Solve for 1:

1 = kn - sin x

An old favorite of mine is Harvest: Massive Encounter. Expand, harvest, defend, optimize, and eventually get wiped out.

Mister Softee is headquartered in Runnymede, NJ so the east coast association makes sense. It’s a franchisor so there’s trucks in 18 states.

The Wikipedia article about them says the song is titled “Jingle and Chimes”, and it’s based on “The Whistler and his Dog”. There’s lyrics too!

Apparently it was adapted to “Did you ever see a lassie?” which has much brighter and simpler lyrics than the original, which is very dark.

It reminds me of O Du Lieber Augustin. And it took me a really long time to figure out that title… I thought it was some well-known nursery rhyme melody, but it’s a 224 year old Viennese tune.

Yeah, Mr. Softee in San Francisco uses the same music. I don’t recognize it from anywhere else. It sounds like a music box, especially because many of the notes don’t hit the beats.

In America there’s a concerted effort to destroy public education. That means there are insane policies like this one: Some public schools lose a bit of funding each time a student doesn’t show up. Doesn’t matter that the school’s expenses stayed the same. It’s not like they could tell a teacher to go home 15 minutes early and reduce their pay accordingly, which would be awful for the teachers anyway. So schools are extremely motivated to keep kids in the school.

Yes, device management systems can push apps directly to devices, but the devices have to be managed first. So I think it probably is about the lack of Google Play.

One of the hardest parts of managing devices is getting them enrolled in device management in the first place. Microsoft uses the Microsoft Authenticator app to authenticate users as part of the enrollment process, so they know which employee is using the device and how to configure it. They need a reliable app store to distribute that app, and they need to do it before the device is managed. So usually they rely on Google Play.

It tells when the user is online. This is useful for sending spam, because being on top of the inbox makes it more likely your message will be read.

To be fair, I doubt anyone’s implemented this specifically for ICMP. Instead I’d expect tracking that watches for any IP traffic whatsoever, and that happens to include ICMP.

ICMP reveals your IP address, which is easily correlated with other traffic…