Airports in Europe do not make most passengers remove shoes, but nobody has blown up a plane there with a shoe bomb. It’s probably not a serious threat.

A decade ago, I thought phone numbers would soon die out. Instead, the most popular messaging apps use them as identifiers and adoption of those in North America is poor.

If by “these applications”, you mean Lemmy and Lemmy-likes such as Piefed, I think “forum” or “message board” is a good classification. Some people might consider that a subcategory of social media, but I think many would argue they’re separate categories.

I’ve used Linux as my primary OS for many years, but I keep a copy of Windows on my current laptop for gaming. I know the gaming story on Linux is pretty good now, but having to hibernate and reboot is enough of a barrier to launching a game that it helps me stay more productive.

At home, my laptop sits on a stand with great airflow, but when trying to play The Witcher 3 on a desk while traveling, it overheated and throttled to the point it wasn’t playable. On Linux, the thinkpad_acpi driver allows setting the fan level to “disengaged”, which sounds like “off” but actually means unregulated and results in a considerably higher speed and cooling performance than the usual maximum. Some research led to the conclusion that while manual fan control is possible with certain apps on Windows, there is no way to exceed the maximum automatic speed.

It only took a couple minutes to set up Lutris and Proton to run the game, and as expected the mild abuse of my laptop’s fan does make it playable. What I didn’t expect is considerably faster load times, but I got those too.

It depends on how annoying a noise it will make if allowed to finish. I find it odd that the option to disable the beep on completion isn’t common. There’s rarely any urgency to remove what I just heated.

That’s the best way to control a microwave.

I remain fond of the analog knob myself.

I’m content if my shoe cost is under $10/month. You’re just over a tenth that. It would be hard to get the number lower and still have reasonable comfort and protection from the shoes.

It had been the norm for phones, then Android came along and a much more PC-like level of capability became the norm for phones. SafetyNet didn’t show up until five years later and it didn’t get significant negative press.

It’s weird this didn’t get more pushback on mobile. Even the mainstream press was critical when Microsoft proposed it for PCs.

What happened to old Internet Forums?

Some of them still exist; some of them shut down. It’s not just a matter of Reddit siphoning off all the users (though that’s a factor), but that administering and moderating forums is a lot of work without a lot of reward. In addition to the baseline effort being significant, a changing landscape including reduced organic search traffic, more spam, and increased legal liability in some jurisdictions has reduced the number of people who want to attempt it.

banned for not adhering to Left Wing orthodoxy

Reddit has many problems, but in my experience this is not one of them. Of course you’re very likely to be banned if you bring politics into a community that isn’t about politics.

I don’t think vindictiveness is a major factor. This is about power.

Trump is trying to grab as much power to deport people as he can. He will fight every challenge to it until the legal options are exhausted. He will attack the legitimacy of the courts when he loses. He cares about the precedent and saving face with his base, not Garcia himself.

a mid tier graphics card?

GPU inflation is getting silly when 1000€ is just mid-tier.

Huawei was forced to offer non-Google Android due to USA sanctions. I don’t know whether that has created difficulties for them in the Chinese market, but a quick search shows a significant decline in market share in Europe.

I do think Amazon launching an Android phone in 2014 without Google’s ecosystem is the main reason Google launched SafetyNet. Of course the Fire Phone failed because it wasn’t very good and Amazon didn’t iterate, but I imagine Google didn’t want them or anyone else to try again.

Sometimes people make things that are useful to Google or find bugs for them. It has no meaningful cost to them as long as non-Google Android isn’t appealing to mainstream users.