They are still functional as USB barcode scanners, with the right software.

... can i store them like on a USB disk attached to the Xbox 360? Or what? like, what's the process for really taking advantage of the fact that they've introduced huge discounts to almost the entire store?

or will the download servers still live on, even after the store closes?

...why are nearly 100% of the people in multiplayer VR environments somewhere around 6 years old?

I don't know the future, but this isn't just a kickstarter and some naïve geeks in a garage. Panic is no fly-by-night. They've been around for years shipping really high quality Mac and iOS software, and has a more recent bend toward gaming with titles like Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game. Hardware is completely new for Panic though. I don't know who is building their hardware, but they did partner with Teenage Engineering on design. Teenage Engineering has their own line of portable audio and music creation devices, and has become the Pharrell of high-design boutique electronics, with partnerships on hardware undertaken with Baidu, IKEA and Nothing.
So, I don't know if you're wrong, but I feel comfortable saying it's not a foregone conclusion that they'll fail.

I think there's some belief involved here, because we don't really know whatever the hell it was that Tesla was up to at the time. We don't have enough information, I don't think, about what went on in his head, what he was ultimately doing, to know if he had some theory in his brain that we haven't even come close to rediscovering, or not.

It seems clear that if we had a way to do this already, if we could prove out that this was possible, using the knowledge that we have right now, then we would already be doing it, if the technological progress wasn't out of our reach.

I think this kind of hints at an underlying question -- do you believe that Tesla knew what he was doing, and that he may well have had some idea that we haven't even yet thought of, that might've worked?

That's my experience. I've used several assistants, and they all fail to understand my requests. They'll skip words, lose context for follow-up requests, and do a lot of really stupid web searches. Want a reminder for the next time you're at Home Depot? You'll get that reminder next time you're home. Want to call your wife? "I'm sorry, I don't know who your wife is." Next query - "My wife is Anonymous Coward" and it'll ignore your address book entry (that has the relationship) and perform a web search.

I have to assume the chart placement for Nirvana's Nevermind had to take off, since every assistant I've tried thinks I want to interrupt my weather query, calling my mom, or whatever other task I'm trying to perform with a web search for a twenty year old album.

As bad as these things are on my phone, laptop and TV, I can't see giving them their own hardware that always listens. I estimate they save time in less than a quarter of attempts. Another quarter result in harmful errors, like meeting reminders using the wrong metric or date. The rest are plain old failures and useless web searches for things that sound a little like the topic of my query ("call Richard" "according to wikipedia, Richard Hammond is a presenter on the Amazon series The Grand Tour").

~$150 USD will buy a Windows 10 laptop that would, in most measures other than pure storage capacity, outperform a wide swath of machines shipped with XP. ~$60 USD will get you a cheap Windows 10 tablet.

Still, we can't get people off of Windows XP.

I've owned an EV. They're great. I just don't think there's any chance that people will swap out equipment on the sort of time scale described here.

Huh?

20 characters would probably be a strong password.

20 bits of entropy almost certainly would be a very poor password.

I'm not sure what twenty characters of entropy would be. I guess it would depend on your encoding.

Yeah, actually.

Yahoo’s Very Bad Idea to Release Email Addresses | WIRED

...that connecting sites, and allowing one site to post to another, increases your attack surface. It also shows that a failure to police these connections can increase risk as older services become "stale."

Twitter, Facebook, et al should introduce security tools to help remind users. "Hey, you haven't used "Cartoon your face" in two years. Would you like to disable access to your account? You can always change it back later."

Disdain? The Internet as a whole has been applauding and attempting to follow, where it can.

How much longer will the community itself keep going on with the same memes? There's a lot more to Fark than memes.

I'm so sorry to hear that seeing 3 ads on a page hurts your brain so much, that you turn into a giant raging spewmachine.

And even then, all you can do is throw models at it and strategies to attempt to use on those models.