Technology
Exploring "Why" questions about Technology
491 articles
why do you have to “eject” USB drives before removing them from your computer?
I'm fairly sure this gets asked a lot, so I'm going with Short Answer: your operating system doesn't always write changes to files right away. This is intentional and for performance reasons. Telling
Why do people think it is so bad when machines or robots take over human jobs?
Because it's hard for the person who has lost their job to think of the bigger picture and the overall effect on the economy when they had such a big thing happen to them. It doesn't matter if their j
Why does a country downstream from a dam suffer a hit to its water supply? Doesn’t the net water flow stay the same?
One big factor is evaporation. A reservoir generally creates a greater water temperature in the upper layer and a larger surface area, which increases evaporation and reduces downstream water availabi
why are Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome so much better than Internet Explorer? What are the big problems with Explorer? If I have good anti virus software is there really a difference?
Historically you would be correct about IE being a bad browser. But it you use the Modern ones they are pretty equivalent to Chrome and Firefox. They all have add-on's to varying extents.
Why do many people claiming to be US patriots display the Confederate Battle flag when the Confederacy was fighting against the US?
America is a free speech country, you can mostly say whatever you want, it doesn't have to make sense or reflect history accurately.
Why is Google Chrome so unfriendly to Flash and Unity? What downsides do these programs have?
The entire tech industry is hostile towards Flash, that is not a Google specific thing. This is partly due to Flash being a resource hog, and partly due to the fact that serious security vulnerabiliti
Why do spam comments on YouTube/Instagram list links and words in fancy text?
The spammers do that to try to defeat anti-spam measures. For example: "Meds" is a strong spam indicator, but they might hope that "Μεds" doesn't, because it includes a couple of Greek letters.
why are ad videos shown without problem on my phone but when the video starts the internet becomes slow?
Because ads are cached, because they are smaller and loaded more frequently than videos. Moreover, they doesn't come from the targeted site but from an API that is [probably geographically closer to y
Why have the phone companies not moved on to “caller ID v2” which can’t be spoofed?
Why should they? Scam calls make them money, and people have no choice about who their local phone company is. There is no financial incentive for them to improve caller ID.
Why is everyone on reddit explaining their edits? Even when it is just a typo and they added 1 letter, they write: “Edit: Typo. I was on a phone” or something like that.
You can troll people by posting something, waiting for people to reply, then edit your post to something else so the replies no longer mean what they intended. E.g. You post something innocent like "n