It took my friends months to find working 8" floppy drives they could take to Guatemala to decode the files the police and army had created during the dirty wars there. I don't want to have to buy a 9-track tape drive to read the one 9-track tape I have (if I find it again, and if it's still even readable.) (I gave away the Sun cartridge drive along with the Sun-2.)

Much more reliable to copy the data every couple of years to some current medium, knowing that Moore's Law means that it's not going to cost much and the only problems will be data formats, not media formats.

void *strcpy() { printf("Don't use strcpy, idiot! We told you that years ago!\n"}; exit(-37); }

void *strcmp() { printf("Don't use strcmp either, idiot! We told you that years ago too!\n"}; exit(-37); }

Also, according to the articles I've read about this, the somewhat more official patch came out in 2013, but wasn't marked as a "security" patch so it only made it into the newer OS versions, but wasn't retrofitted into the older ones. So it'd be fixed in Ubuntu 14.04, but not in the 12.04 LTS version.

Moore's Law is only partly your friend here - storage keeps getting cheaper rapidly, but that also means that not only do devices become obsolete, but the interface specs and data formats also become obsolete. You probably don't have an 8" floppy drive anywhere, or a working 5.25", or the right kind of cable to plug the 5.25" drive into, or a Bernoulli drive, or a 9-track tape drive (800, 1600, or 6250dpi), or the Sun cartridge drive, or anything to plug those MFM drives into, or SCSI-1, or probably SCSI-2. You might have something that can handle IDE / PATA, or an old laptop with PCMCIA, but even those are getting scarcer. If you can connect to that old disk disk drive, you can probably load a virtual machine running NetBSD that'll have drivers for the file system format, but maybe not; you certainly don't want to risk having Windows "update" the format. You might think that FAT 8.3 format will stick around for a long time (and maybe it will for reading, but it's rapidly getting replaced with FAT16, FAT32, ExFAT, NTFS, etc.

Leave aside the question of whether you can read a 20-year-old version of WordStar or WordPerfect format file (unlike my late-70s nroff files, which would be readable if they weren't on a 9-track tape I've probably lost.) You can probably read that 4-year-old TurboTax file, but if you need to get tax data back from when you bought your house, you'd better have everything on paper.

Just for physical format alone, you need to copy stuff every couple of years.

Acid-free paper, otherwise you and your friends will just keep eating bits of your archives.

More seriously, paper's only good for some things, and only if you protect it well enough. Some years ago, my work hard drive crashed, and when I was driving to work a day or two later, my coffee cup bounced off the holder into my briefcase, taking out both the Palm Pilot and the dead-tree copies of my data. There were backups of some of my PC data, but my current calendar was gone.

:-)

It especially explains why many colleges (at least before the US drinking age was raised to 21) have bars called "The Rathskeller", pronounced "Rat Cellar".

"Original Series. But Picard."

My local cable company didn't carry The Sci-Fi Channel until just about when Farscape went off the air (idiots! This is Silicon Valley, what did they *think* we wanted to watch? ESPN?) so I never saw enough episodes to really catch on, but it was kind of fun. And ST:TNG happened during the years I didn't have TV, so the few times I saw it were always the same annoying episode with Q in it for some reason.

This was back before the World Wide Web, when call centers were primarily toll-free numbers that you called to get information from companies, make airline reservations, etc. It was either people you wanted to talk to, or people you had to call anyway like the electric company.

Babylon 5 vs. Star Trek ver N+1? Easy choice, Bab5 wins hands down.

But X-Files was why I had a TV in the first place. We'd had an old Amiga monitor and VCR to watch movies, which eventually got replaced by a TV/VCR combo, but my wife saw X-Files when she was staying at a hotel for a conference, came home and rented all the available videos at the video store (remember video stores?), and then one day I came home and there was a coax stretched down the stairs from the cable jack, and I was told that if I didn't like it I could move the cabinet that was in front of the living-room cable jack.

95-99% of the calls to my home phone are from robots. Some are friendly robots ("Your prescription is ready at CVS"), most are spammer robots. I finally got fed up and put the number on the Do Not Call List, and the main change has been that more robots call me and either don't play a recording at all, or else play a recording but if I press "1" to talk to their human, never connect me to a human. (And I almost always tell them I want to; usually I'll put the phone down, sometimes I'll chew them out, often I'll put the phone down and if somebody answers, I'll say "hello" and then put the phone down.)

Back when I used to design call center equipment, in the 80s, phone calls cost more per minute than operators. These days that's totally changed, so it doesn't cost them much to make calls and abandon them if they don't have a spare operator within a few seconds; it's not like they're worried about losing repeat business.

My assumption, since the entire country has been annoyed at Rachel and her ilk for years, and since the FBI could easily get warrants to search for her even if the NSA didn't pwn the phone companies, is that either

• - It's really a Russian scam, out of their jurisdiction, or
• - They're a distributed scam, run by lots and lots of people who can buy a "Rachel from Cardholder Services" audio recording kit, hire work-at-home telemarketers, and run their own cottage industry, so if they do get caught, the scam keeps going, or (like old-fashioned spammers in trailer parks) maybe they don't make as much money as the folks selling the kit promised them, so they go out of business and other scammers take up the slack.