Fair enough. Of course with public transit you could send some of you home with some of the goods while one person waits for the tow truck.

Shared IPv4 addresses are not to deter hosting but because there aren’t enough v4 addresses to go around. Most ISPs will happily give you an entire block of persistent IPv6 addresses but won’t give you a v4 because of address space exhaustion.

The comic does point out that the litterer is not a good person, though. You could argue that this cutesy depiction of a gleefully evil person serves to normalize misbehavior but it doesn’t try to hide the fact that it’s misbehavior.

I agree that Mimi is being a dick in this comic and that anyone acting like that in real life is a dick.

That being said, dropping the plastic bottle in the generic trash hole is something I could ignore. (And if your area has a bottle deposit I damn well expect you to put the bottle beside the trash can so less fortunate people can at least get your deposit – of course a gleefully evil person wouldn’t do it in this case.)

Though, to be honest, plastic recycling is mostly a myth in in the first place. For most plastics, the “recycling” procedure consists of paying some impoverished country to let you dump them there.

Basically, every plastic bottle can be assumed to contribute to microplastics contamination sooner or later. Glass and aluminum bottles are better (as are cans); both of those are economically feasible to recycle.

I generally find that cutting taxes is more popular with the politicians who think that reducing the debt is more important than a functioning power grid and bridges that don’t collapse. Don’t ask me how the hell reducing tax income is supposed to help with the deficit but it’s probably built on the assumption that the kickbacks economic growth will make up for it.

To quote that same document:

Figure 5 looks at the average temperatures for different age groups. The distributions are in sync with Figure 4 showing a mostly flat failure rate at mid-range temperatures and a modest increase at the low end of the temperature distribution. What stands out are the 3 and 4-year old drives, where the trend for higher failures with higher temperature is much more constant and also more pronounced.

That’s what I referred to. I don’t see a total age distribution for their HDDs so I have no idea if they simply didn’t have many HDDs in the three-to-four-years range, which would explain how they didn’t see a correlation in the total population. However, they do show a correlation between high temperatures and AFR for drives after more than three years of usage.

My best guess is that HDDs wear out slightly faster at temperatures above 35-40 °C so if your HDD is going to die of an age-related problem it’s going to die a bit sooner if it’s hot. (Also notice that we’re talking average temperature so the peak temperatures might have been much higher).

In a home server where the HDDs spend most of their time idling (probably even below Google’s “low” usage bracket) you probably won’t see a difference within the expected lifespan of the HDD. Still, a correlation does exist and it might be prudent to have some HDD cooling if temps exceed 40 °C regularly.

On the other hand, austerity politics (aka “don’t spend money in order to reduce the national debt”) tend not to work, either, because they offload maintenance to the future. Repairing broken infrastructure costs more than keeping it from breaking in the first place.

I suppose you could just raise taxes but even with WWII-level tax ceilings it’s damn expensive to run a country.

Hard drives don’t really like high temperatures for extended periods of time. Google did some research on this way back when. Failure rates start going up at an average temperature of 35 °C and become significantly higher if the HDD is operated beyond 40°C for much of its life. That’s HDD temperature, not ambient.

The same applies to low temperatures. The ideal temperature range seems to be between 20 °C and 35 °C.

Mind you, we’re talking “going from a 5% AFR to a 15% AFR for drives that saw constant heavy use in a datacenter for three years”. Your regular home server with a modest I/O load is probably going to see much less in terms of HDD wear. Still, heat amplifies that wear.

I’m not too concerned myself despite the fact that my server’s HDD temps are all somewhere between 41 and 44. At 30 °C ambient there’s not much better I can do and the HDDs spend most of their time idling anyway.

I always end up ship-of-theseusing the hell out of my computer. Even if I replace my mainboard, CPU, GPU, RAM, and PSU, the old storage is still good, as are the case, the fans etc.

I phase out old components as they lose relevance, although my DVD burner has lasted forever and will probably keep doing so.

Entra isn’t Azure. Entra ID is what they renamed Azure Active Directory to. But not always; there’s also Azure Active Directory B2C (yes, that’s the fully expanded name). And various other Azure-branded things that may or may not belong together.

Microsoft are spectacularly bad at naming things.

It’s a miracle they haven’t renamed Windows 11 to “360 365” or “Live 6.5” or “Active-DOS Series X” or something.

It’s an old term for the sexual organs that’s only used as part of terms these days. I tried to kinda match that. My translation wasn’t great, though.

Let me step in for a moment. I’m this man’s attorney. He can’t possibly say stupid shit on the internet because he doesn’t use computers. He wouldn’t have time to use one in the first place as he’s too busy being a wildly successful Path of Exile streamer.

It’s the basic idea behind ordoliberalism – companies get free reign until their actions start harming the common good, at which point the government imposes fair rules to even the playing field. It’s… reasonably functional as far as political theories go. Still wildly suboptimal, though, and not long-term stable against the influence of hyper-wealthy entities.

Note that these, too, have a German name, which translates to “inner taint-lips”. Just calling them “labia” in English is not just defaulting to Latin but also imprecise.

“The author wrote it that way to increase suspense. Don’t worry, though. My friends will be resurrected because they’re very marketable.”

And Windows 10 was clearly faster.

Than Windows 11, that is.

“Legally required”, so they’re seeing it in the local laws. Some countries require websites to disclose who operates them.

For example, in Germany, websites are subject to the DDG (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, “digital services law”). Under this law they are subject to the same disclosure requirements as print media. At a minimum, this includes the full name, address, and email address. Websites updated operated by companies or for certain purposes can need much more stuff in there.

Your website must have a complete imprint that can easily and obviously be reached from any part of the website and is explicitly called “imprint”.

These rules are meaningless to someone hosting a website in Kenya, Australia, or Canada. But if you run a website in Germany you’d better familiarize yourself with them.

Wouldn’t the half-name actually be “Cla”? “Santa Claus” is the anglicised version of “Sinterklaas”, a Dutch adaptation of Saint Nicholas.

I work for a publicly traded company.

We couldn’t switch away from Microsoft if we wanted to because integrating everything with Azure and O365 is the cheapest solution in the short term, ergo has the best quarterly ROI.

I don’t think the shareholders give a rat’s ass about data sovereignty if it means a lower profit forecast. It’d take legislative action for us to move away from an all-Azure stack.

And yes, that sucks big time. If Microsoft stops playing nice with the EU we’re going to have to pivot most of our tech stack on a moment’s notice.