Yeah, you could do that, or you could change to a non-standard port. In my ten years of running sshd on a non-standard port on several public servers I've been hit by exactly 0 (zero) probes on that port.

Obscurity for the security win!

When I was much younger and had better hearing and MP3 was a new thing, I ripped my CD collection and encoded everything with whatever the state of the art was back then (bladeenc? mp3enc? this was pre-lame). After a while I started hearing artifacts in MP3-encoded music so I did some A/B testing against the original CD the music was encoded from. Turned out those same artifacts were in the CD.

MP3 encoding has matured and improved since then, so whatever degradation there may have been, it's less now. I've only ever used 128Kbps stereo encoding, and I've never been able to detect any difference from the CD in any kind of music. This is with fairly high-quality sound cards, amps, and speakers.

Of course, my high-frequency hearing is pretty much gone now so I sometimes worry that my music collection might sound horrible to anyone with fully functional ears.

Making fart jokes and naughty-word puns and such is central to being childish, and being childish is central to being a nerd. I'm not really sure what it's like to be a man.

99.9% of the time those are (1) someone goofing around, not a real threat, or (2) drive-by from a botnet, never going to hit from that address again. So you're adding complexity and extra points of potential failure to your router with no real benefit.

Obviously I pulled that "99.9%" figure out of my ass, but seriously, whom do you think you're protecting yourself from with this script?

I'm pretty sure this story is a very elaborate piece of fiction. That makes way more sense than somebody clearly so smart going to so much trouble to earn themselves a life sentence in prison.

Maybe last year we could expect someone to do this for real, but not this post-1/11 world.

My iphone 3gs is like that too. I figure it's mainly the flash controller working harder as the flash memory ages. I routinely fill it to 99% before purging the camera roll. After 3 years of heavy use I'll bet the average page erase count is way up there, and there are probably more than a few bad blocks by now.

Or it could just be three generations of extra firmware bloat bogging down the primitive CPU.

Never ask why ....

Correction: Always ask why.

The answers are usually pretty interesting.

Probably with electricity from the grid, generated from coal, gas, hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, etc, as usual. TFA didn't actually mention power sources at all.

You're talking about sociopaths.

You're probably right that the president and legislators are sociopaths, because the election process does a pretty good job of weeding out non-sociopaths. Nobody with normal human emotions could possibly do what it takes to win a typical modern contested election campaign.

I really don't get it: more than 50% of the US population is against a tax raise for the 'filthy' rich which only constitutes a maximum of 3% of your population... Why do those (more than) 50% care for those 3%, they certainly don't care for you?....

The answer is simple: More than 50% of the US voting population believe they actually are filthy rich, but experiencing temporary cash-flow problems. That is, they all plan to be in the top 3% within the next year or so.

Ah, the sweet seductive myth of a classless society and economic mobility....

And that's not even the most preposterous thing that most Americans believe.

The sooner instagram dies the better. There are great cameras in smartphones now, it's crazy people want to make their photos look like crap with filters.

How dare they want something that you don't want! They must be stopped!

Absolutely correct! For all we know, the correlation could be the other way around: Violent criminal behavior causes lead poisoning. For example, when someone gets all criminally violent at me I shoot him full of lead. QED, cogito propter unum. In your face, "science"!

I remember the broom exercise at school. Funny, isn't it? Big strong lads can't do it for more than 45 seconds. I thought I'd try it myself given that I'm not 12 any more. I got bored after 5 minutes. Sure, my shoulder aches a little bit, but I reckon I had another 10 minutes of holding my arm out, stock still.

Same here. I'm in terrible shape, haven't been to the gym in over a year. Picked up a broom just now and held it at arms length with one hand out to the side for 5 minutes, which seems long enough to prove the point.

As a teenager I heard a similar challenge involving holding the empty hand horizontally at arms length for five minutes. After 25 minutes without the slightest tiredness I got bored and quit. I figured I was just too skinny or something -- twiggy nerd arms must be easier to hold up than big muscly jock arms.

I'm pretty sure this "can't hold arm straight out for n minutes" is pure myth. Strange that so few people actually bother to try it.