The cheeky option:

tar -h

Or is it tar --help? Oh no…

I see images, audio, or video files distributed in zips far too often. You’re getting maybe a percent of compression if you’re lucky; just distribute the raw files or use a non-compressed bundle format like tar.

Nope, but tomorrow there’s a lunar eclipse!

Do you have a source for that? I am unaware of any modern hard drives that support reading individual bits; the minimum unit of data that can be read is generally one sector, or 512 bytes. If the sector fails to be read, the drive will usually attempt to read it several times before giving up and reporting a read error to the PC.

Data recovery companies can remove the platters from a damaged drive and put them in a working drive, as long as the platters are in good condition, preventing further damage. (If the platters themselves are damaged, you’re screwed either way).

If your data is really important, you should send it to a reputable data recovery service. Using the drive any more (even with a tool like SpinRite) risks further damage.

If every one of those users uploads one 10MB file, that would be two petabytes of data. At S3’s IA prices that’s $25k/month. And people are uploading far, far more data than that.

If anyone wants to actually run this, here ya go:

          #include              <stdio.h>
      short i=0;long          b[]={1712,6400
    ,3668,14961,00116,      13172,10368,41600,
  12764,9443,112,12544,15092,11219,116,8576,8832
,12764,9461,99,10823,17,15092,11219,99,6103,14915,
69,1721,10190,12771,10065,16462,13172,10368,11776,
14545,10460,10063,99,12544,14434,16401,16000,8654,
12764,13680,10848,9204,113,10441,14306,9344,12404,
  32869,42996,12288,141129,12672,11234,87,10086,
    12655,99,22487,14434,79,10083,12750,10368,
      10086,14929,79,10868,14464,12357};long
        n=9147811012615426336;long main(){
          if(i<0230)printf("%c",(char)((
            0100&b[i++>>1]>>(i--&0x1)*
              007)+((n>>(b[i>>001]>>
                7*(0b1&01-i++)))&1
                  *main(111))));
                    return 69-
                      0b0110
                        ;}

Bonus points if you can deobfuscate it!

Physically speaking the sweat isn’t going to cool you down if you’re already covered in shower water, but you’d definitely still be sweating.

I’m tired of people ascribing any sort of intelligence to AI. It’s not thinking, it’s not seeing you as a threat, it’s just predicting a probable response based on its training data.

Now that’s an interesting idea; basically external regenerative braking. Not too helpful on a highway, but I suppose it would be useful in the situations you described.

That’s a fair point, a device could theoretically harvest energy that would have otherwise been wasted, and that would be green energy. I imagine a wind system could work, though it might result in cars experiencing additional drag from slower wind speeds.

However, the piezoelectric generators mentioned in the article quite clearly do not use waste energy. They compress under the weight of the cars, turning a small amount of gravitational potential energy into electricity. That energy must be made up with extra fuel.

Finally, even if all of the vehicles on the road were powered by clean electricity, it would still be a useless system. Piezoelectrics are nowhere near 100% efficient, so you’re just taking electricity from the vehicles at a loss.

Last year the California Energy Commission posted the results of a study aimed at assessing efficiency of deploying piezoelectric systems to generate clean electricity from roadways.

“Based on the laboratory evaluations and road tests, the application of the piezoelectric energy harvesting system in one lane of a one-mile-long roadway has the potential to generate 72,800 kilowatt-hours of energy per year,” the team reported.

How is that clean energy, in any sense of the word? Any system that gains some energy from a passing car must necessarily decrease the (kinetic) energy of the car by an equal or greater amount. And the vast majority of cars get their kinetic energy by burning fossil fuels. Sounds like a more expensive, less direct, and less efficient version of a gasoline generator.

I saw a comment back when they announced they were “canceling” it, saying the same thing. It seems they were right. Microsoft will do anything to get their grubby hands on as much user data as possible; of course they’re not going to give up that easily.

Yeah I switched to PAYG to lessen the chance of that happening. So far I’ve managed to not accidentally spend $5000 in some dumb way, so it’s basically equivalent to the free tier.

Yep, it’s all backed up locally. I figure eventually they’ll shut it down as they’re losing a fair bit of money.

You can sign up here, and it comes with 200GB of storage and 10TB of monthly bandwidth. And apparently a $300 credit, that wasn’t around when I signed up.

Edit: Nevermind, must’ve not noticed it.

Yep, it’s Oracle. It’s a really great deal; I’ve been using their services for a couple years now and haven’t had any problems.

Some intern is having a bad day right now.

Almost as if a browser company that’s not also an advertising company has no reason to fight ad blockers.

Yeah, I just left my SSH port as 22 since I only use key-based authentication so there’s really no security risk. Plus, it’s funny going through the logs and looking at all the login attempts.