

the article says he's being sued for fraud and breach of contract (whatever the merits of that may be). this seems to be a matter of trade secrets, which is basically the opposite of patents.

yeah, but first off pedagogy isn't the same as praxis. also, (western) math has moved from its Euclidean geometric roots to much more efficient and powerful representations. that is to say, i'm not convinced that low-level memory management is actually a fundamental skill.

anyway, people can and do learn these things if and when necessary; what's happening is that there are so many other things to do now (this is called progress) that people don't have to do them. further, the people who actually do these things are benefitting from modern approaches. even demo writers using decades-old hardware are making graphics which would have been considered jaw-droppingly impossible at the time.

yeah, no hand-holding... but back when "made it work" often amounted to implementing some half-assed version of curses for your ASCII sort-of-GUI, or blitting 320x200 raster gfx to the buffer, or other such bullshit. the most amazing part of it was that everyone around the world was repeating the same fucking work which, sure, some of us enjoyed that work and some of us got paid a lot for it, but anyone who thought that would actually last was just delusional.

sure, there are downsides to the progress we've made; i almost retched when someone proposed a cross-platform "solution" for finding the IP address within an interpreted language by installing a JSON library and querying an API. however, on the whole it's a lot better now; i can go from the sketches, brainstorming, math, and algorithms to an actual result within a few hours instead of a few weeks (or, more likely, never).

It could use a few commas, but it's not terrible. "Sitting an exam" is standard Australian English, I presume. In Europe, it's commonly called "writing an exam" (they started moving from written answers to psychometry much more recently). Maybe "sitting an exam" doesn't make literal sense, but neither does "taking an exam" really; I mean, where are you taking it?

no, no, no. you're still thinking of solving the technical problem of delivering signal. this is mostly old news. sure there are a few improvements here and there, but it's far more important to solve the new problem of extracting maximal profit through market segmentation.

according to a deterministic theory, or one where 300ms is a hard upper bound.

in other words, it's a dumbass assumption.

yes, precisely. i'm wondering why "random engineer thinks this is screwy" is the extent of the analysis here. why the fuck aren't people doing more? isn't this why we have ludicrously large lawyer awards for class-action cases?

uh, since ransom malware generally isn't targeted, that doesn't make a lot of sense. the line you're referencing is that once you pay the danegeld, you never get rid of the dane.

malware is more of a "stumbling into a pit full of spikes" thing than a "village being raided by vikings" thing.

since they just throttle the connection into tiers so as to maximize profit, isn't it at least possible that the higher tiers also have lower latency or higher prioritization (among the ISP's users, not necessarily of youtube)?

seems like these gentlemen could teach 4chan a thing or two about dealing with the likes of Anita Sarkeesian.