Flash memory hit the market in 1987, about 9 years before USB did in 1996, and it gained popularity in the PCMCIA bus memory cards. Before that, we had things like EEPROM (Electronically-Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory), which could be erased and reprogrammed at will. The method and easy of the erasibility changed over the years. (Before that we had EPROM, which was erasable, typically with ultra-violet light for about 30 minutes, as I recall, and I still run into that occasionally, though not in the last 10 years or so.) Flash is a type of EEPROM, but it really was a big improvement when it came out. I started working with Flash around 1992, and the early stuff was slow to reprogram, a picky algorithm to erase (as I remember), and was inconvenient in that it needed a 12 V supply, not the typical 5 V (or later 3.3 V).

While I had read about bubble memory in the late 1970s, I never actually saw any. However, the Wikipedia page offers this interesting bit: "One application was Konami's Bubble System arcade video game system, introduced in 1984. It featured interchangeable bubble memory cartridges on a 68000-based board."

Hardly -- non-volatile memory has been around as long as computing, but it was usually of a different form and not random-access. The first significant step to where we are with our current "thumb drives" and such (namely non-volatile and random-access) that I can think of would be the "rope memory" which was non-writeable core memory which was used in the Apollo space program in the 1960s. There could very well be more before that.

Agreed. The USB Flash drive requires a "slot" in the same way that the PCMCIA cards required a "slot", but it's now so small and a different shape that "slot" may not be a good descriptor. The ISA, PCI, PCMCIA, USB, etc., are all card slots, just of different sizes, so what is the size where it stops being a "slot"? They also have different pin counts and physical types of pins, though only PCMCIA has might be what a general user would call a "pin". (And likewise, what makes something a "port" versus a "slot"? Are the various serial, parallel, keyboard, and video ports really fundamentally different from a "slot"?) So the difference between a bubble memory S-100 board from 1980 to the Flash USB and micro memory cards of today is just a steady evolution -- I don't see any "revolution" along the way.

Netflix tried to spin it off about 10 or so years ago as Napster or Friendster or DVDster or some such awful name, which is why it currently brands itself as "DVD.com", with minimal references to Netflix. But there was a lot of customer unhappiness and the idea was shelved, but I expect it will occur at some point. The two services go together well and are linked reasonably well on the web sites. It's nice only having a single list of films in my queue (I'm at about 450) so that I can then see availability on either service. So I'd be saddened to see it spun off, but I'd still subscribe as it's the only way to get many (typically older) movies. (That said, my 35-or-so-year quest to finally see _Zuckerbaby_ (Germany, 1985) (AKA _Sugarbaby_) was finally fulfilled, as it showed up on TUBI or some other service. Current hard one is _Antartica_ (Japan, 1983).)

I met someone at an IEEE 802.11 (later known as WiFi) standards meeting back in 1993 or so, and she was in charge of the radio protocols for the project at Apple, and she gave herself the perfect title "Air Traffic Controller."

[This is a true semi-relevant story that I posted to Reddit a few years back.]

Many years ago, I got a field report of a few systems that were turning themselves off during the night without warning or seemingly a reason. We had some temperature-monitoring software that would automatically shut the system down if it got too hot, and the logs showed that was what was happening. But it was November and the systems were in snowy regions, so too-hot didn't make sense.

A quick look through the code showed me the problem. The programmer was reading the current temperature from the hardware as an unsigned byte instead of a signed one (as the data sheet for the part specified), so that an actual temperature of -1 C (which is crazy cold for a system) was being read as 255 C, and so it would shut down immediately. Later investigation found that the affected systems were in unheated loading dock areas.

The fix was, of course, easy, but testing it required putting the system in our kitchen freezer (with the various cables coming out for power, the monitor, and so on). The CEO walked in while I was sitting there with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor seemingly hooked up to the refrigerator and just said, "I don't think that I should ask what you're doing."

I don't know that you can really take suggestions on what should be your charities. You want to find those groups and issues that you're interested and hopefully passionate about. That said, this is my list, sorted with those that I'm most charitable towards first:
* Local public schools (who also get my time running a tech club and other activities)
* SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)
* Southern Poverty Law Center
* Planned Parenthood
* The Planetary Society
* National Organization for Women Foundation
* GEDMatch (DNA matching tools)
* Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF)
* Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
* Wikimedia

Based on my experience with my YouTube content and monetization, YouTube also pays $0.001 ($1 per 1000 views). My channel is at nearly a million views (total, not per month), so it's not huge, but it's not trivial, either. I don't know if they pay different rates to different people / channels, though.

Or a smart phone that she carries on her person (e.g. shirt pocket or on an arm band) that alerts when it is no longer vertical, such as if she's on the ground or slumped over?

I think that "rrrybgdts" would be a poor password, as a Google search shows it's a common "word" and is used as a user name on a bunch of sites, so it could easily end up in a password dictionary.

The clearly-Indian-accented fellow called last week and I knew immediately that it was this scam. I am not Indian, but know many and I love international movies. I said, "Hey, you're Indian; let's talk about Indian movies!" Him: "No, sir, I'm not Indian; I'm American." Me: "Clearly from your accent, English is not your first language." Him: "No, sir, English is the only language I speak." Me (in my best Hindi, but I only know this phonetically): " ." ("I speak Hindi.") Him (very surprised): "You're Indian, too?!?!" Me: "Let's talk movies! Have you seen _The Three Idiots_? How about _English Vinglish_? _RA-One (Rawan)_? _Barfi_?" So we chatted for a few minutes and then it was time for me to go.

Everyone should see _The Three Idiots_; it's a great movie!

You have to do a clean shutdown or the memory isn't freed. If the probe were destroyed, that would be memory which could never, ever be allocated by anyone ever again.

It really starts to add up. A few thousand probes and you're talking hundreds of kilobytes.

It's the only way to be sure.

I forgot:
* _TCP/IP Illustrated. Volume 1_ by Stevens.

I know the list is light on academic books -- I many other books due to college and grad school computer science, but the're not something that I look at very often.

Off the top of my head:
* _Programming Pearls_ by Bentley
* _Debugging the Development Process_ by Maguire
* _Cuckoo's Egg_ by Stoll
* _Windows Internals_ by Russinovich and Solomon if you're doing low-level Windows work.
* _Code Complete_ McConnell and _Writing Solid Code_ by Maguire are good for someone just getting their first programming job.