DICOM is a magical container format that is more than capable of storing data that no one can use.

In the best case, it contains the imagery in an unencrypted format that everyone can read like JPEG or TIFF.

Because it's the medical industry, it will instead contain an encrypted blob of proprietary imagery data that can only be read by a crappy Visual Basic program that the vendor supplies.

(At least, based on my brief experience trying to get useful data out of medical devices that did provide DICOM files that were universally in some vendor-specific format. And in at least one case were actually encrypted. You could get the raw imagery data out, using the Visual Basic program.)

Well, yes, but as your own link explains:

So it's less that they chose those words and more that we, as English speakers, chose them.

Anyone claiming that the iPhone 4S is supported with iOS 8 hasn't tried it.

I mean, it is "supported." You can install install iOS 8 onto it. I have access to a 4S with iOS 8. (It doesn't have a SIM card so it's not useful for anything but test purposes.)

You don't want to. It will make your iPhone 4S absolutely unusable. The UI is clearly designed for the larger screens on later models and it's clear that they made the OS require more memory and processor power. You can argue if that was malicious (to force you to upgrade) or just "the cost of new features" but the fact of the matter is that they did.

Really Apple only supports the absolute latest. They may offer updates to older hardware, but there's absolutely no guarantee that the updates work in anything approaching a reasonable definition of work.

Given that they shared MP3s, it wouldn't surprise me.

I was honestly unaware iTunes even looked at the ID3 tags. I thought it loaded the files once into the library, and once imported, used its own metadata database and completely ignored the MP3s except for decoding audio. So I'd never have thought to look for corrupt MP3 files.

Not to mention that I've never come up with that solution in all my searching for why iTunes would be sitting at "copying items" indefinitely. I found a ton of people with the same issue, but no fixes.

Absolutely ancient as far as Apple cares: my mom's iPhone 5S and my brother has an iPhone 6. Both of those fail to sync properly with the latest iTunes. Clearly my brother should have gotten the iPhone 6 Plus with extra bendy case, maybe that would work with the latest iTunes.

iTunes stopped syncing with devices years ago. It just ... doesn't work. It won't copy new tracks over, instead just sitting at "Waiting for items to copy" or some BS like that.

This isn't just me. This is everyone in my family, quite a few people on Facebook when I went there to ask for help, and I recall Adam Savage tweeting about something like that. It's basically impossible to get new music off of iTunes and onto an iDevice and has been for several years now. (There is a solution: factory reset the iDevice and copy everything over again in its entirety. The last time I did that metadata copied over wrong so tracks with one name would actually play an entirely different track. At that point I gave up.)

If I were more cynical I'd think that was the point (force everyone to buy off the iTMS) but I think instead the article is correct: Apple just doesn't care to fix very common bugs.

Here's another one everyone who's had to touch a Mac in the past five years will be very familiar with: SLEEP_WAKE_FAILURE.

I can tell you about my most common mode of USB stick failure, and it's something I never had to worry about with floppies:

Kneeing the damned things such that I break the USB connector while it's plugged into the side of a laptop. OK, so yes, that's my own damned fault. But still, I never did that with a floppy...

But I'm a nerd. The only oven I have in my kitchen is a microwave oven.

Eh, I'm sure that's close enough, what's the worst that couL!JGFnasdj23NT #TR@dna5 m5wv sa3nt34246jnahe5t63qj

I only have my own personal anecdote, but I was the top boy in my highschool class by far. That didn't even get me into the top 10% of my class, though, since the top 10% were all girls. I think the only other boy in the honor society was a boy from the next year's class but I can't remember. (I know who the next highest boy in the school's ranking was but I don't remember whether or not he hit the cutoff for honor society.)

This was during the 90s in a public high school, so it wasn't like the population was simply unbalanced. This is hardly a new problem. Our education system simply doesn't engage with boys and hasn't for years at this point.

If you want links, though, it isn't hard to find them:

Itâ(TM)s Time to Worry: Boys Are Rapidly Falling Behind Girls in School
How to Make School Better for Boys: Start by acknowledging that boys are languishing while girls are succeeding.
Education: Boys Falling Behind Girls in Many Areas (Paywalled, so I have no idea what it says)

Those were just the top results on Google.

Unless something has changed since less than a week ago, if you try and connect to Steam while Steam is down for any reason (say, a DDOS attack, like in this article), you will fail to authenticate and be left in a "logged out" state. At that point there's no way to activate offline mode because you can't connect.

If you were already logged into Steam and attempt to "go offline" it will attempt to authenticate with the Steam servers, and again - if Steam is down, that's the end of that.

This happened less than a week ago. That's not misinformation, that was me trying to open Steam on Saturday to check out the holiday sale.

I can guarantee you that the last time I tried to start Steam without any network connectivity it tried to connect, couldn't, and refused to start in that state. That was a couple of years ago, but it definitely used to be the case that the only way to get Steam to go into offline mode is to already be online. So now whenever I get ready to leave for vacation I make sure to take the laptop offline.

Likewise when Steam was offline this weekend (and it was only down for like a half hour), I would start Steam, it would go to "Connecting...", it would fail, it would bring up the login window with an empty password, and that was that. No way to login, no way to switch to offline mode. So it's possible that it saw the working network connection and decided that since it couldn't contact the Steam servers it wouldn't go to "offline" but I most certainly couldn't do it while it was out. (I think Steam was out in a weird way where the update servers were up and a few game servers were up, but the authentication and store servers were down.)

But I can guarantee you that there was no way to get into offline mode at that time. I suppose I could have tried unplugging my Internet connection but why would I have tried that when it's their servers that are down, not my Internet?

I checked. Steam doesn't have a status page, so you have to rely on Reddit threads. Steam was definitely actually down since other people couldn't get online either. You most certainly cannot start Steam in this state, there's no way to do it, it will be unable to authenticate because it can't contact the servers, so it'll demand you reenter your password. At this point there's now no way to get into offline mode because Steam can't get past the login.

In my past experience with Steam, the only way to get into Offline Mode is to first be online. Apparently you're supposed to know ahead of time when your Internet connection will die for a week.

How long a timeout? Because Steam was down just the other day and the way it reacted was dumping me to the login screen, requiring me to re-enter my Steam password despite it being "saved", and then failing to connect because it was down, at which point it quits.

To get Steam into Offline mode, you must first connect to Steam.

I don't think Mac OS X even has a user-accessible BIOS. I know there's a "special" key combo you can hit to reset whatever they call their equivalent of CMOS settings (it's either NVRAM or PRAM and I have no clue what the difference is or why it matters). (I know this because there's another cute Mac bug that frequently hits my work MacBook where it will forget it has a built-in display because I turned it off while connected to a monitor, so you have to reset it to factory defaults to get it to realize "maybe I should turn on the laptop display.")

Ah, what the heck, I have the sucker sitting right next to me, let's see if you can disable it in ... "thu: no items." Oh.

(And I checked, you cannot access the EFI shell at all on new Macs. So even if it were possible to turn Thunderbolt off there, you can't access it anyway.)

Well, yes, if you can rip open the computer case and install new hardware, you have complete control over the hardware and that's to be expected.

Thunderbolt is more like USB to the user - it's a thing you use to connect untrusted devices to your system. You wouldn't expect that plugging in a USB thumbdrive would magically own your system (well, maybe you should, because it's happened in the past, but I think it's fair to say that it shouldn't). You'd think that plugging in a random Thunderbolt device would be designed to be safe. Apparently not: apparently Thunderbolt is unsafe by design.

The one mitigating factor is that literally no one uses Thunderbolt for anything, so it's not like anyone's likely to be coming across random compromised Thunderbolt devices. Discovering a Thunderbolt device at all would be out of the ordinary.