Then your browser will not give your search agent of much of a chance to track you, and in most cases you have the source code to verify that. Search engines don't bother to track by IP because it's both unreliable and you will likely be pissed off if you see ads which are too relevant when you take such precautions.

Presumably most of your searches are not privacy sensitive and you might even appreciate the ads that show what you are looking for right at the moment. And when you are seriously looking into overthrowing your government, you use your browser's Incognito mode to connect to Tor over a VPN provider outside the jurisdiction of your local spooks.

Use DuckDuckGo if you like it, but it can not be your only privacy measure when you need real privacy, especially as startup on American soil forwarding searches to Putin's Yandex. Most search engines track you to get some money from ad clicks. Having to produce records to various law enforcement agencies is both costly and bad for brand reputation, so some effort is expanded in degrading usefulness of stored data for this purpose while minimally complying with the law.

This is simply not the way to run any business that makes most money from repeat customers, let alone one with no marginal costs. People will not suddenly stop listening to music after 3 months. If I was a musician participating in Apple music, I would be much more worried about their conversion rate, ongoing pay rate and discovery of my songs in the service. Speaking from experience of marketing a photo app and giving away free printed photos in all kind of kids events to jump start word of the mouth awareness.

If you in a mortuary business, maybe things are different. But for everyone else recognition is exactly what opens up possibility of paying the bills.

Here we go again! These artists are not losing any money or time to have their tracks played to a wider audience. They are just gaining potential new revenue in future. What Apple should have done is let artists opt out of the free trial and take a chance that people will establish different listening habits in the meantime.

Ah, the classic blunder of confusing physical goods with intellectual property.

You can wave a magic wand to get a house cleaned. Someone is running a service where a significant portion of users sign up to pay you some change for each cleaning after a 3 month free trial. Is it really a bad deal, even if it did take you a lot of time to make your magic wand?

If you are running a startup, you would love a service that offers 3 month free trials with decent conversion rate. It would be easy enough to get a bank loan and cover expenses while subscriptions ramp up, so long as you can document your likely monthly profits afterwards.

Now it could well be that most musicians would rather be paid a salary than depending on fluctuating royalties. But the likes of Taylor Swift would actually be strongly against that. When you are on a salary and become a megahit, you would get a nice bonus and maybe stock grants, but nowhere near the actual value of your work.

A hardware server start may take ten minutes - if it actually comes up successfully. If you are starting a cluster in an emergency outage, you never know how many servers, power supplies and network switches kicked the bucket since you last used them. Plus, your DNS, NFS, db and other dependencies have to be unaffected by the outage and handle the added load of hundreds of servers starting at the same time. If you do a staggered restart of 100 servers in groups of 10, that's an hour and 40 minutes of outage if everything goes without a hitch. Worth the power savings from idle standby?

Modern systems are good at reducing power consumption when idle. It's quite reasonable to have 30% of capacity as spares, reserve for unexpected load, capacity for new apps and so on. They probably consume 3% of the power and nobody is motivated enough to look for more savings. Keeping things completely off is problematic, because you never know how much of the hardware and software will come up in time to handle an emergency unless you run and test it all the time.

There is certainly room for further environmental/financial improvement, but the 30% figure is sensationalized.

Most people want search engines to understand synonyms, misspellings and contextual relevancy and return results that one had in mind rather than string matches. This only becomes more important with mobile/voice search.

You may have better luck with internal search of sites like stackoverflow.

So what in your opinion are computing/internet service innovations that originated in Europe?

I am sure there is no lack of smart and highly educated people, but you can not have innovation without a high degree of freedom. Imagine running Facebook or Twitter under these kind of laws. The tragedy is that US laws can be easily improved on by a country that wants to be in forefront of technology. Certainly a country motivated to become tech center of the world can respect privacy much more than NSA.

Even when implemented correctly, TRIM slows down regular I/O that happens around the time it's done. On top of that, you are risking OS and drive bugs that can vary with every incremental revision. You may not notice corruption until all your backups are overwritten, and just think of a hassle of restoring even once. Is it really worth potential minor performance benefits that are often realized by drive itself anyway?

I can think of exceptions like building a supercomputer with monolithic array of drives uses for disposable cache. But for individual users TRIM makes no sense.

In 90s game consoles were significantly cheaper, easier to use and more stable than computers of the day. Now you can get a steam machine for $499 or find a deal on a gaming PC at or below price of consoles. Just hook it up to TV, get a controller, run steam Big Picture and enjoy access to same games as consoles, plus many hundreds of PC-only games, frequently for $10 a pop. I can still "emulate" my Windows XP games on Windows 10 without jumping through hoops.

If there is future in console gaming, it's cheap boxes and hdmi sticks that can play casual games with a remote or do local network/cloud streaming of more demanding titles.

Let's see. To intercept a fax or voicemail from the machine in my office, you need to be physically present there or next to outside phone lines every time. Hardware to do persistent remote wiretaps is expensive and not widely available. Chances of getting caught or leaving evidence of tampering are high and you only get my future communications, not the ones I already read and shredded.

With unlocked computer I get years of your e-mail so far and your IMAP password that I can use to spy on you from now on. Plus an opportunity to install a keylogger and any other malware of my choice. Even if every single e-mail is encrypted, I instantly get valuable metadata of whom you have been corresponding with and when.

A fax machine is way safer from casual adversaries, including local police departments that can not justify spending huge resources on your case. A computer can be potentially safer than a fax machine against NSA, but only if you are very skilled and careful and never make a single mistake.

Most of OS security vulnerabilities are irrelevant for the purposes of the server running specific internal apps. The server is going to be running behind a firewall that blocks everything but a couple of ports and sanitizes anything that comes through those. Employees are going to login with 2 factor authentication before being allowed access. And you are smart enough to not browse warez sites with Internet Explorer from server console right?

Of course if you run your network like Sony, you will probably get p0wned. The thing is that it's very unlikely that upgrading to latest Microsoft software is going to make any difference. Just think what will give you best value and employee productivity for the next 3 years and go with that.

It's no surprise that big programming organizations develop new languages to better suite their own needs. If you are running a large server farm, a language that helps you have 25% fewer memory corruption crashes without sacrificing speed is a huge thing. Outside adoption may vary, but over time some will succeed and supplant C/Java as default choices for new projects.

Personally I am hoping for something that unifies memory and external resource management without leaks, crashes or perceptible GC pauses. This may be unsolvable in theoretical general case, but a language and runtime can provide many patterns for common practical needs. Even having reliably destroyed local instances that can not be returned out of the method in Java would be a huge thing for helping people remember to close files.