palordrolap

The only one I ever had break was one I accidentally smacked pretty hard perpendicular to the USB port it was in, and I'm still not 100% sure if it was the port or the stick that broke. It sure scrambled the directory listing in the file manager though. Lots of funny characters.

Pretty sure the port took damage because it didn't work well with other things plugged in afterwards, and I've never used the stick again in case it's turned into a port killer. That probably just me being paranoid though.

I think the real danger might be write cycles. Super cheap ones might run to only a few tens of thousands of writes per cell and might even do no wear-levelling, bringing that down further. Nonetheless, as I understand it, they usually lose write-ability before read-ability, so in theory you'd be able to get data off one you couldn't write to any more. (In practice might be a different matter.)

Actual physical lifespan ought to be more than that if it's in regular use. I have a 256MB one that was just shy of state of the art when I got it (must be coming up on 20 years old) and it still works fine. I don't use it often though, so that might be in more danger of old-age rather than data integrity problems.

Ehh. It's someone doing what they want with their hardware. Now, if they'd tried to get MS Windows running I'd agree with you.

Are they now able to criticise Kim Jong-un and the DPRK or is this still a reasonable shibboleth for detecting them?

Upvote for this software. I'm yet to try it on multiple devices at once, but it seems like it's as easy as copying a database between devices that have their respective platform's version installed.

And it got me out of the habit of using variants of the same password everywhere. I don't actually know most of my passwords now.

Edit: clarification

The most obscure person I can think of on Wikipedia is a man called Edmund Trebus. He was a real person who was an (if not the) unwitting anti-hero in a British TV series about cleaning up a London borough. Trebus was a notorious hoarder whose lifestyle spilled out of his property, creating an eyesore and constant problems for the local council.

I'm not saying do that, but there may be ways to generalise from that. Also, that series was a while ago now and I fear Wikipedia might eventually remove his article for being insufficiently notable.

Alternatively, are you musical? A one hit wonder would ensure your fame (or infamy). Mathematical? Solve a famous theorem (What, like it's hard?). Programmer? Invent a hugely popular programming language and you're sure to get one. Artsy or extroverted? Become a "content creator" on TikTok or wherever the kids hang out these days.

Worst case, you end up a footnote in the page about your creation(s). But would that be so bad?

Or come at this from another angle entirely. Create an article. Or edit one. Not about you but about something else. No trolling. Be informative. Provide sources. Your work may last decades, and if you do it under your pseudonym, or - horrors - your real name, as a login, you'll be recorded that way, at least for a while, in the page history.

And if you create one that doesn't get deleted immediately, well then, no-one can take away you created that page even if your original work disappears over years of constant refinement by other people.

Lastly, there are other places for immortality. I frequently see the same (real!) names cropping up in entries in the OEIS, for example, most of whom don't have their own Wikipedia entry. Be aware that their standards are pretty high these days though.

Douglas Adams takes this in a different direction in one of the Dirk Gently books, namely, all gods continue to exist in a dimension beyond ours and live according to how many people currently remember them.

Over there, gods are basically just people. Forgotten gods live in shacks and hovels in out of the way places. The Abrahamic god isn't actually mentioned much that I remember. Probably because he's off living in a palace somewhere, and his former pantheon mates, along with his wife, are doubtless relegated to squalid conditions nearby.

Ironically, it's been a while since I read that book so I may have misremembered some of the details, but there's a weird mind-bending concept that if we think of misremembered details as a god then my recollection is at least partially, and paradoxically accurate.

If DOSBox runs on one, then the old DOS-based Windows versions might work. But then, they didn't keep much in System32, where they even had it at all.

The answer is that eventually all trace of the soda would be gone because there are only a finite number of atoms of "soda-stuff" and eventually you'll end up with a situation where there's only one molecule left, which - assuming that wasn't the water part of soda in the first place - will have a 50% chance of being in the half that's removed before the next dilution step. Theoretically it could survive infinitely many rounds of this, but the chance of that is basically zero.

How many times is that though? For a litre of soda, the lower bound is about 85. A hundred ought to be more than enough. (And 300 times would be enough to dilute the entire observable universe assuming it was soluble in water, so that's a reasonable upper bound.)

You'd almost certainly stop tasting the soda quite a while before that though. After 20 dilutions you're into parts per million soda to water.

Things become more complicated if you replace the soda in this experiment with holy water. It seems to be agreed that 50/50 holy to regular water remains holy, but after that, some believe that dilution can be repeated forever (presumably being left to sit for a while after that step) while others claim the holiness disappears once the dilution goes beyond 51%, regardless.

Immediately order a DNA test and/or a second opinion. There's no way I'm not my parents' child.

I look and sound too much like my father, so I'd have to be the product of an affair of his, and my mother would have left him and cut off contact with whichever relative was actually my mother if he'd done that. She absolutely would not have adopted me and raised me as her own.

I mean, I like the idea that I'm actually the beneficiary of an extremely wealthy family, but it's simply not the case.

Edit: beneficiary, not benefactor

There was a situation where there were two sets of identical twins born at the same hospital at the same time, and somehow one of each got swapped. Each mismatched pair grew up thinking they had a non-identical twin and only found out about the mix-up later in life.

Maybe they wouldn't have found out at all if both were swapped. Food for thought.

There's a certain group of old men, many of whom happen to be running certain countries, whose EOL - natural or otherwise - I'll be relieved to see, but the fear is that there are plenty of (relatively) young men with similar ideals waiting in the wings, ready to take the reins when the old guard is gone.

Note that I'm not wishing them dead per se, but no-one lives forever. Not even them.

The war would be over if Putin just took his troops out of Ukraine immediately and indefinitely. Even Trump can grasp that concept. It's not hard at all.

But Putin won't because he's too far into a delusion that was first one of grandeur but has become one of sunk cost.

Trump might be able to grasp that too, but I'm not sure that his mind wouldn't then immediately reject it because its roots are in qualities he admires in himself and others.