so I wonder how much damage this "rise in piracy" is actually doing.

None. Piracy increases income.

I say the answer is actually more nuanced than that.

If you're a popular author, perhaps writing some rather popular erotic fiction, or vampires, or something, piracy probably has a measurable impact on the bottom line. But measurable in the sense that well, so instead of making $1,050,000, you only made $1M. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, it's a tiny amount of money.,

For indie authors, piracy does have great positive benefits because the problem with anything indie is well, 99% of it is crap. Doesn't matter what it is - a book, a videogame, music, movies, apps, etc., The vast majority of it is utter crap. The goal is to somehow rise above the noise - which requires either spending money to market yourself, or trying to get your word out there that you exist (usually a more common problem - people can't find you if they don't know about you).

So piracy greatly helps in this case because it helps you rise above the noise that's drowning you out otherwise.

(And yes, 99% is crap. The good thing is, you don't hear about it because no one generally spreads crap so it just dies a silent death).

These are the equivalent of cars with built-in iPod docks, not aux jacks. Both of these standards are incompatible with each other, brand new, and controlled by companies that change/drop their old "standards" at the drop of a hat. In five to ten years, these systems will be just as obsolete as the cars with slots to fit a first-gen iPod, 30-pin connectors, and firewire level power output.

Cars provided USB power only recently, say 10 years ago.

Apple introduced the 30 pin dock connector 12 years ago, in 2003, which supported USB charging AND Firewire charging. The iPod was only 2 years old at this point. Incidentally, the 3rd gen iPod is the first million unit iPod model shipped, so the Firewire iPods were a curiosity (the 3rd Gen iPod was also the first to support Windows directly).

The 30 pin connector lasted 11 years. In the same time, USB changed from B ports to mini B ports to the current micro B ports. Since few cars used specific iPod cables (most were USB to iPod), the situation is just the same as USB plugs changing.

Android Auto and Apple CarPlay also connect to your phone using USB - the same standard USB plug. So when Android phones move to USB C, and Apple still uses Lightning (oh - USB C's coming, time to buy new sets of cables over the next couple of years), it will still all work. Will Apple support USB C? Maybe - Apple gave the USB-IF guys the design for USB C gratis in an effort to make the USB plug more useful for everyone (because it was obvious they were just going to stick with micro USB rather than try to incorporate any useful consumer-friendly things like the ability to not worry which end you plug in which way).

The bigger worry in the end is there aren't many platforms that last over 10 years - PalmOS started in the mid 90s and was wiped out in the mid 2000's, Windows Mobile started late 90s and was wiped out in the mid 2000's. Symbian started in the 80s as EPOC and probably lasted the longest, but again, dead. Ditto say, Blackberry. There's a good possibility that say, 2020 would bring about a new platform or innovation that renders iOS and Android both obsolete.

I also see those messages, but I don't use any ad blocking software. Java is disabled, plug-ins are disabled, javascript is enabled and cookies are limited to the same domain. Whoever wrote those "ad blocking detection" functions is an idiot.

it's most likely using the JavaScript detection - if you don't run the ad javascript, then you're most likely blocking it (are there any modern browsers that don't support javascript?).

Of course, it's a basic check - there are more advanced checks that could be done. But right now, few enough people do extensive ad blocking to matter.

Eventually you'll probably see things alone the lines of "use an adblocker and it's paywalled" scheme - so if you have an adblocker, you have to pay to view the content, or you can view the ads and get it for free.

The real concern though is that these websites use some sort of common paywall system, which may not have the best privacy protections and is vulnerable to hacking.

Or if people are outdoors, they actually try to drink enough cool water to survive.

  One thing that the Israeli army has right is they require their soldiers to take regular water breaks if conditions are safe to do so, and they enforce that enough water is drunk each break. It's amazing how high the temps can be and still be survivable if one isn't dehydrated.

That's fine for Israel, a modern developed country with good infrastructure, and relatively civilized people who don't try to treat everyone as slaves.

Indie is far less developed, and access to water itself is scarce. Even electricity is scarce - if you have it, you only have it for a few hours a day, especially if you're not in the city. (And during the worst heat, even that's not guaranteed).

Couple that with bosses who don't care and consider breaks to be the sign of a lazy workforce...

No testing provides 100% coverage, especially for the number of combinations of possible Unicode characters in a 160-character/byte message. Only a complete moron would blame this bug on lack of testing.

Let's not forget that Unicode is a standard that's constantly evolving - new glyphs are constantly added (there's already a new proposed set for Unicode 9 including glyphs for "selfie", "avocado" and others)

People keep arguing that /. doesn't support Unicode, when it really does - it just uses a narrow whitelist of characters. The reason for this is obvious if you think about it - to prevent situations like this from happening.

Heck, there might be strings out there that will crash any Unicode library implementation, just we haven't found them yet because the search space is huge.

The "sound" of a badly encoded MP3 is already influencing the way people sing - it's almost as if they think those artefacts and unwanted harmonics are something that makes a voice a good singing voice, because that's what they hear when someone holds a long or high note. Bloody hateful.

The other scary thing is, if you played back the MP3 and the original lossless source material, you'll find the new crowd prefers the lossy encoded one.

I'm not saying using LAME on 256+VBR, but crappy encoded 128kbps stuff where there are audible differences.

Listening to poorly encoded music in poor listening environments has changed the preferences of the music. Even the recording engineers now have to optimize their music for the lossy encodes with reduced dynamic range and pre-echo distortion.

There's still a few who go by the "if it's clean going in, it'll be the cleanest it can be coming out", while others are realizing that they need to adjust their mixers to sound better.

Bing returns the same results so unless both knowledge graphs are operating the same I would imagine it's a much simpler explanation: both sites rely on "answer" websites for answers. If you ask any question most often the results are Yahoo.Answers, Answers.com and wikihow. My guess would be that "Answers in Genesis" overloads their weighting for "answers" URLs associated with "Questions" on this topic.

If they actually overloaded the Knowledge Graph it would appear in a special box at the top of the results. In this instance it's still just a link. If you search "Circumference of the earth" you'll get a knowledge graph result with an "official answer".

FTFA, it was in a special box - there's a screenshot of the result right there.

It wasn't just a set of links, it was an actual knowledge box with the answer being found in Genesis.

Links, fine, that's just a SEO thing. But this was being presented as facts - Google returning it as definitive "truth" and answer, and appearing before the actual search results.

He might have been a disaster as a manager. Now they want to replace him.

I doubt it. As a VP, he's not really having a direct hand in managing his subordinates, more like general guidelines who his direct reports then interpret and control. And in his new title, I doubt he even has many direct reports at all.

If anything, it's likely in his new position he's given more creative freedom to test out and experiment without having traditional business issues get in the way. He's free to travel, seek input, explore and examine materials.

Maybe he was a terrible manager, so they moved him in a spot where he doesn't have to manage people and is more free to do as his creative wishes desire. He's a designer after all, so he does need space in order to be creative.

So, WTF is an e-mail client doing on a POS terminal in the first place? It doesn't need one, it shouldn't have one. Ditto a Web browser. You don't have to worry about vulnerabilities in software that isn't present on the machine in the first place. There are of course other things to be looked at, but those are a good starting point.

In a small business of 1-4 people, the POS system is usually the only computer on the premises. POS systems are cheap and readily available and help businesses out, at least with stuff like inventory management. (This is especially tricky with stores where there's a breadth of products, but not much depth).

And being the only computer, it's often used for online commerce - the store may have a simple Shopify style website that sells products, and thus have email and everything. Do it right and the two can often work together, so online sales draws down from the inventory database.

And no, these companies are way too small to have a proper client-server POS solution, and often don't have the space for more than one computer, period.

Though, usually they're also too small to have an integrated POS solution - a manual terminal to process card payments is usually the standard rather than even working with the POS system...

Yeah, wouldn't it make sense to see where the GPS signal dies, and when it comes back, and persume they took transport from one position to the other? No inertia guessing needed. The Yellow to the Red line is the only way to connect those dots without looping or doubling back. So why do you need to have the accelerometer to confirm?

Because the accelerometer is often free to use. Accessing GPS requires permission and often has an indicator.

With this, an app can use the accelerometer surreptitiously while leaving no indication that movement is being tracked - so many apps use it that no one gives a second thought. Using GPS often brings up an alert so the user knows they're being tracked. If your app uses the accelerometer anyways, you can sell that information for tracking. Whereas If you app suddenly popped up "MyCoolApp needs to use the GPS - Allow/Deny?" then people get suspicious.

At least it does on iOS. I don't know - do apps have free reign over the GPS on Android or do you get alerts when they attempt to use it?

No. Hence why I said that they can't have a third-party web engine. They have to use the system-provided WebKit.

Ironically, Firefox for iOS uses system WebKit as well. This could result in an interesting situation where Firefox on Android runs like crap, but Firefox on iOS runs pretty nicely (still like crap because embedded WebKit disables Nitro).

As for why, Safari runs with reduced permissions that allow JIT code compiling, embedded WebKit runs with standard (i.e., greater) permissions so JIT code is a security vulnerability.

But apparently it's not about the HTML renderer that matters - it's everything around it that matters in a browser.

Lost another SSD over the weekend. Crucial m4 512GB. Lost detection of the drive by the computer (Win 7 desktop), plugged it in through a USB adaptor and it's still not detected (Windows and Mac). That's 3 in the last 18 months.

RIP
Muskin Chronos 120GB (Windows 7 laptop)
Crucial m4 512GB (MacBook Pro 2012)
Crucial m4 512GB (Windows 7 desktop)

That being said I run everything on SSD: 2 HTPC, 2 desktops, 2 MacBooks, 2 Windows laptop.

I can't find the common factor that causes the failures. It would just be working one day, then next day fail detection by the computer and it's all gone.

How do you turn off your computers? And do your storage drivers put the drive into low power mode prior to turn off?

The thing with SSDs (and you don't appear to use the OEM ones like Samsung, Intel or Toshiba) is power failure can be deadly. Modern SSDs are fast and because SATA3 is a bottleneck, many sacrifice speed for data protection (if you can do 1GB/sec, and SATA3 is limited to 540MB/sec, you can sacrifice 40% of the speed in the name of data safety).

SSDs require a bunch of tables to work - the tables manage the flash translation layer software (the software that maps physical flash blocks to what the drive exposes, including wear levelling, TRIM and other features). In data safe SSDs, those flash tables are usually write-through cached so updates are committed to media, and so media always contains a consistent table. (There are tricks done to ensure that even if the table is partially written, there's a recovery table which is an older version. Think of it like a journaling file system).

Older SSDs cached the tables in RAM, wrote to them in RAM, then relied on a bank of capacitors to let them flush the tables from RAM to media on power loss.

Some SSDs cache them into RAM, and don't handle power failure, which can result in failures if the tables are corrupted.

The GOOD news is there's often a way to recover them - if you do an ATA_SECURE_ERASE command, it forces the SSD to reset the tables to a blank state and will often get them completely operational again, albeit losing all your data.

Those "screenshots" are only 600x375. They're more on the side of being huge thumbnails than actual screenshots.

It's actually kind of incredible given that Windows still uses 16x16 and 32x32 icons ("large" icons are 48x48). OS X was slightly more forthcoming when it allowed icons as big as 512x512 (and larger now, I think, with 2x "retina" icons...), turning pixel art into huge paintings.

Or heck, what was a "large" screenshot back then was 640x480 (most thumbnails were smaller than QVGA). Even now, on a 4K monitor, "giant" images that are under 1080p look tiny.

The slowness comes from letting 3rd party tracking sites set cookies and run scripts ... which modern browsers seem to treat as the default, or letting any crap set cookies or run scripts.

Their tracking protection isn't magic, it's just blocking crap. Some of which can be blocked by default anyway.

Well, the reason it's faster is you avoid making extraneous HTTP connections which can be slow by slow servers.

A lot of ad and tracking servers stall out the browser, and because everyone uses them, they're overloaded. The browser might have everything it needs to render the page, but all the tracking stuff stalls out the renderer so you get only the headers. You can easily increase the speed if you tell the renderer to ignore those tracking objects and the network stack to not retrieve that content.

Slow ad servers are the bane of the internet - why ad companies don't purchase more bandwidth and capacity is beyond me.

Is an apparent law enforcement officer (or group thereof) who is conducting their work illegally, really a law enforcement officer?

Well, they're *enforcing* the law (against you). Their methods are just illegal (to them).

So technically still correct - they're enforcing the law.

Now, if you want to talk about upholding the law...