quietly request the READ_GSERVICES permission. This lets them grab your Google Services Framework ID, a persistent device ID that survives app reinstalls and SIM swaps. Translation: perfect for long-term tracking.

Given how critical that permission is, how are they even able to request it quietly? I would think Android would be screaming at the top of its lungs if that permission were requested.

I think part of the problem is that external search engines would simply put worse interactions to the top based on some metric known only to them, so there was a desire to eliminate things that were superfluous, to channel searchers into the places that have their answers.

But of course it ran into the exact problem you described- generally a class of moderators wants that position for some reason. You're looking for the moderators who share a vision of a really useful place where everything works great, but many moderators will just be there to enforce some value (sometimes political) or because they have a keyboard sadism streak and that's that. Basically when you take volunteers for "who wants to have power", only some of the people coming forward want to use that power for thing you want, the others will do that to fulfill the job role but they'll REALLY use it for $LAME_THING.

Pretty shitty world, sometimes you need to communicate that graphically.

This one's main purpose was to race-swap the characters (with the exception of the protagonist, who is adopted, many of the major characters are from the same small town of what amounts to white people, and they all became a weird racial mix you wouldn't find many places historically except for the biggest cities) and do extra-turbo-pseudofeminism in a series that had tons of amazing female characters. This was all very deliberate and probably part of why the thing got funded to begin with.

This made it poisoned from the start, and of course they immediately began making changes to the source material, because the visual media looms so large in everyone's brain, they figured that would then become the in-fact version of Wheel of Time in the minds of anyone who cared going forward.

I'm glad they failed, and I'm glad it is over. Cultural destruction averted through what amounts to good luck, but I'll take it.

Yea we know you will stop at nothing to destroy America, and as first order of business the few good things Trump manages to do will be axed along with all the bad ones.

The world is gonna have to use nuclear power eventually.

>Is it a contest?

Yes of fucking course it is.

> it's been neither "stable" nor "reliable."

I was going to say the same thing. CenturyLink/Quantum's fiber service has been spotty pretty much since the beginning. Which tracks, since their DSL service wasn't much better.

AT&T may find new and interesting ways to screw things up. But Quantum residential customers have already been getting the short end of the stick for reliability.

All humans are still subject to natural selection. Natural selection works better the fewer things it has to select for, right? Like if all a population cared about was having six fingers, then that trait would become pretty common after enough generations, even though it's a very rare trait.
When you eliminate something like "heavily resistant to malaria" from the selection criteria (or just reduce the pressure in favor of it), you get to select for other things. You also get to experience less of any side effects that resulted from that (in my example, sickle cell anemia may be as represented as it is because of the benefits of a gene that causes it as regards malaria).

So generally, removing the selection pressure caused by diseases like the one in OP makes the human race more fit.

This whole exchange has me thinking of a filler bit from a DS9 episode.

JACK: The fact is that the universe is going to stop expanding and it is going to collapse in on itself. We've got to do something before it's too late.
PATRICK: How much time do we have left?
JACK: Sixty trillion years, seventy at the most.
JACK: There's too much matter. The universe is too heavy for its own good.
LAUREN: You need to lighten the load.
JACK: Yes, yes, yes, exactly. We have to find some way to decrease the mass.
SARINA: Of the entire universe?
JACK: That's the whole point.

Apparently, we're just going to have to change the cosmological constant...

What could possibly go wrong?

Polygon had seen better days, that's for sure. But in their early days the site was very, very good.

More than anything else, I feel like the site lost its focus somewhere in the last half-decade. The original focus of the site is all in the name: polygons - as in video games. But Vox slowly morphed it into a general pop culture website. These days it's a mix of video games, movies, TV shows, board games, books, etc.

Those are all fine things in and of themselves. But at best they dilute the brand. And at worst they're taking the place of video game content, to the point where if you're after actual gaming news you're going to want to go elsewhere, because Polygon didn't have the editorial bandwidth to cover it.

So it has been a long time coming, in some respects. Unfortunately, the people who really pay the price are the writers, who are now out of a job.

CodeWeavers is one of the few companies that I believe really do intend to keep their word - and have the means to do it.

The company has been shipping CrossOver Mac for almost 20 years now - basically since Macs transitioned from PPC to x86. They've rejiggered their software lineup a couple of times, essentially consolidating a few different products (Games, Office, Standard) into a single SKU, but they've always provided a continuity of features and an upgrade path. Put another way, they've been offering the same continually-updated CrossOver product for over two decades now.

Which, since it's essentially the commercial release of Wine, that makes sense. Their whole business model is constantly developing improvements to Wine, and then bundling that up into a commercial-grade software package that comes with official support. So their business model is stable (so long as Windows remains important), as well as the need to continue updating the software.

Given how intertwined CodeWeavers is with Wine, it would be a disaster if they did renege on lifetime updates for anyone who has paid for them. The corollary to that being that if it were to happen, then something very bad must have already happened to the broader Wine ecosystem, as this is how they primarilly fund the whole project.

Good high schools have offered stats courses for ages. And for college-bound students, AP Statistics has been offered for almost 30 years now.

Not even jokingly, no. Denuevo is self-contained at the executable level: it runs entirely in ring 3. It's not like, say, StarForce, which needed a ring 0 driver installed.