Re: Scrolling on unfocused windows, I believe this change happened circa Windows XP but it may have been slightly earlier. Windows that do not have the focus can still receive window messages, scroll wheel inputs now being one of them. This does not grant focus to the window in question. Some old/poorly coded apps that ostensibly support scroll wheel input will do this day ignore it if they do not have focus, even if your mouse cursor is over them.

Dakka.

There really aren’t. This is down to the developer of the game in question and not necessarily the OS. Windows does indeed allow for true multitasking, especially in these modern times of multicore processors being ubiquitous, etc. However, nearly all game developers assume that their game will have focus 100% of the time and pause some/most/all processing any time their application does not have focus.

What Windows does do is assume only one window can have focus at a time, i.e. it is the window receiving default and direct input from the mouse and most especially the keyboard. Most other graphical environments make the same assumption. If your application or window does not have the focus it’s also not a given that it’s even visible, so it’s not necessarily safe for the user to be able to interact with it anyway. It’s not that you can’t, but rather that it’s risky to allow your program to do so. Imagine if you had e.g. a file manager that accepted input from shortcut keys even if it did not have focus, and deploying ECM in your flight simulator happens to be bound to the delete key. See what I mean?

Gamepad input is actually not necessarily application exclusive on Windows, either. I know for sure that even as far back as the Windows 98 days I had several emulators that could continue running even when they did not have focus and would accept inputs from a controller, although not the mouse or keyboard. This allowed you to do exactly as you describe, keep playing the game (or allow someone else to keep playing the game) via the controller while you browse the internet using the mouse and keyboard, or whatever.

It’s probably also safe for most game developers to assume that regardless of what the computer is capable of, the player’s attention can only be directed in one place at a time. There’s not much benefit in making sure your program can accept inputs even if the user’s nose is buried in their web browser because it’s unlikely they’d have the game in any state except paused while they look something up anyway. In Windows specifically you absolutely can even set up an API hook to intercept and read keyboard input and even relative mouse movements before the focused window gets it, but 99.999% of the time there is no non-nefarious reason to do so.

Fun fact, because no-knock and nighttime raids on armed suspects have always been a stupid idea, some states outright prohibit them. Even people as dumb as our legislators have been able to figure this out, albeit after many years of the blowhard infantry washouts who habitually pack our local police forces getting themselves popped.

Sure is, as long as it’s crank operated! Dakka-dakka-dakka-dakka-dakka-dakka…

You can already theoretically do this with the doors on a Jeep, but it hasn’t exactly turned into an epidemic.

Low towing capacity and an outrageously miserable bed size. Less than five feet? The powertrain of this should have been put in a station wagon, not a “truck.”

Fry is easily the oldest living human depicted in the series, at least if we consider age simply as the difference between that person’s date of birth and now. I believe the Professor is stated to be the biologically oldest person in the world at some point, but given that the show itself jokes that he is technically Fry’s junior I think in the spirit of things that shouldn’t count for much. Various aliens, “god,” and other entities may have the technical or biological capability live longer, but only if they’re able to survive the end of the universe and continue their existence into the next one… Twice.

I think who gets crowned “oldest” depends heavily on how age is defined in the context of a show where time travel is so frequent. Some additional rambling on that point follows, since I wrote my last comment on my phone in haste and using hazy half-remembered details about a series I haven’t watched for years.

Fry was born in August of 1974 and thus at the time of his first freezing at Applied Cryogenics he was 25. When first thawed in the year 3000 he is thus 1025 – at least chronologically albeit not biologically. Context clues in that season of the show (e.g. ComicCon 3010) indicate that the time machine incident takes place in the year 3010 in the original timeline, thus Fry is 1035 from the perspective of his birthdate when he steps into the machine. I had initially forgotten that the trio make two complete loops of the time span of the universe rather than one, also. Even if the trio did not age for any of that intervening time other than a few minutes here and there while they stopped the machine to search for the reverse time machine technology, they did witness the complete cycles of two universes in super-accelerated form through the windshield and also explicitly can’t return to whence they came. So from the perspective of Fry, Bender, and Farnsworth those years have irrevocably passed. Fry, Bender, and Farnsworth now have two entire universe lifespans between the present and their original birthdates, but Fry is already technically the oldest of those three before they even step into the machine.

So from the time of Fry’s birth to that moment when they return in the machine and crush their paradox duplicates, two universe lifespans plus 1035 years have passed. (I’ll leave calculating exactly how long one universe is to someone else, but the machine shows the end of the current universe to be the year “100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.”) Nobody in the show is provably as far dislocated from their original birth/creation date as Fry, so claiming anyone else is would require some assumption or unsourceable claims.

For what it’s worth his Lars incarnation is biologically older than him by 19 years by the events at the end of Bender’s Big score, having spent an additional 12 years living his life in the past and then freezing and returning to the year 3000 (not 3007 which is when the ending takes place) and living 7 more years in the 3000’s timeline before meeting up with the crew during the plot of the movie. He is killed at the end due to being a time paradox clone at the apparent biological age of 59, but prime Fry outlived him by default. Lars died before having two universe lifespans added to his chronological age, also.

In terms of most time actually experienced, Bender is certainly a top contender. Possibly for this reason the Futurama wiki seems to think that he is the oldest character in the show. I think that’s pretty debatable, not least because all of the time paradox Benders are indistinguishable from one another. We also can’t prove how old the space god is, but he/it is clearly conscious and experiencing events, and has been around for a long time. For completeness, Bender is four years old when Fry meets him (manufactured in 2996) and thus 14 by the time of the time machine incident. But his head was previously buried outside of Roswell for ~1055 years, making his experienced lifetime at least 1069 years by that point. (I don’t believe the show specifies what year the crew left from/returned to bookending the events of Roswell That Ends Well. This could be plus another couple of years.) And as said above one of his incarnations – possibly the prime one, possibly not – from “way at the end” of Bender’s Big Score also went back to the year 2000 to tattoo the time code onto Fry’s butt and then apparently took the long way back to 3007 by simply waiting it out in the cave with all the other time paradox Benders. Bender also did the double universe loop with Fry and the Professor, so regardless of what his experienced lifetime is, he’s third in the top three for oldest beings since date of birth/construction, regardless. What is less clear is while he traveled backwards in time repeatedly using the time code in Bender’s Big Score to steal historical artifacts and returned to the show’s present by waiting in the cave, we don’t know how many times he did it. Each trip is easily thousands of years, and while at the end all of the Benders explode due to the time paradox effect except one, it’s only implied and not outright proven whether the prime Bender is the one who survived (i.e. the one who was ordering the others around and did not take all of the trips himself), whether the Bender who survived and the one who traveled back to 2000 to leave the tattoo are the same Bender, or indeed if the robot we think is Bender is actually Flexo pretending/believing he is Bender since that’s also left ambiguous. Either way, Bender’s experienced lifetime is clearly the longest of the Planet Express crew and probably anyone native to Earth, although on that point the Nibblonians may even have him beat.

That’s because as you have observed the Nibblonians are explicitly immortal in the sense that they do not die of old age, but I don’t think when they actually came to be is specified in the show. It’s possible but not demonstrated that they could have escaped the natural end of the universe by eating themselves, but where they go afterwards is never explained and whether or not the ones we see in the show are native to this universe or came from a different one is never defined. Any of them we meet could be thousands, millions, or billions of years old but we don’t have any specific evidence one way or the other.

TL;DR: Fry has the longest provable time span between his birth and the show’s present. Bender has the longest experienced lifetime in the context of us actually having been able to see it. Space god is probably equivalent to the current age of the universe but we’re not sure. Some random Nibblonians may have escaped the last universe and now live in ours, being an indeterminate and possibly very old age, but we can’t prove that either.

If you include his going around the long way in the professor’s time machine and completely looping the time span of the universe in the process, then yes, and he’s certainly the oldest organic entity. He is his natural age plus 1000 years plus two universal lifetimes. (Initially I said one universe lifetime. This is wrong, it was two.) The professor is technically younger than him by nine hundred years and some change, and Bender is established to be young enough that Hermes approved his QC check. Those two being the only others to take the time machine trip with him. Everyone else got left behind at the end of the first universe unless we see otherwise.

Well, that’s pretty much how the entire crime and punishment system is supposed to work. Do the crime, get got for it, others hoping to do the same thing will hopefully think twice before doing so in the future.

Therefore I think it’s completely fair that this script gets flipped on the fascists who are pretending to be “law” enforcement.

Thus far these bozos have demonstrated a pattern of showing up without uniforms, with masks on, refusing to identify themselves, show badges, or produce warrants.

This is needless to say an incredibly stupid thing for them to do, especially if they plan to also go around kicking in people’s doors. I personally know an old man who got off the hook for shooting a state cop in my area who tried the same. I think the only hope the Dummkstaffel here has of making a charge stick against a homeowner who blows one of them away will be to somehow make it Federal, because otherwise I think the state courts – especially in blue areas – are not going to treat any warrantless door-kicking by nonuniformed armed men who refuse to identify themselves very kindly.

Edit to add: You’re also not protecting your “property” in such a case, you are protecting your person, which is a very different thing both legally and ethically. If the alternative is that you’re going to be whisked away without due process to a death camp in El Salvador, your only rational course of action is to stand and fight – especially in your own home.

All true, but I am going to be that nerd and point out that there were indeed commercial devices with lithium ion battery packs in them in the mid to late '90s, especially so in the late '90s. By 2000-2001 you couldn’t escape the damn things in cameras, disc players, PDAs, etc. So yes, it did take relatively forever for the technology to become commercially ubiquitous, but not that long. (And yes, the first couple of waves of Li-Ion batteries were indeed crap, and had all of us geeks clamoring for gadgets that still took AA’s for a while.)

Your video player “can” account for latency if you configure it correctly which I imagine the majority of people don’t do, and simply put up with it. Ditto with your music playback always lagging 1-2 seconds behind your control inputs. I have never used a media player on any platform that automatically figured out audio latency. Maybe the iDevices do if you pair them with Airpods, I don’t know; I don’t own anything Apple and I never will.

It also matters for music production, and makes life a lot more pleasant for audio/video editing. Plus, latency is just annoying in any setting.

And also no latency. Even expensive Bluetooth headphones and earbuds have crap latency. The systems that don’t are either proprietary and not widely supported (e.g. aptX) or expensive 'phones-and-dongle arrangements that must always travel in a pair and still don’t compete on latency with a pair of dollar store earbuds.

This serves as the perfect illustration as to why whatever brand of kissing Trump’s ass anyone may be doing or have done in the past will not save you when he decides to turn on you. Rupert Murdoch is probably the number one person on Earth most responsible for getting Trump into office not only this time, but also the last time. And the fact that he did so means absolutely nothing to Captain Cheeto who is big mad at him right now. The Trump regime absolutely will attack and discard anyone – anyone – who has been deemed to have outlived their usefulness.

Business owners. Racists. Farmers. Factory workers. Proud Boys. Conservative pundits. Trump doesn’t care about you. He only cares about himself. Trump will not protect you unless he thinks doing so will benefit him today. Tomorrow? The day after that? Eventually he’ll be done with you, and he’ll make up a way to declare you his enemy, and he’ll come after you. And nothing you did for him before will matter. You’ll be in the exact same El Salvadorian gulag or whatever as whoever he was mad at last week.

Fascist regimes need a constant supply of enemies to pretend that they’re valiantly fighting against, and when the run out of the last batch of enemies they’ll make up a new one. That new batch of enemies will likely contain all the people who they claimed were their allies during the last go-round. There’s precedent. As it happens, plenty of it. Absolutely oodles of examples.

We’d love to, but manufacturers keep trying to force them down our throats. And when we express a different prererence or use case a bunch of trolls feel the need to pop out of the woodwork and tell us that no, we’re actually wrong and our use cases don’t actually exist.

How about you all don’t worry about what headphones other people are using?

Those entrenched in power and business incessantly whine about “fertility” because they think their capitalist edifice requires constant growth to operate, and constant growth requires a constant increase in both workers (at least until they replace us all with robots or ChatGPT) and customers, or a the most basic level a steadily increasing supply of people from which to extract wealth via some means.

Since apparently nobody can be content to just make a consistent but flat – and more importantly, sustainable – profit forever, this necessitates a continually increasing population until we eventually find what the real limit of the planet’s human population actually is and the whole thing collapses. No one in a position to do anything about it is willing to hit the brakes now because the majority of them have deluded themselves into believing that it’ll either never happen, or if it does they won’t be alive to be left holding the bag at the time. This constant trumpeting of braindead “fertility crisis” propaganda is a transparent attempt to delude the rest of us into thinking we need to contribute to keep the meat grinder going.

The collapse of humanity, or at least human civilization, will probably not be instigated by there being too few people. People are great at making more people. We’ve been finding creative ways to do it for a very long time, and despite everything the global population is still increasing at this very moment. Rather, it’ll be instigated by there being too many people to sustainably support.

Zoomer Parker will not lug around an SLR camera in the next reboot; he’ll simply be a drone operator.

I have. My former bank disallowed reusing any of your previous passwords, and also did “clever” things like flagging you for using sequences of characters from your old passwords as well.

All provisos that revealed that they were storing passwords (including old passwords) in plain text, because there’s no way they’d be able to make those determinations if they were irreversibly hashing passwords correctly.

TL;DR: They’re no longer my bank.

I also haven’t forgiven them for trying to sue people for simply watching the Geohot video, or removing alternative OS functionality from the PS3, or for trying to reinvent MMC/SD memory cards in a different shape and charge more for for them. Hell, I still haven’t forgiven them for SonicStage.

I won’t buy anything from Sony for any reason. I don’t care what it is. I made damn sure my most recent camera purchase wasn’t a Sony, no matter what the reviews said. That’s because they pissed me off 20 years ago and haven’t demonstrated any improvement in behavior since. Nerds have long memories.