Go to a university library and you'll notice how the annuals from the mid nineties onward are all in pristine condition. Nobody uses them anymore and all they do is take up valuable library space, so many institutions have cancelled paper subscriptions
Preserving paper archives is much more difficult and costly than digital archives, but there's a catch: Current copyright laws make it illegal for institutions to maintain their own archives, so they need to perpetually pay the journal subscription to access archives.

Open access alleviates the problem because there's no single rights holder who can tell anyone what to do with published papers.

Panasonic and Sony profited from selling tapes as well. It's the same old argument recycled.
This will of course simply move more well-intended people to torrenting, sans ads. Media companies should finally realize that the days of dictating when people enjoy content are over.

So far SSD's have been having more trouble with their lifetime. Modern HDDs are incredibly durable and are more likely to be replaced because of increased storage demands (which is considerably later than equivalently priced SSDs)

Modern electronics require a range of low-voltage DC to power the solid state components. High-voltage mains electricity still needs to be converted to the voltages required by the individual components, and this is hardly any easier than with AC.

I always tend to stretch my use of electronics. Avoiding "Windows rot" a PC will last many years for most applications. My cell phones also last many years, whilst other people keep updating theirs because their provider gave it them for "free".
But I'm appalled by how shockingly bad my iPhone 3g performs with the newest system. And because they don't have legacy versions of apps in the app store you're screwed.

That's only the raw material. Paper has to be refined, bleached processed. Add to that the inks and the transportation. Until recently the paper industry was one of the dirtiest businesses out there. It's not surprising that the footprint is bad if all you use it for is a throwaway news article that 90% of readers skip anyway.

Actually the hypothesis dates back to at least the 1940s, before we went to the moon.

Not really. Patents are worded to maximize the breadth of interpretation. Design patents are something separate. It's entirely likely this patent will cover what was described in the engadget post.
The sad thing is that even if this guy thought his idea was truly innovative and patentable, he'd have had to invest a fortune to even get it granted, and even then it would have been practically worthless as he has zero manufacturing power and no industry influence. Tech patents are only really effective in bulk as bargaining tools.
The romanticized ideal of the lone inventor protecting his invention from a greedy corporation is very far from the truth, and those who have tried have failed and been burnt.

That's a recipe for disaster. One of the easiest attacks is to try character substitutions on password dictionaries (which are largely made up of pop culture phrases). The placement of special characters is hard to remember, yet shockingly predictable.

You were probably buying the wrong ones. I notice this easily too, but I haven't seen a new consumer-grade CFL have this problem in years. I haven't really had much experience with LEDs, but one example I did come across had a flicker in the kHz range, at least that's what the detector told me.