ricecake

Those are X in boxes next to those in step four. I believe they're saying "no phone calls, no emails and no dealing with notifications".

Most modern plans for eradication involve creating a virus that handles it, rather than a pesticide.
Have the virus introduce a gene that takes a few generations of breeding in the impacted population before it starts to debilitate or sterilize the mosquitoes. That way your virus can start to kill the population even as it spreads to areas that were missed.

All of our best data on the impact says that it really wouldn't matter. Sometimes a species is a linchpin for the ecosystem, and sometimes it isn't.

Sucks for mosquitoes, but there's a very real chance that we'll smallpox them, and the biggest concern will be our confidence that the virus we use doesn't impact other species unintentionally.

if you technically pull people out of poverty by outsourcing to the lowest paying, least labor regulated parts of the world, is the fact that extreme poverty went away in those areas even a good thing?

Yes. Your prospects of a healthy life increase when going from not being able to provide for yourself to being barely able to provide for yourself by working in fantastically poor conditions.

If a sweatshop didn't provide more worker value than extreme poverty, people just wouldn't work there.

The bare minimum of improvements is still an improvement, and that we should strive for better than the bare minimum doesn't make the bare minimum worthless to the people who got it.

Bribing voters is illegal. Paying people to make a voting plan isn't. Yay legal technicalities!

"In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we'd do our best to make it happen. We're willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library—but currently we can only do it with the help of the justice system."

That's a very fancy way of saying "we'll comply with a court order", which is what any business would do.
This is marketing fluff. DRM free is good enough reason to like them without framing them as fixing literally every problem with steam.

I get that. DRM free is great and better. I just don't like the advertisement that casts it as "you own the game", or entire articles built around posts by their marketing department.
It feels very ambulance-chaser-y.

These articles are basically just advertising for GoG.
They have the same issues as steam does regarding only selling licenses, or not having inheritable or transferable accounts.

DRM free is great, but as a service they aren't fundamentally different from steam. They just like to market themselves like they are.

Oh, certainly. But common language has a term for high latency already, it's just not speed related. Everyone knows about a laggy connection on a phone or video call.

Fun fact: TCP has some implicit design considerations around the maximum cost of packet retransmission on a viable link that only works on roughly local planetary scale.
When NASA started to get out to Mars with the space Internet, they needed to tweak tcp to fit retransmission being proportionally much more expensive and let connections live longer before being "broken".

When talking communication, most people think of the speed with which a unit quantity of information is transmitted, not the latency of that transmission.
Referring to bandwidth as the speed of a communication system is pretty normal, even for people who know how to use the term bandwidth.

Yup, it's not ideal.
For slight contextualization on why it's not the worst: for the most part, the lead pipes have a layer of scale (material from water reacting with the pipe) that keeps lead out of the water.
We stopped installing new lead pipes quite a while ago, and the program to fully phase them out was started in the 90s. This was relatively routine for developed countries, as lead pipes were extremely common across the world.

After Flint, it became apparent that this wasn't the "slow fix" problem everyone thought after we saw how easily it could go to full "problem". So everyone accelerated the timeline.

So while it's definitely a problem, it's not an entirely novel or extremely critical problem.

check out is the part where the actual sales transaction occurs. It really is materially different

Like a vending machine? Or the gas station? Or the grocery pickup, where I pay online?
What makes a human being present for me giving my money to a machine different if it's a grocery store as opposed to one of those?

Sorry your experience sucks. Stores near me regularly have both open and the self checkout is invariably significantly faster. It's not like I just didn't notice that something I do several times a week actually sucks.