I’m positive that’s deliberate, though, because they’re desperate to drive traffic to Bing by any means necessary.

Except when the setting they need isn’t in Settings. Then it’s a wild goose chase.

In fact, it’s often a wild goose chase even if it is in Settings, because the question then is where did Microsoft decide to hide it in this most recent update?

The thing everyone misses which was Control Panel’s greatest strength, however, was that vendors could add their own .cpl extensions to it. So settings for your specific hardware could go there. (Yes, this was abused by-and-large by some vendors just like the system tray, but that’s not the point.) Literally all of your settings and configuration stuff could go in one place. Even if a user did not know exactly where, at least they had a consistent place to start looking.

That all ended with Windows 2000/XP and got worse with 8/10/11.

Now we have this:

“I want to change the behavior of Windows feature X.”

Spin the wheel and guess!

• Is it located in Settings?
• Is it located in Control Panel?
• Is there a category in Settings where it totally should be, and any reasonable person would expect it to be, but it’s not there? Surprise! It’s in Control Panel anyway because Microsoft was too lazy to migrate it to Settings.
• Is it in both Settings and Control panel?
• Is it lurking in the Notification Area?
• Or is it hidden in Group Policy Management instead? Oops, too bad you bought the home edition of Windows.

Etc.

Control panel may have been clunky, especially for frequently accessed settings, but at least it was unified.

Precisely, and this is why I’ve never trusted online “free” converters since day one. Who the fuck knows what they’re actually doing with your file, and I always assumed that most of them were fronts to steal data and IP from users who are stupid enough to upload corporate and business stuff to them.

Anyway, there’s vanishingly little I haven’t been able to do over the years with ffmpeg or Imagemagick, their byzantine command line structures notwithstanding.

Sam: I hope there was nobody on that bus.

Max: Nobody we know, at least.

You can step up the scale of solvent molecular weights until you find one that gives the desired result, but I’m going to conjecture that regular old acetone will probably be quite sufficient.

Top Gear itself was not kind to the Tesla Roadster when Clarkson reviewed it back in 2008 or whatever it was, though.

Similarly, Salvation Army is a whackadoo pseudochristian religious cult masquerading publicly as a thrift store. They’re only about one degree removed from the Mormon church in terms of sequestering, abuse (sexual and otherwise), and manipulation of their members and those in their care. And of course also vehemently espouse the entire conservative fuckhead smorgasboard of homophobic, transphobic, sexist, anti-union views. They claim to do “good works” and superficially may even occasionally accomplish this, but it’s always couched in their hateful religious bullshit which really rather undermines the point.

Yes, Chick-Fil-A is also a famously fundamentalist wingnut organization. Being for conversation therapy is only the start of it.

As is Hobby Lobby – The nation’s only retail chain whose owners were busted for attempting to illegally smuggle stolen religious artifacts from the middle East for display in their personal bible museum!

Very true, but at that rate I think actually nailing your target becomes a concern.

Unless your goal is to just spread fear and discord, in which case it probably doesn’t matter much. Just load that sucker up with a brace of lawn darts and let it rip.

Its almost like pre-made drones are locked down and tracked, and homemade fpv quads take like 20 hours of sim time just to keep in the air.

While I agree with most of your sentiments here, I think these two statements are a bit hyperbolic…

DJI drones are locked down and possibly “tracked,” or at least they were up until recently. But my off-brand drone certainly isn’t, and it’s not like I had to do anything more special to get it than slouch up to B&H Photo/Video with my credit card.

Kit components for FPV drones are extremely capable these days and even entry level control boards are perfectly capable of keeping a homebrew flyer in the air or hovering stably without any skill from the operator required whatsoever other than reading the documentation far enough to run the calibration procedure before rocketing off into the sky. The only barrier to entry there is managing not to crash into stuff, or being smart enough not to yank the left stick all the way when you’re directly under a tree.

I have a micro drone with absolutely no pilot aids whatsoever – No obstacle avoidance, no GPS, no sonar, no head tracking, no nothing. It did not take me 20 hours of sim time to figure out how to keep it aloft. It took me about 20 seconds, after plugging the battery in and pairing the transmitter.

For example, my Fimi (Xiaomi) drone has a factory accessory specifically to enable it to carry and drop stuff. I’ve had it for years. They market this as a search and rescue thing, i.e. you can strap medical supplies to it or something and fly them out to a hard to reach location.

Any tit could just stick a grenade on it instead, but the rub there is that any tit is not allowed to just buy a grenade. The article above is full of breathless scaremongering about fiber optic tethers and guidance systems, but stops well short of specifying just what the fuck these imaginary bad actors are expected to do with the drone once they’ve got it over the presumptive target. If somebody’s already got a bomb, the problem is that they’ve already got a bomb.

I originally migrated here to talk about motorcycles.

The other thing kind of happened by accident.

This is fair in those applications. I only run an ecommerce web site, though, so that doesn’t come into play.

It’s worked alright for me. Your mileage may vary.

If someone is scraping my site at a low crawl rate I honestly don’t care so long as it doesn’t impact my performance for everyone else. If I hosted anything that was not just public knowledge or copy regurgitated verbatim from the bumf provided by the vendors of the brands I sell, I might oppose to it ideologically. But I don’t. So I don’t.

If parallel crawling from multiple organizations legitimately becomes a concern for us I will have to get more creative. But thus far it hasn’t, and honestly just wholesale blocking Amazon from our shit instantly solved 90% of the problem.

It sure is. Needless to say, I noticed it happening.

Especially since the solution I cooked up for my site works just fine and took a lot less work. This is simply to identify the incoming requests from these damn bots – which is not difficult, since they ignore all directives and sanity and try to slam your site with like 200+ requests per second, that makes 'em easy to spot – and simply IP ban them. This is considerably simpler, and doesn’t require an entire nuclear plant powered AI to combat the opposition’s nuclear plant powered AI.

In fact, anybody who doesn’t exhibit a sane crawl rate gets blocked from my site automatically. For a while, most of them were coming from Russian IP address zones for some reason. These days Amazon is the worst offender, I guess their Rufus AI or whatever the fuck it is tries to pester other retail sites to “learn” about products rather than sticking to its own domain.

Fuck 'em. Route those motherfuckers right to /dev/null.

They don’t have to be; they’re radio controlled. Figuring out what frequency they’re on and blasting it should be trivial, if necessary.

The price is irrelevant because this is will be purchased with government dollars. This drone is not for you and me; it is intended to be used against you and me.

Just read the actual product page. They are targeting military, law enforcement, and surveillance applications. These guys have a heading on their product page titled “paramilitary,” for fuck’s sake.

This is basically ubiquitous on many public lands, specifically here in the US. The term is “carry in, carry out.” Bins accumulate trash (obviously) which in turn is an attractant for rodents, bears, raccoons, etc. which causes its own problems. Wild animals should not be artificially fed by human trash. Trash can also be blown out of cans, or scattered by animals. Overall, especially for low traffic environments, the best plan is to have people take all their trash out with them.

TL;DR: Pack out your trash.

Like that guy who never posts any comments shorter than three paragraphs all perfectly formatted and punctuated.

'Sup.

Yes, I realize this particular comment is somewhat self defeating and probably not a great example. But that’s not the point.

The point is it’s apparently become my mission in life to annoy all the people on the internet who just check out any time they see a string of text that’s longer than 160 characters. I’ve been doing this since the early '90’s and you punks will never stop me.

Like the update to the Moto Z3 which broke compatibility with all external cameras (those bolt-on thermal ones, USB borescopes, even the official Hasselblad Moto Mod for that series) and was never fixed because that also happened to be the last update ever issued for that model and Lenovo dropped support for it immediately thereafter.

Thanks a lot, guys!