LostXOR

As long as your data isn't super important that's okay. But if it is, keep in mind that the chance of your USB stick failing when you try to read all the data off it after your SSD fails is fairly high. USB sticks do not do well with long reads or writes and tend to overheat and kill themselves. I'd strongly recommend picking up a hard drive to use as a third backup; a new 2TB drive is maybe $60, and a refurbished one half that.

Let me get this straight... They deleted their only other copy of the files from their old drives immediately after uploading them to OneDrive? Microsoft has some fault here, but that is also an unbelievably stupid decision on the user's part. It also sounds like they were planning to copy the files to a single new drive and immediately delete them from OneDrive, which is equally stupid. Are they allergic to having their files in multiple places or something?

It's an awful situation to be in, but it could've been avoided by simply having a second copy of the data, which is pretty much the simplest backup system.

They raise the barrier of entry for creating spam accounts from "make a bunch of API calls" to "set up some kind of AI captcha solver/pay someone in India to do it for you." It doesn't stop spammers, but it makes it harder for them.

People who are actually smart, regardless of their IQ score, know that IQ is a terrible measure of intelligence and would never brag about it.

I've had a great experience here on fedia.io. It's a smaller instance, and it is running Mbin instead of Lemmy, but everything federates over so you get the same content. Might feel a bit weird switching from Lemmy, but if you feel like it I'd recommend giving it a try. :)

We're also defederated from Hexbear, lemmy.ml, and Lemmygrad if that's a factor.

Nothing at all. That's why we have captchas.

For the first problem, just use a throwaway email service (I like temp-mail.org) to make your account.

Yeah that is waaay too small for a Skittle.

You're right! Let's say we have two dice:

D₁ is fair and has a 1/6 probability of rolling each number from 1-6.
D₂ is weighted, with probabilities P₁, P₂, P₃, P₄, P₅, P₆ to roll each number.

We roll D₁, and get a number with the following probability distribution:
1: 1/6
2: 1/6
3: 1/6
4: 1/6
5: 1/6
6: 1/6

We roll D₂, and get a number with the following probability distribution:
1: P₁
2: P₂
3: P₃
4: P₄
5: P₅
6: P₆

We find the probabilities of every combination of rolls that yields a 7:
1+6: 1/6 P₁
2+5: 1/6 P₂
3+4: 1/6 P₃
4+3: 1/6 P₄
5+2: 1/6 P₅
6+1: 1/6 P₆

Adding these together to get the total probability of rolling a 7, we get 1/6 (P₁ + P₂ + P₃ + P₄ + P₅ + P₆). Since the probabilities of rolling each number must sum to 1, we get a probability of 1/6 to roll a 7, and your gut is right. :)

7 is the only number where this property holds. Other numbers will have a probability dependent on the weighting of the die, which could be calculated with a similar method.

Probably not. IIRC for security the fingerprint data is stored and processed entirely in the reader, and not accessible at all by the OS. Of course they could have some sort of backdoor that allows collecting that data, but that would be a huge scandal waiting to happen.

Fewer creeps here than on Reddit.

Hmm I think I vaguely remember that post; definitely wasn't referencing it in my comment though.