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America Is Falling Out of Love With Pizza
The restaurant industry is trying to figure out whether America has hit peak pizza. From a report: Once the second-most common U.S. restaurant type, pizzerias are now outnumbered by coffee shops and Mexican food eateries, according to industry data. Sales growth at pizza restaurants has lagged behind the broader fast-food market for years, and the outlook ahead isn’t much brighter. "Pizza is disrupted right now," Ravi Thanawala, chief financial officer and North America president at Papa John’s International, said in an interview. "That’s what the consumer tells us." The parent of the Pieology Pizzeria chain filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December. Others, including the parent of Anthony’s Coal Fired Pizza & Wings and Bertucci’s Brick Oven Pizza & Pasta, earlier filed for bankruptcy. Pizza once was a novelty outside big U.S. cities, providing room for growth for independent shops and then chains such as Pizza Hut with its red roof dine-in restaurants. Purpose-made cardboard boxes and fleets of delivery drivers helped make pizza a takeout staple for those seeking low-stress meals. Today, pizza shops are engaged in price wars with one another and other kinds of fast food. Food-delivery apps have put a wider range of cuisines and options at Americans’ fingertips. And $20 a pie for a family can feel expensive compared with $5 fast-food deals, frozen pizzas or eating a home-cooked meal. […] Pizza’s dominance in American restaurant fare is declining, however. Among different cuisines, it ranked sixth in terms of U.S. sales in 2024 among restaurant chains, down from second place during the 1990s, Technomic said. The number of pizza restaurants in the U.S. hit a record high in 2019 and has declined since then, figures from the market-research firm Datassential show. Further reading, at WSJ: The Feds Need to Bail Out the Pizza Industry.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Slashdot
1000 Ants vs. an Obstacle Course
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After seeing videos of how ant colonies work together, TerraGreen thought it would be interesting to see how they behave up close. So he gathered up roughly 1000 ants from an ant nest and put them to the test in a series of collaborative challenges and obstacle courses. Antony is quite the overachiever.
The Awesomer
How we reduced archive storage costs by 100x and saved millions
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In this post, we introduce a new storage system that we built in order to cost-efficiently store log data while providing interactive query latency. We’ll cover some motivations, architecture, migration process, and interesting optimizations we made along the way.
Archive Data
Going into 2024, cost savings was one of the major goals for the storage team. Our AWS MySQL RDS storage footprintPlanet for the MySQL Community
Logitech Caused Its Mice To Freak Out By Not Renewing a Certificate
An anonymous reader shares a report: If you’re among the macOS users experiencing some weird issues with your Logitech mouse, then good news: Logitech has now released a fix. This comes after multiple Reddit users reported yesterday that Logi Options Plus — the app required to manage and configure the controls on Logitech accessories — had stopped working, preventing them from using customized scrolling features, button actions, and gestures. One Reddit user said that the scroll directions and extra buttons on their Logitech mouse "were not working as I intended" and that the Logi Options Plus app became stuck in a boot loop upon opening it to identify the cause. Logitech has since acknowledged the situation and said that its G Hub app — a similar management software for gaming devices under the Logitech G brand — was also affected. According to Logitech’s support page, the problem was caused by "an expired certificate" required for the apps to run. Windows users were unaffected. The issues only impacted Mac users because macOS prevents certain applications from running if it doesn’t detect a valid Developer ID certificate, something that has affected other apps in the past.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Slashdot
Magneto, Xavier reunite in new Avengers: Doomsday teaser
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Marvel Studios continues to dribble out brief teasers promoting Avengers: Doomsday, which is slated for a December 2026 release—first playing in cinemas prior to Avatar: Fire and Ash screenings before becoming publicly available.
We reported previously on the first, which featured Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), the former Captain America. Over the holidays, a second teaser highlighting Chris Hemsworth’s Thor was released. Both are familiar faces in the MCU, but we now have a third teaser that brings in some new players. No, not Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom as rumored. Instead, we’ve got Magneto (Ian McKellen), Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), and Cyclops (James Marsden) from the X-Men franchise.
The film takes place 14 months after the events of this year’s Thunderbolts*. In addition to Thor, we have the new Captain America (Anthony Mackie), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), Falcon (Danny Ramirez), and Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Then there’s the Wakandan contingent: Shuri as the new Black Panther (Letitia Wright), M’Baku (Winston Duke), and Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejia).
Ars Technica – All content
The X-Men Are Back in the Next ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ Trailer
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The first teaser for Avengers: Doomsday heralded the return of Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, and our second checked in on Chris Hemsworth’s Thor. And for week three? It’s all X-Men, baby.
Well, “all” in the sense that it’s about the superteam. The teaser here chooses to focus on three returning actors: Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellen), and a tiny tease of Cyclops (James Marsden). We get shots of the Xavier Institute, which looks to be empty of students and staff, and Charles and Erik playing chess like they did in the old movies.
Then, Cyclops yanks off his visor to use a full-force optic blast in the middle of battle. And after that shot of Cyclops? “The X-Men will return…”
The MCU has been flirting with bringing back the OG Fox-Men for a while, starting with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness featuring an Xavier variant and continuing that thread with The Marvels and Deadpool & Wolverine.
With Avengers: Doomsday, one-third of the film’s main cast consists of these comeback characters: along with Charles, Erik, and Scott, we’ll be seeing older versions of Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), Beast (Kelsey Grammer), and Gambit (Channing Tatum). The jury’s out on if we’ll see other X-actors like Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Storm (Halle Berry), or Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), but it certainly could happen.
Avengers: Doomsday hits theaters on December 18.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Gizmodo
Report: New ICE Recruitment Plan Targets Firearm Fanciers, Gun-Rights Advocates
ICE is launching a $100 million recruitment campaign targeting gun owners, veterans, and patriotic Americans—drawing sharp criticism from legacy media outlets.
The post Report: New ICE Recruitment Plan Targets Firearm Fanciers, Gun-Rights Advocates appeared first on The Truth About Guns.
The Truth About Guns
Handle Nested Data Structures in PHP with the Data Block Package
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The Data Block package for PHP can handle querying, filtering, and setting nested data structures. This package offers a streamlined approach to handling nested data and complex JSON structures.
The post Handle Nested Data Structures in PHP with the Data Block Package appeared first on Laravel News.
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100 SQL MCQ with Answers (SQL Test 2026)
https://codeforgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/SQL-MCQ-Test.pngThis SQL Test 2026 contains 100 SQL MCQ with Answers to help you practice and improve your SQL knowledge. These SQL MCQ questions cover the most important SQL topics, including basics, joins, queries, functions, constraints, keys, etc. This SQL Test is ideal for students, freshers, developers, and anyone preparing for placements, coding interviews, online tests, […]Planet MySQL