Permanently disabling the speaker in an Airtag is possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The average user won't be able to do it, but most people can find someone who has the tools and knowledge. The tag no longer has an IP67 rating after the operation, so liquid and dust can get in there. IMO a dab of hot glue would help, but I've never had an Airtag so I don't know for sure.

As I write this I'm wondering if there are any jurisdictions in which disabling the speaker is illegal.

I suspect they're looking to score points for creativity and open-mindedness. I think the current administration is desperate for high-profile good news stories to further distract folks from all the crap that's been raining down from above.

No degree here - just one year of post-secondary education at a private technical college. But thanks for the implied compliment.

An excellent point. Next time I'll strive to get there on my own and resist my itchy trigger finger.

I wasn't thinking they're worthless, but simply unprepared by their lives-to-date for the role they're signing up for. On further reflection - prompted by all the pushback in this thread - I now realize that I wasn't thinking clearly. Thanks for the challenge, an sincere apologies for my thoughtlessness.

Thanks for the info. I had an assumption - which I hadn't thought to question - that the gamers would form a much larger percentage of the workforce. My bad.

I can own the prejudice you charge me with, to some extent. But racism??? What The Actual Fuck!!!

Take a long, careful look around you, then tell me you're confident that all of what you just said will still be true in a year or two.

Nothing says "clown-show shit-hole" like hiring gamers - many of whom undoubtedly live in momma's basement and maybe work at 7-eleven or Walmart - to look after the safety of all those people both in airplanes and under their flight paths. Brilliant!

I wonder how many of these fledgling ATCs will only find out the hard way that THIS game is for keepsies, and that dead "NPCs" - aka passengers -and their families may come back to haunt them for reals.

Plus, at some point the ones who actually turn out to be good are going to want salaries, benefits, and working conditions commensurate with the job - something that the current administration is explicitly opposed to.. (By "commensurate" I mean "what all those former ATCs had before the country went to hell in a hand-basket").

It wouldn't surprise me if American airspace ends up being blacklisted by many airlines and pilots around the world. This situation might be just one more piece of rockwool batting in America's increasing insularity.

You voiced a sad-but-relevant truth which nevertheless made me laugh. I'm guessing some butt-hurt moderator is using "Offtopic" as an excuse for the downmod.

Thanks for that richly deserved put-down. The AC you responded to likely has a strong prejudice against facts, learning, and changing his mind in the face of new evidence.

I could see a case for modding your comment "Offtopic". But "Troll"?

It must have been a MAGAt moderating - they have a propensity for fighting against truth, justice, and the Amer- Oh, wait...

Best of luck to you, and I hope Reddit gets the screws put to them bigtime.

I don't know much about this stuff. My first thought is that the law should force companies like Reddit to have a DSAR banner on every page their site serves. It would show the total number of DSARs filed to date, and have a link to a page listing ALL of them, both pending and resolved - with personally identifiable stuff redacted, of course.

If legislation forced such businesses to make every gaslighting move blatantly public, maybe the behaviour would improve.

Finally, there's a sentiment that people ranging from MAGA to Democratic Socialist can agree on - "fuck ubiquitous state surveillance".

It's too bad that this is an issue over which proles of any political stripe are unlikely to prevail in the long term. It's also too bad that many on the Right side of the political spectrum won't understand a key point: namely that they voted for this, and that if they vote R again they'll be signing up for having their every move tracked and catalogued.

That's not to say that the diet MAGA leaders of the Democratic party - the ones who are essentially corporate property - would be any better on this issue.

My biggest problems have been with trying to install out-of-band programs/versions in APT and having unsatiisfiable dependencies. It's really annoying when there's a program - or a specific version of one - that I really want but can't install. In those cases I look for AppImages, Flatpaks, and Snaps - in that order.

After about a year I STILL hate current versions of Thunderbird; but I can't find any older ones that will install, and I can't find Snaps or AppImages. Similarly, I'd be on an older version of Firefox if I could. I'm not willing to build from source, so I'm stuck with stuff that I really don't like.

As an aside, I really wish Mozilla would stop dicking with perfectly good UIs and making them harder and more annoying to use. If they're going to reinvent the wheel, they should at least make the fscking thing round!

I'm glad that crhylove brought something to the party, but I won't be partaking. I fully sympathize with the desire to avoid dependency hell, but in my experience AppImage is the only format that does that cleanly, reliably and painlessly.

Yes, heavy reliance on AppImages chews up disk space - and also memory, if you're using a lot of apps which under traditional package management systems share libraries. But they're clean, and they generally don't break when the system is updated and libraries change. The onus is on the user to keep them up-to-date, and I can live with that.

I'm not hugely experienced here, so this is just an opinion: if you want to avoid dependency problems, AFAICT AppImages are the best choice. That said, in my limited experience, Flatpaks are at least less problematic than Snaps.