The document which governs this in Canada is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, part of the Constitution Act. The relevant portion is right at the beginning: “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” In other words, rights are not absolute, which allows things like laws against hate speech to be passed. Among the rights guaranteed by the Charter is “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication”. Freedom of speech is a subset of that.

( Full text of the Charter )

(In fact, even in the US, the right to freedom of speech is not quite absolute, as there are laws against libel and slander.)

Ontario’s economy is heavily reliant on their auto industry that’s pretty tightly coupled to the US.

Looking over statistics in Wikipedia, it’s about 10% of the provincial economy, and not all automobile manufacturing in Canada is twinned to US companies (Honda and Toyota both operate plants as well, and probably have a better chance of competing with the Chinese companies). It’s nearly all concentrated in a handful of cities in Southern Ontario. Their local economies would be in trouble if the US automakers pulled out, but I think the province as a whole would weather it, although some of Ford’s more ambitious and useless projects would have to be put on hold due to the drop in tax revenue. Some of the factories and resource streams could probably be offered to non-US automakers or moved to manufacturing armoured vehicles, which (unfortunately) it looks like we may need more of anyway.

So, Ford is kind of speaking up for the short-term interests of a small, vocal subset of his constituents. The rest of us, not so much.

I suspect they’re making an unwarranted assumption that the experimental patient ended up with high cholesterol due to excessive consumption of animal products (rather than, say, a genetic defect that would cause them to overproduce it regardless of diet) and applying some typical vegan arguments regarding livestock farming. No need to listen to them.

Remember, Windows will install updates without user intervention. If you remove things, it just puts them back.

Some people seem to need the psychological crutch religion provides them with in order to function, and I’d no more take it away from them than I’d take a physical crutch away from someone in a leg cast. I have no issue with people who want to pray or carry out ceremonies in private or in a public building clearly marked out for the purpose. If you voluntarily enter a church, synagogue, mosque, temple, etc. then you should expect religion.

The problem is forcing religion on people who don’t need or want it, including children. In other words, the real issue is proselytization (trying to either encourage people to join your religion, or shame them into it) aimed at random members of the public. It shouldn’t be illegal, but it should be treated as much more impolite than it currently is.

Sounds like the soil failure taking place was natural under those conditions, but the conditions themselves were not entirely natural. Situations like that make weasel-wording easy.

There are still a few brands of dumb consumer TVs on the market, although they’re becoming harder to find. Ars Technica did a roundup in December.

Even their older, simpler fridges are crappy. We bought one because our previous fridge conked out in mid-pandemic when the selection of new appliances was low. It lasted about three years before developing an issue that would have cost us more to fix than just replacing the damned thing. So we replaced it with some cheaper probably-Chinese brand I’d never heard of before and will never buy another Samsung appliance again if we can help it. AI will just add expensive, useless functions on top of their already poor design and dubious manufacturing.

In other words, if these become the only fridges in existence, I may just try to find out where I can purchase an old-fashioned icebox.

Gentoo is volunteer-run. The people doing all this work don’t expect any money. Rare in this day and age, I know. If you check the actual report, it’ll tell you where the money went (mostly hosting).

Dude, all Rockchip had to do to avoid this was a bit of license-related bookkeeping. They’re a corporation, so they’re used to dealing in bookkeeping and contracts. Someone at their end whose job it is to track this stuff either screwed up or let this through on purpose, assuming they wouldn’t be caught (more likely the latter, because China).

SD card readers that plug into your USB port are still quite cheap, even if you have the misfortune of being in the US.

The page is reachable for me in a Javascriptless desktop browser window and does not throw the error you described, so it’s probably a broken script or embed. Or at least I hope it’s just broken and not malicious.

(What’s additionally weird is that 413 is an error you would normally see when uploading a file too large for the server . . .)

According to records obtained by the group, “it’s often impossible to tell which parts of a police report were generated by AI and which parts were written by an officer.”

This does not give me a great impression of the literacy level of American police officers. Another good reason to stay out of that country.

If you have no internet but want your music as a file, that’s how you go about it.

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.