If a tree falls in a forest it is staggeringly unlikely no one was around to hear it. Birds, squirrels, mice, snakes, bugs…

I believe that would in fact be a man.

But enough talk. Have at you!

That, and Gabe’s hotdog stand has spent decades building customer trust by generally acting decently towards its customers, right after it invented the concept of the hotdog stand.

Making the core of your business model revolve around whining about your competitors doesn’t work so great when your main competitor is already significantly better than you are.

Maple leaves are pretty recognizable. There’s a whole entire country that’s got one on its flag.

Maybe, but they can’t change the look of all those third party .cpl applets.

And sure, anyone could theoretically do anything. But this is Microsoft we’re talking about. They’ll just put another layer of cruft on top of the five or six layers of cruft they’ve already got and then call it job done.

Well, in that your upvote total and ratio can be calculated, at least. Does it actually do anything, or can it do anything, like it did on reddit? Subs having minimum karma thresholds, that sort of thing? If not, it’s truly meaningless and can be safely ignored by everyone.

That’s what I do.

This is never going to happen fully, because there is a ton of software and also device drivers that hook into the OG Control Panel system and install their own .cpl’s there, which are required for that hardware/software to work. The system to support those is going to have to remain in place, otherwise Microsoft is going to have a lot of very angry corporate customers and hardware vendors up their noses in short order.

In fact, this is most likely the exact reason the Control Panel still exists behind the scenes the way it does today in Win10 and Win11. They’ll probably go to ever-greater lengths to hide it from home users, but I’d doubt they can actually remove it completely at this point.

In fact, from TFA:

Tip: while the Control Panel still exists for compatibility reasons and to provide access to some settings that have not yet migrated, you’re encouraged to use the Settings app, whenever possible.

The one on my Moto G Power 5G works just fine. It has a side mounted power button with the fingerprint reader built into it. It reads very quickly, and apparently very accurately, so much so that 99% of the time I’ve tried it you can just press the power button normally with the correct finger and this also unlocks the phone. The advantage I can see there is that it does not require a separate action to operate at all.

(I don’t keep my fingerprint reader activated, though, for security purposes. Down with fingerprint readers in general, at least if you live in the US where the police can compel you to supply your fingerprint to unlock your phone.)

The under-screen reader in my previous Moto Z4 never worked worth a damn.

Honestly I’m pretty impressed with the G Power 5G overall. It’s a “budget” phone so certain people will inevitably get unreasonably butthurt over the lack of “premium,” but is quite fast enough for everything I do, gets great battery life, has a headphone jack and memory card slot, a good screen that’s 120hz capable, and it’s only $200-250 depending on the color. I think its cameras are just fine. How so? Well, check out any of my post history over the last month or two – All of my photos lately have been taken with that phone.

They are locked, but as anyone who has watched 20 seconds or more of the Lockpicking Lawyer, the locks are trivially easy to defeat. Typically they are in an unsupervised area of the post office and most of the time there “isn’t budget” to even cover them with cameras, as if a premeditated thief would not just show up wearing a disguise anyway.

There might be something to this. I went and checked just now, prompted by a your comment, and I found a handful (like, six) comments from ages ago on reddit that did not get torched when I did my mass edit-and-delete, somehow. I found these mostly because some punters found them and necroposted on those threads, so I have notifications regarding them.

I found a few more and deleted those by hand, too. Most of them were from the same sub, so that sub was probably locked when I did my mass delete.

Are you a resident of the EU? If so, I believe you have the legal right to demand that reddit delete all of your data and user content, and by law they must comply.

If you are a US citizen, I believe you have very little recourse in forcing them to delete your data, unless you are a resident of California or Virginia.

There are plenty of perfectly legit uses of “master,”

Like the Digmaster™.

It became a Fortnite emote at one point. Or maybe it was PUBG. I forget. But shortly afterwards that was the end of that.

As your attorney I advise you to buy a Hayabusa. It’s the only way.

Quite a few cities in the Northeast are designed this way, because they were done so in the 1950’ swith the intent of highway traffic doing 40, maybe 45 MPH through town at maximum. To conserve expensive urban land, they have short ramps and merge areas that were appropriate for those speeds, not to mention the lower overall volume of traffic in those times. And now we’re stuck with it, because it’ll be a 200 year long court battle to eminent domain the 427 landowners who are all clinging to five square feet each in the patch you’d require for a longer ramp, all hoping for a fat payout to let go of it.

And nowadays, of course, everyone takes it as their god given right to do 90+ MPH on the freeway at all times, and get frothingly pissed off if they can’t for any reason whatsoever. So the ramps aren’t long enough anymore because no one is using the highway as designed.

stopped getting pissed about people being in front of me

The world would instantly be a better place if all the mouth-breathers in it could figure this out simultaneously. Wow, you’re pissed off at someone being “in front” of you. That’s because there’s totally an Earth-shakingly significant difference between having 9,784,326 cars in front of you vs. 9,784,325.

It’s gotten to the point that I associate advertisements with bad products.

I wish more marketers understood this. In fact, keeping on topic with Youtube in general, any product I see Youtubers doing sponsored ad reads for is for me is an instant and automatic hard pass for whatever it is. I just automatically assume that product is either crap or a scam. Or both. When I was shopping for headphones, the #1 brand I refused to consider for any price was Raycon. If I’m looking for a new game to pick up, I can guarantee you it will never be Raid: Shadow Legends or War Thunder, no matter how bored I am. If I need a new razor, it absolutely will not be from Manscaped. Etc., etc.

If I am bombarded incessantly with really insipid ads for a particular product, the only thing it makes automatically come to my mind when shopping for a product in that category is that the one I definitely don’t want is that one with the fucking annoying ads. This is obviously completely counterproductive from the advertiser’s standpoint, and I have to imagine I’m not the only person in the world who rolls this way.

The only possibilities I can think of are that advertisers really are dumb enough to oversaturate people’s attention to the point that they get turned off from the product entirely but keep soldiering on anyway because it earns a paycheck. Or worse, that it doesn’t matter because for every one viewer who gets pissed off and vows to never buy your product, they are outnumbered and offset by a horde of other viewers who are stupid enough to conflate repetition with truth and actually will be enticed to buy whatever it is, insipidity be damned. And the marketers probably know it.

Portal 2?

It’s not very long, but it has an entire co-op campaign that’s completely inaccessible without a 2nd player.

My OG Legend of Zelda cart (NES) still has working saves on it with the original battery…