Honestly, I'm shocked it got a second season. It was objectively worse than Rings of Power. Disagree? Here's why:

Both have almost nothing to do with the source material.

• RoP didn't get a license for the Silmarilian, the book that covers the period prior and closest to where they set the story. So it couldn't be good. They should have shelved the project at that point, but failing to climb a mountain with two broken legs doesn't make you a bad climber, just an idiot for trying.
• WoT on the other hand had a license to all the source material, full access to RJ's Widow/editor + his assistant + Brandon Sanderson who worked to finish the last three books, and chose to ignore the source material and the people most familiar to them and just to do their own thing. This was an unforced error.

The characters, their back stories, their behavior, and their values are wildly different than the books, essentially new characters wearing their names. Similar issues with the lore early on that are pretty core to the story - no idea how they intended to fix that if it had survived to later books, but I'm guessing since all the characters were essentially new, the ending would have been as well. Just one character and relationship example: Mat in the books is a fun loving, humorous rogue archetype, with a tendency to get himself into trouble, but a nack for getting back out of it. He has a loving family, and his father (Abell Cauthon) is known to be a shrewd horse trader, from whom Mat learned a lot about horses, how to watch out for scams, and to deal fairly but firmly. Abell along with Rand's father leave the Two Rivers shortly after the kids hoping to catch up and help look after them as they adapt to the wider world, though they never do catch the group. In the show? Abell is an abusive drunk. End of story.

It's not even internally consistent, killing a character at the end of the first season, realizing he was too important to the story to have dead and just having him walk onscreen in season 2 without comment. The whole world is wildly different too, with White Cloaks operating with impunity within the borders of Andor - something Morgase wouldn't have ever allowed in the books one example from the first episode). If they wanted to do an original fantasy show, they should have done that. Getting a license only to ignore everything that people value in the original work isn't going to do better than a new property after the first couple episodes, because the built in fanbase will be angry instead of excited.

Bottom line: it was bad, and Rafe should feel bad.

Hey, Pinterest is actually pretty good once you use userscripts (Greesemonkey, tampermonkey, etc.) to remove the need to login, allow image saving, add a button to directly open the full-resolution image....

OK, OK, you pretty much need to rewrite the entire site, but there's some great data berried under all the BS.

The bug is assigned to someone, and it's rated P0 (highest) in priority, and S0 (highest) in terms of severity. That's a pretty strong response. They could have downplayed it by reducing the severity or priority, but they're owning it.
Any textual statement doubtless needs to be vetted by PR, and go through Legal, and a bunch of other BS, but those assignments didn't.

Really wish I could read the post-mortem on this one though. Whatever bug triggered this must have slipped though so many unit tests and phased rollout checks, it must be edge cases upon edge cases.

Also the penalties are small enough that Apple can probably ignore the law in its entirety:

42488.3. (a) A city, a county, a city and county, or the state may bring an action in superior court to impose civil liability on a person or entity that knowingly violated this chapter, or reasonably should have known that it violated this chapter, in the amount of one thousand dollars ($1,000) per day for the first violation of this chapter, two thousand dollars ($2,000) per day for the second violation, and five thousand dollars ($5,000) per day for the third and subsequent violations.

What's $5000/day to apple? They could pay this to every country in the USA for $15,715,000.00 per day vs their daily income in 2022 of 273,432,876.00 - a noticeable expense, but what are the chances that every single country in the country sues the simultaneously?

1) No manufacturer or authorized repair provider shall be liable for any damage or injury caused to any electronic or appliance product, person, or property that occurs as a result of repair, diagnosis, maintenance, or modification performed by a service dealer or owner, including, but not limited to, any of the following: ... (C) Any inability to use, or reduced functionality of, the electronic product or appliance.

Combine with pre-existing:

(f) Nothing in this section shall be construed to require a manufacturer to make available special documentation, tools, and parts that would disable or override antitheft security measures set by the owner of the product without the owner’s authorization.

And I don't see any reason they can't use serialized hardware to nearly break a repaired device, and call it a security measure. They're not responsible for any resulting loss of functionality, and don't need to provide tools to bypass security measures. Now, section f may be specific enough with "antitheft security measures set by the owner without the owner's authorization" that this reading won't fly in court, but either way, they still aren't responsible if a screen replacement disables the fingerprint reader or any of the other shenanigans they've pulled as far as I can tell. I'm not a lawyer though, so open to being wrong here.

I mean, Second Life has been quietly doing this since 2003 and hasn't ever exploded (and is the most successful attempt I know of). Playstation tried it briefly with Playstation Home in 2008. There's an argument to be made that Microsoft Bob in 1995 was a single-player virtual world. This is an old bad idea that people keep suddenly thinking is revolutionary.

Here's the thing, if a virtual world like this recreates walking around and talking to people, well, we can already do that in real life, and are choosing to be on our computers instead. If it offers activities, if they are fun enough, they would sell better pulled out of the virtual world and packaged as a game without all the overhead of the virtual world. It lets you communicate with people remotely, but you can do that faster and better by using texting, email, voice calls, and video chat, all without the overhead of a virtual world.

The unique things a virtual world brings aren't compelling, and anything compelling that can be done in one is made worse by being in one.

I do seriously believe they delete it. Why wouldn't they? The value of a single user's data is negligible. The cost of a lawsuit for holding data they reported deleted is potentially expensive. It's in their best interest to do so. The majority of users probably don't know or care that they can delete their data, and Google gets to look good for making managing your data retention easy. It's win-win for them.

Google may not unilaterally delete your history every 24 hours, but you can both manually and automatically delete your stored activity in Google with their support and assistance, so if you want a 24 hour sliding-window of history, Google will happily let you do that.

1. 1. On your computer, go to your Google Account.

2. 2. At the left, click Data & privacy.

   3. Under "History settings," click an activity or history setting you want to auto-delete.

   4. Click Auto-delete.

   5. Click the button for how long you want to keep your activity and then Next and then Confirm to save your choice.

   Note: Some activity may expire sooner than the timeframe you choose. from https://support.google.com/acc...

I don't read their unwillingness to delete other people's data without asking as malicious but giving you the power and tools to do so if you want is pretty fair.

What we call the "common cold" is several different viruses that have common symptoms.

The most common are Rhinovirus, Coronavirus (Not the COVID-19 strain, which has more serious symptoms), Respiratory Syncytial Virus, Influenza and Parainfluenza (these two can cause more serious symptoms that would not be described as a cold), and maybe a couple hundred more. (If you are an adult, you have probably had the common Coronavirus a couple times in your life and experienced it as a cold)

If someone actually claims to have a cure for the common cold, they would need to have developed a broad spectrum anti-viral medication that successfully treats at least the above viruses, and probably many many more.

This graph, on the other hand, is VERY pessimistic. I have a 65" TV at about 10' viewing distance. This chart puts that in the "Benefits of 1080p start being visible" range, but the difference between 1080p and 4K were night and day with a good content source. My corrected vision is probably around 20/20 since, well, that is the purpose of glasses. Of 4 other people that regularly watched TV there, 3 of them noticed a clear improvement. Is a sample size of 5 (Me + 4 others) a small survey? Yes, but that's a pretty high p value even so. Would I notice an 8K resolution given the same size and viewing distance? That's more questionable. If someone wants to give me a 65" 8K TV, I'll happily repeat my survey :-P

Seems someone in PR realized how bad this looked, as they've updated the license: https://01.org/mcu-path-licens...

This is actually worse than it sounds. The RX 560 is identical to the RX 460, except the RX560 has an extra two compute units and a modest clock bump. Selling a "RX 560 with two compute units disabled" is really just selling RX 460 units with a RX560 name. AMDs alterations to the description of the RX560 on their own website show this to be a deliberate move (check the wayback machine ) My guess? They had some 460s that they couldn't sell, so they bumped the clocks a bit and re-defined what a 560 was in the hopes of moving them as "better" cards.

Everyone here is arguing politics and history, and I'm just wondering how they expect anyone to teach that "the laws of Chemistry and Physics are due to the laws of Allah" when they aren't allowed to teach Mathematics.

I mean, how, exactly, are you supposed to teach any Chemistry or Physics if you aren't allowed to teach Mathematics? (scratches head)

Wow. Lisp has closures, and it dates back to 1958. Not that I like Lisp a whole lot. I prefer to have syntax beyond parenthesis.

When I need closures and a functional programming paradigm, I usually turn to OCaml myself. (Cue hated from the lisp crowd)

Seriously, programming language preference is like editor preference. It has a lot to do with what you are most used to, and a lot to do with how your mind happens to be most comfortable thinking.

I prefer the much shorted debugging period afforded by strongly typed statically typed languages, even though it forces me to jump through some hoops that a weakly typed dynamically typed language would save me form. Personally, I've coded in C, Java, C++, Perl, Python, OCaml, Lisp, Scheme, PHP, Prolog, Javascript (very little) and Basic. Among these, Perl, Ocaml, Lisp, and Scheme all make extensive use of closures. Others may as well. (I just haven't used closures in more than those 4)

1/4 cup vinegar, 1/2 teaspoon liquid soap or detergent, and 2 cups of water in a spray bottle.

Spray on window, and rub vigorously with terry cloth. Works wonders.