There's just not a better option for a lot of people.

Frequently no-one's going to be home to accept the package. Picking up at the USPS / Fedex / UPS facility instead can take time (30+ minutes, depending). Package lockboxes are possible (amazon does them) but also have their limits (esp. package size) and cost money to run / can't be put everywhere so there can be that time issue again. Signature delivery requires someone at home. Office delivery is fine, but doesn't work for all workplaces. Some apartment complexes have secure delivery areas and give the delivery people codes / kesy to access them, but there would be a lot of infrastructure work to make something similar for houses. Also doesn't help if the delivery person is in on it which they sometimes are (could very well be here, given that the thieves had inside info from someone).

I've had packages sit outside for a month (long work trip, package that arrived late that I had expected earlier kind of thing) and nothing happened to them; porch piracy isn't a universal problem.

Because it isn't true? Amazon drivers can't even reliably deliver to the correct place; if it's an Amazon driver for me it's a diceroll where the package ends up - UPS, Fedex, and USPS never mess up. (It's an outsourced driver thing - google maps et. al. are terrible with apartment complexes, while the other delivery services actually pay for correct addresses).

And the requirements of mail are different from the requirements of packages for an online vendor. The only reason Amazon can do rapid delivery stuff is because they know ahead of time what they might have to deliver and can setup package warehouses. USPS don't have that luxury since they have to actually carry all kinds of shit.

Maverick's full theatrical run was 2022, not 2023.

The notion that "woke messaging" has anything to do with this is silly. The top 5 movies of the year (US) were:

Barbie $636.2M
The Super Mario Bros. Movie $574.9M
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse $381.3M
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 $359.0M
Oppenheimer $326.1M

Barbie is so woke it literally stops so a character can deliver a monologue about feminism. Mario has the badass action princess. 3 and 4 are the black Spiderman movie and a superhero movie about how animal experimentation is bad. Then there's a movie that's so political it's about a senate hearing. (Worldwide top 5 switches Spiderman with Fast X, which while probably not political certainly fails the coherent script thing). Trying to describe 'woke' (or 'political') to exclude these things just makes it nonsense - they're certainly at least as or more woke than all the superhero movie failures this year.

And the breakout video game of the year (there are no good cross-platform video game sales rankings as the real numbers aren't publicly shared, but it's most likely somewhere in the top 3 of non-live service games; certainly #1 PC) kicked of its marketing campaign by revealing you can have gay sex with a bear. Admittedly, that was in large part to grab clickbait headlines that would then talk about the rest of the game, but "look at all the bisexuals you can date" continued to be a significant driver for the game and there were the usual complaints about wokeness due to it.

Of course, all of these other than Super Mario (first kids movie in theaters in 4+ months, and adults were willing to go because Mario) and Fast X (only did well internationally) had actual merits and were well-received by critics and the general public (>80% critic and audience on rotten tomatoes, A Cinemascore). "Woke" simply isn't a meaningful factor. (Nor is left-wing boycotting, as seen by Hogwarts Legacy's big success). People don't really care about that shit.

The Sphere opened on September 29th, 1 day before the quarter ended:

The Sphere in Las Vegas reported an operating loss of $98.4 million for the fiscal quarter ending Sept. 30 ...
opened Sept. 29 with the start of U2’s multimonth residency

So I doubt the loss for the quarter means much; just that it lost money completing construction before opening.

As for the guy quitting, why would a rich person (CFO for a multibillion dollar company, he's rich) work for a shitty boss instead of fucking off to the Bahamas or whatever? Dolan is a petty micromanaging asshole, given his public conduct around the Knicks (which he cares about more than anything, and is very bad at running despite being an easy job - NBA is a star driven league, there's no hard spending cap, and NY is an attractive city) so it's unsurprising the CFO decided he had better things to do.

At this point it's a publisher decision, as Valve has worked with Anti-cheat developers to ensure Proton can support them. The big anti-cheats are VAC (which is Valve's own and fully supported for ages), Battleye (Supported since 2021), and Easy Anti-Cheat (Supported since 2021); the latter two only work if the publisher enables them.

Publishers don't always enable, particularly the big multiplayer (Call of Duty / Battlefield / PUBG / Destiny) and Asian Gatcha games, but some do (Apex Legends, Halo, GTA5); as I don't really play those games the only issue I really run into these days is the shader compliation can be annoying with old budget CPUs like old i3s. Valve has been pouring resources into this for a good decade.

Yup, that's it. Bridge looks complete because image is from 2012, but if you go forward/backward to intersections, there are more up to date images from which you can spot the fallen bridge if you turn around without moving.

Forward, May 2023.

Backward, May 2019.

Google Maps is terrible at fixing things - they have my address wrong and won't fix it - I don't know if they have any legal liability here but they obviously fucked up, given the notifications (esp. given that they had streetview images showing the bridge was out to check when they got the notifications).

I was under the impression that the idea was to lean to the side that will probably win. So Apple will be allowed to keep their monopoly?

No, this is just the Supreme Court keeping the status quo while appeals go on. Generally the default because it minimizes the number of times things have to change back and forth; the status quo isn't fatal to Epic, so they can wait until the appeals finish for the court judgements to take effect.

From Etsy's August 1st post addressing the controversy (bolding mine)

We introduced payment account reserves in 2021, and to date it’s been successful in helping us to deter fraudulent activity and ensure reliable shopping experiences. However, as we’ve expanded and iterated on the program to further protect our marketplace, we recognize it may have led to disruptions in how some sellers manage their day-to-day operations.

So they started the reserves back in 2021 just for new accounts at first but they've become wider and wider since. Some information from an etsy blogger and an Etsy policy statement suggests a lot of it relates to shipping, but as Etsy doesn't actually integrate with shipping trackers properly (including Royal Mail in the UK) you can ship something with tracking and Etsy is too cheap to notice, but will withhold funds anyway. Also they don't properly explain why they're withholding funds, and sometimes just do it by accident; it seems like something that's been growing over the past couple years into an increasingly large problem.

Given that the withholding is 75% for up to 3 months with no explanation - more than enough to derail a business entirely - the annoyance seems pretty justifiable.

"No Crypto" isn't what's preventing that from happening, and crypto doesn't solve the reasons it hasn't happened.

Pretty much all digital games are already tied to accounts, so there's nothing technical stopping Valve, Epic, MS, Nintendo or Sony from allowing people to 'sell' a game from one account to another. Valve has had an active digital item store (Steam Community Market) for selling items between players for over a decade. And people sold accounts with games to one another years before then - people were doing it unofficially at least back in the Warcraft 3 days and almost certainly before then. (It still happens, there are a bunch of 'accounts with playstation plus' for sale on ebay, for example).

But the corporations don't want to do it for money reasons, not technical reasons. And NFTs don't solve that problem, they way they haven't manage to solve any of the others they were supposed to.

There are 3 Democratic members already, and by law (15 U.S.C. 78d), no more than 3 (out of 5) SEC Commissioners can be of the same party:

This is done for a number of financial things (the FTC is the same), to maintain "independence", but as 3 (of 5) is generally enough to pass actual rulemaking it doesn't generally matter much. And the Democratic party hadn't really been any better than the Republicans on crypto until the bottom fell out, so while I'm generally dubious of "the parties are the same" stuff, it's been pretty true on crypto until recently. (Which is probably why Peirce is whining now).

Their explainer:

Later in the same paragraph:

That's .. an ad. Shoving a product they want you to buy on the lock screen is an ad.

This old Joel on Software about the 80/20 myth makes some points, but I think a particular thing is this:

A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.

Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.

While Joel's post is written for selling software products, this also applies when you consider that libraries are another set of products for a specified set of customers (other programmers) who are going to use the library that does what they need. I'm currently working with mathematical operations on large datasets (up to around 2TB / run) - big image manipulations and the like - so obviously speed and optimization is needed. A core, I-wrote-everything-myself-in-c/assembly path would be a few megs of code at most. The libraries end up as several hundred megs at the moment and I am likely going to drag in more.

Why? Because a bunch of people are doing almost the same thing with almost the same needs, so the people that wrote the library cover for a lot of people. And because each library is optimized at its own job by people who knew what they were doing, it would take a massive amount of (redundant) work - with a whole new set of bugs - to match the speed / reliability of the core code path. See also encryption, in which rolling your own is generally a terrible idea because of a whole lot of domain-specific issues. This bloats up further for stuff where speed isn't a core concern - a library is probably going to be better at the core concern than whatever you will come up with unless you do a lot of work - and if speed isn't a core concern for multiple components things are going to add up.

This doesn't apply to every library ever written of course, and sometimes people import stuff just for the non-core functionality of a library which is gonna be a bad idea. But for the most part it's not lazy programmers.

Usually they are holding the government to it's own rules

But the Supreme Court can easily find the way to both sides when it does so. Take the recent decision ruling that the federal law barring discrimination based on sex barred discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender presentation; it was a perfectly reasonable conservative textualist interpretation by Gorsuch. And the dissents that found the opposite were also perfectly reasonable textual or originalist interpretations by other justices.

Or the vaccine mandate. CoVID being present elsewhere does not make it not a workplace hazard, and not all workers ever have the same risk of exposure to any hazard; the mandate could have been upheld perfectly fine. The same with CO2; the language written by Congress is broad enough but without an explicit description of CO2 that they can find their way to both sides.

And it doesn't even need to have anything in relation to the Constitution or the text if they feel like making it up. None of the laws police officers use qualified immunity as a defense against say anything about being limited to "clearly established" violations of the constitution or the rest of the qualified immunity nonsense. But the Supreme Court made it up anyway.

There are times where someone fucked the chicken bad enough that they get slapped down (some of the Trump rulings, for example), or it's not politically salient enough that it ends up unanimous. But most Supreme Court cases generally don't arise until there's a circuit split, indicating the lower courts have reasoned to both sides; it's not surprising that as a result the Justices can find their way to whatever is politically convenient when they want.

It wasn't in violation of the terms of service, which allowed the 3rd Party client (which is still around, as are other approved 3rd party clients, which seem to be extensively used) and mods that didn't affect gameplay (like this HD mod). If you read the announcement linked in the sxummary, it notes that they have to update the ToS to actually ban it:

So it's not just banning the project, it's letting the project go on for two years before suddenly changing the rules to ban a project about to release that had been previously allowed, in favor of a supposed official HD release that will not be out for years, if ever.