Spoiler alert!

The roadtrip will end in India.

Poe's law applies here.
I honestly don't know if you're being sarcastic or audiophile.

The makers of the cable didn't know WTF they were doing; they claimed it was better for music.
The testers merely were merely thorough by explicitely testing the claims, asinine as they might be.
By doing so, they are taking away any dumbshit rebuttal the makers might have had otherwise.

This.

Just as robots won't turn into some psychoc skynet bent on destroying humanity, they won't turn nice and happy either.

Just curious; what were your reasons not to consider them before? In what way didn't they fit your job requirements?

Even more so for the kernel developers that blacklisted the Samsung drives.
These developers should probably be banned from kernel development or atleast banned from making decisions regarding functionality.
Creating code with a bug is human, not doubting your own code and blaming somebody else is stupid.

I've had one where the sleep button was directly below the delete key. That keyboard lasted for about 3 days.

Well, I mostly use my computer for checking if I'm still running the same operating system, so I wonder why I never noticed winkey+break before. This combo will save me literally hours every day. Didn't know it could be so incredibly useful. Thanks!

Obviously caps-lock is the least used key. you press it only once after boot, then no more.

The three keys on the top-right
- Print screen/SysRequest: a poor man's screengrabber at best
- Scroll Lock: does something in MS Office, though I know not what.
- Pause/Break: as far as I know, does absolutely nothing in any application.

Just curious, what OS are you using?
On both Windows and Linux, it's a pretty handy key.

I think I'm going to have to disagree with you here.

The ternary operator is just syntactic sugar for an if..else statement, I don't see how this is any different except for prettier (subjective!) syntax. Also ternary is best used with caution. Complex ternary expressions are the embodyment of "Well, that escalated quickly". Also, you seem to be describing MVVM, which still uses all the conditionals, it's just hiding it from you at the expense of flexibility.

I don't like replacing states with arbitrary ranges of a number. In your example you assume some way of knowing in advance the length or duration of something. This is simply not true in many cases and would give a false indication of knowledge. In your example set [not started, arrived] you imply only being able to know the initial and final state, yet the 0.75 seems to indicate a high level of accuracy. These are not comparable situations. If you had only had knowledge of initial and final state, the number would essentially be treated exactly the same, using conditionals. If you had the accurate information to indicate progress, you wouldn't use states in your model anyway because you'd lose information.

All I'm seeing is some rules of thumb and low-level optimalization strategies --examples where a good solution doesn't need to use conditionals-- but no solid argument against the use of conditional expressions in general. I'm not disagreeing with most of the examples you give, but they are very specific and do not seem to support eskewing conditionals in general.

Seriously... were you ever a kid or a teen yourself, or were you born a boring old grampa?
Doing embarrassing things is what kids do; it's how they learn what not to do.
The problem is hypocritical people who like to pretend they never did anything embarrassing when they were kids.

Are employers looking at Facebook also mostly a social thing?
The problem isn't embarrasment, it's judgmental people with the power to affect your live.

Do you have an example of code without "if" (or similar) statements that is more easily readable than the equivalent with "if" statements would be?

It seems to me the only way would be to either use numerical tricks, which you say you like even less. And to which I would agree (though I've used them on DSP's because true branching would be dramatically slower). Or to abuse loops (which are essentialy "if" statements with "goto"s) or things like the Strategy design pattern.