Dave.

Well, anything’s possible, I say we give it a try and see what happens.

Have you tried…

you know,

(cough)

maybe just, ah …

(air quotes) “heavily implying”

the , ah, you know …

particular…

(taps side of nose)

ah, torrent

in

(eyebrow waggle)

ahem,

QUESTION?

Eh?

Ehhhhh?

Inertia, mostly.

Of course Plex then takes advantage of that with the slow erosion of the free edition.

Flash chip cells are basically tiny electron traps, they consist of a tiny stored charge surrounded on all sides by an insulator. When writing to the cell you fill it with some electrons via (much handwaving here) a method of quantum tunneling. You can then read the cell by sensing the internal charge without disturbing it.

When not in use eventually enough charge tunnels out of the cell via random quantum tunneling events for it to read nothing. This is worsened when things are hotter, so maybe keeping your flash chips in the freezer would help.

Consumer flash memory, I probably wouldn’t expect more than 20 or 30 years of offline storage out of it. The older chips would last longer, because their cells are bigger, and you’re not trying to read multiple charge levels per cell like the newer stuff.

Added edit:

Magnetic media probably has a higher chance of surviving longer. Floppies from the 80s can still be read, for example, but they are low density media. You’d want something that separates the drive system from the actual magnetic media to stop bearing or motor failure from being an issue , so tape would be a good idea.

The problem is, of course, that you could end up with media you can’t read as nobody makes the hardware for it. Tape drives have gone through a dozen revisions in the last 30 years as capacity has increased, but as long as you have the same physical tape cartridge you should be ok.

M-Disc is a blueray compatible media that doesn’t use dye and should have a life of hundreds of years. But who will have a blueray reader on hand in the 24th century? I’ve got a USB M-Disc compatible writer for my backups, but in 30 years will I be able to pull it out of a drawer and plug it into a USB Gen 15 port and have it work with whatever software I have then?

I think we’re going to have to do the manual duplication process for a while yet, until we finally settle on some universal petabyte storage crystals or something.

not only claim the right but also apparently claim ownership of any content you publish there, while providing no consideration (payment) in return.

That’s not entirely true.

The payment is hosting your content for free on their servers that provide reasonable uptime and unlimited retention. You can choose to carve out your own place on the internet and post your content on your own hosting if you want, but a lot of people choose Reddit, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Snapchat, because the tradeoff is agreeable.

But… what about my 83k karma and 13 year badge!

Gamification is a powerful addictive force.

When Reddit locked down their API and Boost stopped working, I forced myself to do casual browsing on chrome on my phone. It was clunky enough that I didn’t bother replying to comments, and navigation is a bit of a pain on mobile, and that was enough to ruin the game.

Because people are addicted to spreading their political opinions like evangelists of old.

Luckily that only generally seems to be Americans. So if you could all kindly tag yourselves in your profiles as such it would make it a lot easier to filter. /s

Sure, there’s always some low-level background muttering about politics in other countries, but the USA has really taken the cult of personality/political party to it’s absolute max.

Looking from the outside in, I pin the beginnings of this on the pledge of allegiance. Indoctrinated a whole bunch of young boomers into the idea that the USA was at the pinnacle of society, and once you blindly believe that, your eyes are closed to the actual issues. Rinse and repeat for a few generations and here we are, watching a country tear itself apart via a political system stained with polarisation, bias and narcissism.