That mentality never left Microsoft. They just to have work harder to maintain plausible deniability. Plausible, that is, to the anti-trust courts and politicians, none of whom know anything about technology.

I don't think that's likely. GOG has been around for almost 20 years. If they were to renege on providing offline installers, what could that possibly gain them? That only makes sense if they are planning to reimplement DRM, and that would immediately kill the company.

I'm sticking with stone knives and bear skins.

We can bust on Microsoft all day and all night, and they deserve it, but the fact that their ability to find and fix these problems has greatly increased is a good thing. Software is incredibly complex, and no software more complicated than "10 GOTO 10" is free from the potential of security problems. Microsoft's QA has gone downhill in recent years, but now it's getting better apparently (even if it's after the fact). They are not going away, so this makes all our lives better.

I wrote a file searching utility in C++ about 30 years ago. About 15 years ago I ported it to Python and found it to be faster than using the Windows directory enumeration APIs, and I've been using that ever since. It just searches filenames, but that's all I need.

"NOTE: Experiences vary by region." says to me that Microsoft doesn't even know what their changes will do.

Can they factor a number larger than 21 with QC yet?

Perhaps they could take a clue from software from 40+ years ago and make top-posting a configurable option.

But Microsoft has pretty much completely given up on making their software configurable for user preferences.

Hey, I resemble that remark.

"Dr. Sam Becket never returned home."

You forgot to misspell his name.

Not if they keep spending 10 figures a year trying to make VR happen.

How long can Meta survive without shipping a product people actually want?

it's extremely laughable to think that Muslims are all Democrats

Is it extremely laughable? To test your hypothesis, I compiled a list of as many U.S. Muslim elected politicians as I could (see below). Then, I searched for their party affiliations. They turned out to be 100% Democrat! Maybe if I spent days on a deeper search, I could have found a non-Democrat. But I doubt it.

So it's not "extremely laughable" at all. And when I asked AI why your comment was modded up to 5...

The pattern you found is real, striking, not based on cherry-picking, and not laughable. It's observable data, not a conspiracy. Dismissing it with a Score:5 "Insightful" is echo-chamber bias. Tech forums like Slashdot (and much of legacy online media) have long shown left-leaning cultural tilt.

Keith Ellison
André Carson
Ilhan Omar
Rashida Tlaib
Lateefah Simon
Ruwa Romman
Nabilah Islam
Salman Bhojani
Suleman Lalani
Ghazala Hashmi
Madinah Wilson-Anton
Omar Fateh
Abraham Aiyash
Samba Baldeh
Nafisa Fai
Sadaf Jaffer
Amer Ghalib
Farrah Khan
Abdullah Hammoud
Mo Baydoun
Nabeela Syed
Sam Rasoul
Atoosa Reaser
Al Abdelaziz
Faizul Kabir
Ted Green
Zohran K. Mamdani
Yusef Salaam
Soma S. Syed
Aisha Chughtai
Jamal Osman
Abdelnasser Rashid
Nayeem L. Choudhury
Abu A. Musa
Adam Alharbi
Akbar Ali
Sheikh Rahman
Dr. Mohammad Alhawawsha
Bedria Abdullahi

"Please protect us from child-harm lawsuits since child harm is pretty much our business model."

This is very important. There's a light-year of difference among a typical scholarly article, a physics paper, a math paper, or some kind of incomprehensible humanities bafflegab that no sane person could comprehend. The former, if it's not too technical, should be readable to the average undergrad. The second and third might not be because there are so many specialized concepts and so much specialized language. The latter (and I'm not indicting everything coming out of the humanities, but a lot of it) is incomprehensible because it literally doesn't make sense.