They don't usually reduce graphical quality unless absolutely necessary to get a reasonable frame rate. Most of the optimizations involve hand optimized shaders, or even just hints to the shader compiler built into the driver. Shaders are compiled to a high level bytecode a bit like Java, and then that is compiled into GPU native code, so there are opportunities for optimization.

There can also be removal of checks that are confirmed not needed for a particular game, tweaks to GPU memory management code etc.

Or know when to call it a day and end the relationship mutually, before it gets bad enough to warrant a divorce.

What percentage wouldn't have had an affair if not encouraged by seductive advertising or given the opportunity to meet someone online rather than having to trawl bars or date people they know where the risk of discovery is higher?

I have no idea, but for these sites to be making money the answer must >0%.

No, it's actually the exact opposite. Read any introductory text on micro-aggressions, it will include examples of denying the psychological differences between men and women as things to avoid.

What feminism does argue against is the notion that because women might be predisposed to avoid conflict slightly more than men, that means they will always be worse at competing.

45% of B.S. degrees in mathematics in the states go to women, but 0% of US Mathematics Olympiad team members are female. You even point out that more generally there are fairly equal numbers of men and women in the top ranks of mathematics. So you have not answered the question of why there is this discrepancy. The institutional problem is with institution selecting and training team members.

I think that is far more likely to be due to social issues, specifically the repression of males who feel pressured to move away from "girly" subjects.

It's an area that needs more study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In short there are differences, but they are not enough to account for there being no females or very few on most of the teams. That suggests that selection for the teams is either not based purely on merit, or there is some issue preventing more girls studying mathematics to the highest levels.

It's a legitimate question to ask. That you simply don't like it or feel threatened by it is irrelevant.

It might be more accurate to say that in a competitive market place there may well be no alternatives.

Facebook is a great example. To become popular it had to give away its services for free. Otherwise people would have just used one of the many other similar but free services. The whole point of social media is to connect with other users, so putting people in a position where they have to tell someone to sign up for a paid service so that they can socialize is doomed to failure.

In fact, it's so bad that they can't even advertise to or monetize their users. People will just move on to the next competing free service as soon as it gets annoying or creepy.

Some users just can't pay anyway, e.g. people under the age of 18 who don't have access to a credit/debit card. Sites like MySpace couldn't charge half their audience even if they wanted to.

For sites like that, do you have any viable alternatives?

The NSA wouldn't bother back-dooring individual tools. They would just have MS insert a backdoor into the kernel and 0wn the entire machine that way. Then they can run their own screen capture code, as well as any other arbitrary code they like.

Why pay for multiple backdoors when a single one will work better anyway?

Netflix probably didn't enable the full retard mode, because it would break things for a lot of people. Want to watch on a DVI monitor? Sorry, it doesn't support HDCP encryption like HDMI does. They will have just used the standard windows D3D surface method that foils normal screen capture apps.

Unfortunately for them Microsoft have created a tool that can capture D3D surfaces and encode them on the GPU, much like the XBone and PS4 do. Netflix appear to be stuck between a rock and a hard place until Microsoft implement a new API, because they don't want to cripple their app on e.g. laptops that don't bother with a full encrypted path to the internal LCD.

If you were building/refitting a house, would there be any major disadvantages to installing a Faraday cage in the walls to block RF? You would lose the ability to listen to portable radios or TVs without plugging in to a wall socket. Your mobile phone wouldn't be able to make calls unless your provider supported calling over wifi or you bought a femotocell. Radio controlled clocks wouldn't work.

There would be a number of advantages. Much less congestion in the 2.4GHz band. Privacy. Protection from government mind-rays.

I'm wondering if it's a worthwhile trade-off.

Regardless of how it was originally billed, the reality is that today Netflix, DVRs and Bittorrent offer advert free viewing for either a subscription fee or a one-off payment. Any platform that thinks it can sneak in annoying, unskippable ads is dreaming. People will abandon it.

Why would they want to prevent others from doing it? They try to make out that they are a more ethical company that protects user's privacy (lol) so it would make sense for them to allow other companies to be evil.

The goal is to offer all children the chance to study CS, without gender or race related barriers in their way. The goal is to stem the complaints about those things by fixing the problems. Numbers are basically irrelevant.

It's interesting how many people are in total denial that the issues even exist, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It's kind of obvious why, when you think about it.

If the tech industry has a diversity problem, then that kind of suggests that the people in tech are part of the problem. Most people don't think of themselves as being sexist or racist, and in fact have extremely negative ideas of what those things are. So when the problem is more subtle and doesn't imply that the people who are part of it are bad people, it's hard to make the argument because people quickly get angry.

For another example of this, take Anita Sarkeesian's videos about video games. There's an instant -1 flamebait mod - see how angry people are even at the mention of her name? She starts the videos by stating that it is fine to enjoy video games while also critiquing them - in other words playing and enjoying a game with very poor female characters doesn't make you a bad person, and she isn't suggesting that you are. But when you look at people's reactions, it's clear they see it as a personal attack on their character, because they feel guilt by association.