If I recall correctly, they’re diverting to Timmins instead of continuing north to Cochrane (although it’s been a little while since that part was in the news, so I’m not 100% sure). Still an improvement over the current state of public transport in the area.

They picked the wrong history, in my not so humble opinion. The AI situation looks more like the dot-com bubble, recycled.

It’s possible—I’ve used Perl scripts to pull data automatically out of email attachments stored in a maildir setup, and you should be able to pick commands out of a plain-text email body with a scripting language even more easily—but I will add my voice to the chorus that’s saying you should look into any other method you can find before settling on this. If it turns out you must proceed along these lines, think long and hard about security.

You should be able to set up the system to autologin on startup and then run commands from the auto-logged-in user’s .bash_profile, if you can reduce what you want to do to a script. You’d probably want to specially set up a user for this, to reduce security risks.

(I just stood up a weird little Gentoo media PC that does approximately this—logs a user in on startup and then runs startx from .bash_profile to make it easier to use with no keyboard attached and no DM. You’d just want to put a different command in instead.)

Have you ever lived in any of the Northern Ontario ridings (or any other part of northern Canada, for that matter)? I have, and do, although I haven’t lived in Kap-Timmins-Mushkegowuk specifically since the 1990s. Still, I doubt it’s changed much.

To put it bluntly, it’s an area that’s used to being ignored if not outright mistreated by government at both the provincial and federal levels. Small and shrinking population with a high percentage of Indigenous and Francophone individuals, large tracts of land with limited transport options, little industry, few jobs, and no influence. Our MPs normally have no influence either, unless they somehow make it into Cabinet. It almost doesn’t matter what party they belong to.

Charlie, according to everything I’ve seen, heard, and read, tried. Dude worked his balls off for his constituents, and for Canada in general, with little in the way of result or recompense. I don’t know if he’s doing more for Canadians right now than he did when he was in Parliament, but his seat didn’t give him much more scope to accomplish anything than he has as a private citizen.

Lacking government regulation in the largest markets, proper separation will never be enforced, because it isn’t to the manufacturers’ benefits. And that probably isn’t going to happen until hacked infotainment systems kill enough people to draw attention, unfortunately.

The US has health institutions? I thought they’d all been defunded.

Animals, including humans, have sensors for pain (nerve endings), and a series of routines in our brains to process the sensory data and treat it as an unpleasant stimulus. These are not optional systems, but innate ones.

Machines not only lack the required sensor systems and processing routines, they can’t even interpret a stimulus as unpleasant. They can’t feel pain. If you need proof of that, hit a computer with a sledgehammer. I guarantee it won’t complain, or even notice before you damage it beyond functioning.

(They can, of course, make us feel pain. I just spent the last hour trying to get a udev rule to work . . .)

Furthermore, we’re talking about exports. Does anyone really believe that other countries that haven’t banned plastic straws won’t just source them elsewhere instead? China’s usually willing to manufacture any random plastic object someone is willing to pay for. If plastic straws really are the hill someone wants to die on, environmental activism in the countries that still allow them seems like it would be more effective than an export ban here.

For some people, recreating the form factor of a book is the point, regardless of its convenience or cost. I’m sure whoever put this thing together was quite aware of how mainstream e-readers are built and didn’t want that, or they would have bought a Kindle or a Kobo.

China is a lucrative enough market that some trade with them is inevitable, alas (and, to be honest, Canada as a whole probably can’t support itself if it limits international trade to countries that have had fairly clean human rights records for the last fifty years or so—it’s just too small a fraction of the world). We just have to be careful that we don’t get in so deep that we can’t easily pull out again.

Please let the people in positions of power in this country have learned something from the consequences of the current US administration’s antics. We can’t afford to put all of our eggs in one basket, no matter how large or tastefully decorated that basket is.

The record coldest temperature in North America of -63⁰C was recorded in the Yukon (specifically, at Snag, Yukon, in 1947). Brrr.

The right to arm bears might be more pertinent in this case. They become much less attractive targets if they’re shooting back.

(Seriously, though, how much longer do we have to wait before we can employ cloning/vat-grown tissue strategies to feed the insatiable demand of traditional Asian “medicine” markets, and stop killing animals for ineffective superstitious bullshit?)

It’s really just institutionalization by another name. While homeless people are in involuntary care, the people who don’t want them around will have their wish, and from their point of view, having the homeless cycle back into the system within a few months of release is a feature, not a bug. It doesn’t actually do anything to curb substance abuse, but it isn’t really meant to.

Attempting to defeat browser fingerprinting (you can never be 100% sure you’ve defeated everything) without TOR is kind of an advanced subject, yeah, and one of which I have only shallow knowledge. A lot of it is Javascript-dependent, so allowing Javascript only on a whitelist basis should help (but is too tedious for a lot of people). Deliberately pissing in the pool by varying prominent identifiers like the User-Agent string should help. Canvas poisoning. Specialist browser extensions, some of which may be more effective than others. Running the blandest default-settings browser possible in the blandest possible default-settings environment (a container or live media inside a VM) could conceivably cause you to vanish into the noise, but may be highly inconvenient.

It’s worth considering who is likely to be interested in going to the trouble of browser fingerprinting in the first place. Small players have little use for the information and aren’t likely to accumulate enough to sell it for much money. So the problems are going to come from ad networks, large digital networks like Google and Meta/Facebook, possibly CDNs and service providers like Shopify if they think it’s worth their while, maybe some governments, and completely dishonest scam sites that think any money is good. Some of these can be avoided altogether if you work at it.

It does, however, make a certain level of anonymity at least possible as long as you scrub your cookies regularly, never log into the same accounts over the VPN that you were using without it, and never buy anything over the VPN.

In the end, you have to sit down and ask yourself what information you’re trying to protect from whom, and how much trouble protecting it is worth. You don’t want your nosy cousin who works at your ISP to know you look at furry porn, well, a VPN should be good enough for that (provided you don’t use the ISP’s DNS). If you’re trying to conceal your actions from a nation-state-level observer, you’ve got a lot more work to do.

If this involved any other province, I’d think it was a Beaverton headline.

Bagged dry beans require more prep before they can be eaten, though, and you have to have the clean water to rehydrate them on site, and the know-how to do it. There’s an energy cost (electricity in remote off-grid communities isn’t necessarily cheap either), and a time cost on the part of the people cooking, all of which has to be taken into consideration. That doesn’t mean that replacing canned foodstuffs with dried or freeze-dried can’t be part of the answer, but it may have to be supplemented with recipes or facilities or cooking classes or something.

If there’s a systemic issue here that goes beyond people in the supply chain profiteering, the solution may not be simple.

It’s been available in Gentoo since late 2022 (Project:LoongArch at the Gentoo wiki). And in some other distros.

I disagree. Doing so reduced the amount of diversity in rendering engines and reinforced the idea that lazy site owners don’t have to test against more than one browser. That’s a loss for the Web as a whole.