_underfl0w_

This is an absolutely mind-blowing quote, thanks for sharing.

Easier to do in some places than others.

Public transport is nonexistent in several places here in Texas for example - you have to have a car (or know someone who does) to get to your job in the first place. But commuting puts wear and tear on the car, especially if you can't find work particularly close to where you live.

Local software != map data, necessarily.

One might begin to wonder if there's more than mere correlation between those who adopt socially conservative beliefs and those who seem unable to paint their environment in anything other than such broad strokes...

That is actually incredibly good advice. Sounds obvious on its face, but isn't necessarily obvious in the moment.

That still leaves unanswered questions:

What encoding - ASCII or Unicode? UTF-8, or UTF-16?

What type of filesystem - FAT32, exFAT, ext4?

What physical medium - HDD or SSD?

OP's question goes deeper than just the file format.

Do you have a source to cite for "the approach that the vast majority of purchasers prefer"?

That seems pretty speculative. The market can be manipulated or directed by more than simply consumer choice, e.g. by business incentives of product manufacturers.

`self`, `this`, `$1`, etc. are also fun to sprinkle in there.

The problem is that this wasn't the only way they were gathering this info, and that they misled consumers by allowing them to turn off a setting that supposedly stopped this kind of tracking, while still continuing to track due to a different setting defaulting to "on".

Definitely worse, but also the next logical step given that an ad company has achieved relative browser dominance and has such weight to throw around in defining web standards. Moves like this were inevitable. Writing's been on the wall a while now too.

Please read TFA. It answers this question.

"What about $otherthing?"

Neither is good, but that doesn't necessarily make the topic you're attempting to pivot to relevant in this situation.

Also, Cloudflare (provider of the external service you mention, assuming you're talking about DNS-over-HTTPS) definitely isn't Google. At least not yet.

> but it is objectively the best selection system one could possibly devise

Your determination of objectivity seems a little... subjective.

Maybe this was objectively best at the time but at minimum the race part seems to no longer be true.

Can anyone cite a source for this? I don't doubt the legitimacy, but would like to know more about it.

"Expected" != "Acceptable" though, IMHO.