Did he look in the cat bed? Cats steal things all the time. Good place to find lost items.

That desert? edge screams for a switch to smooth, and a little bit of edge fade to make the transistion less harsh.

If you don't find the correct line style, it is easy enough to make your own. Just click the line style indicator, and make a new style. For a dotted style, you'll want very short line segments, and a distance between them that is still quite short, but at least twice as long as the line segments. And make sure you don't use paper scale.

You're using a symbol fill, right? You have to edit the actual symbol used for the fill. Open up Symbol Manager, and check the "Show Fill style symbols" option. Now you should be able to find the symbol in the list, and you can edit it from there.

That scale does sound a bit weird when I look at the symbols on your map. Even the tiniest buildings I can find in your latest map would then be about 50'x50' and the trees fill almost an entire 200x200 square on their own.

Technically, there is little difference between these, they're all polygons in the exact same shape as the entity they're outlining

a) The advantage when creating them with the tool is that they have their own configuration, allowing the tool to put the landmass and the outline on different sheets if desired, and specifying the desired thickness and fill. While the tool can use any configuration, the polygon is usually turned into an outline instead of solid fill by setting the line width greater than zero. This means the line will be wider on screen as you zoom in on it.

Note that not all styles use an outline for their landmass drawing tool, but relies on effects instead.

b) When you use outline in black, the poly ends up on the same sheet as the original entity, so it won't be on the same sheet as the landmass's original outline. It is made an outline by using the "Hollow" fill style, which means it will always be just a thin line, no matter how far you zoom into it, it will always be just as thin on the screen. You can change properties on this one however, setting the fill style to solid and a non-zero line width, and change the sheet to the same sheet used by the original outline and it will be more similar to that one.

c) Same as b.

d) Same as b, but the outlines from the polygons in the multipoly are themselves multipolied, and multipolies cannot have a line width. Explode them to make them work like regular outlines.

You can also use 'Explode Text' (Right click Explode) and then setting groups to unlocked (the button at the lower right of the screen). Now you can color individual letters. This may be easier than the text along a curve option, BUT the downside is that the text is no longer letters at all, but polygons, so it can no longer be changed using the text editing tools. Lock groups again when done.

If you are looking for a simple and free editor, I like Paint.net. (Not to be confused with Paint. They have both a free and a paid version. Same program, paid one is just to support them). Gimp is also free and a bit more fully featured, but also more complex to work with.

(My personal image editor of choice is Paint Shop Pro 7, but that is over 20 years old, so probably not where you should start out today. It is only slightly newer than my image viewer of Choice, ACDSee 2.42 from 1999. I teach university level students younger than some of the software I use)

Every once in a while, someone does. Which is the whole problem. Spam is an industry because it works. How it works differ a bit, sometimes the intention is to get people to click a link (which can lead to a legitimate product, a scam, or even malware), other times they just want the links out there because it boosts their search engine ratings which means people searching for this stuff will get the spammy sites high up in the search rankings instead of the legitimate ones. In the latter case, it is not the people that see the spam that is the actual targets.

That is a simplification of how things work though. Not all tasks can be parallelized (and this holds true in new modern 64-bit software too, there are many cases where you simply cannot start calculating the next step before you know the result of the previous calculation), so even if a program uses multiple cores, there will often be times where there is a longer running task running on a single core which needs to finish before more cores can be spun up with other tasks. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't utilize multiple cores in a good way.

For a simple example, if half the workload can be hugely parallelized, but half needs to run on a single thread, it still halves the execution time compared to running on just a single core, even if the other cores seems idle a lot of the time. This can happen because the parallelizable workload get split all over the cores, so with 8 cores, the computer will chug through those parts much more quickly. Of course it would be nice if it could use all the cores all the time, but that's simply not always possible.

(Not claiming CC3+ can't be improved here, just highlighting some of the general issues with multiple cores and parallel processes)