LAwLz

Ah I see. Missed that part.

I am not really sure why people are surprised by this or what people are reading into this story. What did people think happened with old phones? That they magically became new phones? It's not like the phones being sent there for destruction are the latest model with zero issues. The phones that are in good shape and a somewhat new model gets sold as refurbished by Apple. Taking the phones and recycling the materials is very common in IT. When the article says "destroyed", it means recycled. I think the biggest story here is that an employee at GEEP apparently stole a bunch of phones and sold them. And before someone asks, a private person selling old iPhones on for example eBay or Craigslist can get away with selling partially broken or very roughed-up phones.

There is quite a lot of misinformation (or very vague terms) about this news piece floating around. Even the source article itself seems to get some things wrong or at the very least makes misleading remarks. 1) Android devices going quite far back already had support for AV1. What is changing is that the decoder is being changed from libgav1 (Google's own AV1 decoder) to dav1d (the AV1 decoder developed by VideoLAN). So nothing is changing in terms of what devices can and can't play. It's just that the new decoder is better than the old one. 2) When talking about which formats a device supports or doesn't support it is very important to specify "software support" and "hardware support". Pretty much all devices support AV1 decoding in software. Very few support it in hardware. 3) Just because your device reports support for a certain video format does not mean an app will use it. On Android, when an app fetches the list of supported formats the OS specifies if decoding of the format is supported in software, hardware or both. In other words, just because your phone supports AV1 decoding in software doesn't mean an app will just decide to fetch that format for you. The app itself will have information about which formats are supported in hardware and which aren't, and makes a decision based on that. 4) Just because the Youtube app, or any other app for that matter, uses the new dav1d decoder doesn't mean it will automatically fetch an AV1 video. Which video it decides to fetch is a separate from which formats are supported. As I said earlier, nothing in this chance from libgav1 to dav1d changes what devices report as supported formats. If Youtube now decides to play AV1 videos on devices that doesn't support hardware accelerated AV1 decoding then it is because the Youtube app doesn't care, not because of some OS change that messes with what gets reported as supported video formats. 5) Something to keep in mind is that AV1 is very easy to decode in software. Last time I checked, the OnePlus 8 with its quad Cortex-A77 CPU (Snapdragon 865) was able to easily get 250+ FPS when decoding high bitrate 1080 footage on just its CPU. Even a single Cortex-A53 is enough for playing 720p footage with. Of course, it is more than hardware-accelerated H.264 or VP9 decoding, but we're still talking about what should be a fairly low impact, especially since this mostly applies to phones that usually get 480p video served to them. Laptops, where the power efficiency matters the most, have had hardware-accelerated AV1 decoding support for quite a while now. It shouldn't be too big of a deal. I am sure that Google have run some calculations to see if this is a good idea or not. Edit: Not sure why so many people are talking about uploading in this thread either. This has nothing to do with uploading. The only thing this (potentially) changes has to do with watching/downloading/decoding. Not uploading.

Please note that if you do this, there is a risk that if one druve fails you will lose all or most data stored on BOTH drives. In other words, you're basically doubling the risk of losing data as well as doubling the data you lose. Even though drive failures are fairly rare it's something worth keeping in mind.

I think those people are joking with you. What makes you think you couldn't program on that keyboard? Programming is just typing. The only difference between typing this forum post and programming is that you will need to use some special characters like ( ) more than in typical typing, but that's it.

I don't see why it would be hard at all. Did you write this post on your keyboard? If you can type on your keyboard then you can program.

I suggest you stick to the "message the mods" function. Remember, you are asking them for a favor. The last thing you want is to come across as annoying, which lessens the chance of them fixing your issue.

No matter what you say, taking away platforms where people can express ideas is a form of censorship. Just because it isn't an absolute silencing of people doesn't make it any less censorship. My argument was simply that the whole "it isn't censorship because you still have some options left" is simply false. The same logic taken to the extreme would mean that nothing in China is censored. The definition that "censorship is the complete and utter removal of any possibility to express a certain idea" renders the word useless. Luckily for us, the word "censorship" has a fairly good definition and banning TikTok would absolutely be a form of censorship. Whether or not you agree with that censorship is a different discussion though. I like your "this time it is different, and if someone said the same thing back then then they were wrong but I am totally right this time". I won't pretend like TikTok is all good. I am sure there are legitimate concerns and issues with it. But whether or not those issues are big enough to warrant removing the platform is less clear cut than I think some people believe. I feel like it has become cool to hate on the platform, and people generally are okay with censorship if they dislike the thing being censored. I feel like that is what's happening here. Also, since site like YouTube also pushes the same content, maybe we need to consider if a ban on YouTube is a necessary step to deal with the negative aspects of social media. I mean, if we agree that TikTok contributes to mental health issues to such a degree that the government needs to ban it, what's to say the same shouldn't be done to YouTube?

Yes, and putting someone in jail is not restricting freedom because they can still walk around in their little jail cell... For those wondering, censorship is defined as: or: Just because you have other ways of communicating something doesn't mean the act of taking options away isn't censorship. By that logic, China isn't censoring anything at all. Them banning certain words on websites? That's not censorship because people can still say those words in their own homes. It's a silly argument to make that shows a lack of understanding of the word. People said the same thing about books, movies, music, and so on.

That is up to every individual to decide, but if you want an example, pirating a game deprives the developers of all the income. In the case of YouTubers a large portion of their income comes from sources other than the built-in ad system. Sponsor spots among others. I would argue that there is a big difference between taking away 100% of someone's income vs taking away ~18% (last time I checked their income breakdown). I don't know. Maybe just call it a bad or mean thing to do if that's how you feel? I see your point about creators and YouTube preferring that viewers don't block ads. However, consider that advertisers also don't want viewers to change channels during TV commercials, yet it's generally accepted as a part of watching TV. Both actions, using an ad blocker and changing channels, stem from a viewer’s preference for how they consume content, even though both can affect ad revenues similarly. I believe that people are more okay with things that impact the advertisers negatively than things that negatively impact Youtube creators. My guess is that this is because a lot of people feel like the Youtubers are their friends, so it is the responsibility of the viewers to make sure the creator earns money. If we are going to talk about what responsibility the viewers have to make sure some company makes money, shouldn't we also be championing the idea that we shouldn't change channels on our TVs when the ads start running? I am sure that if it was possible and the ad companies were in control, they would prevent us from changing the channel.

I don't think you understand the point me and others have made. Piracy, the word piracy, means that it breaks the law. You are free to call it a thing you shouldn't do, but you shouldn't call it "piracy" because the definition of "piracy" do not fit what adblocking is. I am not objecting to you saying that adblocking is bad, immoral or whatever else you feel about it. I am objecting to you using the specific word "piracy" because adblocking does not fit the definition of piracy. And no, at its core it is not like pirating a game. There are very big differences both legally and morally. Legally they are very different things, and morally I don't have any issues with adblocking. Everyone is free to draw their own moral lines wherever they feel comfortable. For example, I might say you are doing a bad thing by clicking "skip" on ads and that it is a thing you shouldn't do. I am not sure how Youtube does it these days, but once upon a time creators didn't get paid anything if you clicked on the skip button. In those cases, someone clicking skip did the exact same amount of "damage" to the creator as someone who blocked ads. If we assume that creators still get paid even if ads are skipped then someone could argue that it is immoral to do so because you are basically taking money from the company who paid for the ad. If we extend the analogy to TVs or radios then some could argue that it is immoral to change channels when the ads come on. A company paid to have those ads shown/heard, right? So if you switch to a different channel you are harming them. They paid to have you see/hear a commercial, and by switching to a different channel you are causing the ad to not be transmitted to you. Is that also a bad thing you shouldn't do in your eyes?

There is no technical reason for it. I also speculated about things like VBS, MBEC and HVCI support for a while but then things fell flat when I started looking into which processors had or didn't have those features, and how they matched up with the Windows 11 requirements. Then the vice president of OS security and enterprise at Microsoft flat out said that there were no specific features that caused the cutoff. Microsoft just felt like it was a good place to cut support at for a wide range of reasons like "quality, support and reliability". So if you are asking why Zen isn't supported but Zen+ is then the answer is "because Microsoft said so". There is no technical reason for it. They just felt like it was old enough that they could exclude it when drawing their line in the sand. They wanted to draw the line and had to draw it somewhere.

No, it isn't. Is bocking ads breaking copyright law? If no, then it is incorrect to call it piracy. You can call it a dick move, immoral, or whatever, but don't call it piracy because that has a specific meaning and the meaning does not fit here. Downloading a game without paying for it is piracy because it goes against the DMCA (or similar laws depending on where you live). Blocking ads have been tested in court and found to not be against copyright law. You are using words incorrectly.

Yes, but Linus uses a lot of words incorrectly. I can agree with that, but that doesn't make adblocking equal to piracy. But the word "piracy" has a specific meaning. Piracy, when talking about computers and software, means copyright infringement, which is regulated by several laws and international trade agreements. There have been some court cases which have debated this such as the lawsuit against Eyeo (the company behind Adblock Plus) and in that case the court found that adblocking was not copyright infringement. If we Google "software piracy" pretty much every single link you can find will talk about copyright laws. Because that is what software piracy is. Breaking copyright law. You can talk about how you think adblocking isn't "morally good" if you want, but that is a very different argument from claiming it is piracy. When you make a claim that something is piracy, you are making a claim that it breaks a certain type of law.

No it isn't... You can say it is a lot of things, but piracy has a specific meaning and adblocking do not fit into it.