The thought of how the computer would react to me telling my cat to get down off the desk is . . . both amusing and disturbing.

Even if the final product is made in Canada, some of the inputs may have to come from the US, and it can take time for manufacturers on this side to take over where that’s possible.

Cans for beer and soft drinks were an issue for a while, and biting into the bottom lines of craft breweries. Canada has enough aluminum to make all those cans, sure, but not the pre-existing production lines, and tooling up takes time even for a well-understood product.

Even steel is more difficult than you might think—Canada and the US both produce steel, but steel is an alloy with different properties depending on the proportion of carbon or other additives, and some mixes were, as of this time last year, only being made on one side of the border or the other.

There are probably other similar issues, but those are a couple I’m aware of. In the long term it’ll all sort itself, but right now things are volatile, especially for small businesses needing to source peripheral inputs like packaging.

In all fairness, Carney is kind of stuck in a no-win situation. Some people are ticked off because he seems to be going soft on the US, some are ticked off because lack of trade with the US means that they’re losing their jobs. Some people, I have no doubt, are ticked off at him for both reasons at once, no matter how little sense it makes.

Only a change in circumstances outside of Carney’s control could possibly make everyone happy in the short term. In the long term, hopefully market diversification can take the pressure off, but it’ll be at least a couple of years before that gets to where it needs to be. Legacy businesses with long-term contracts don’t function on Internet timescales. In the meanwhile, he’s doomed to get shit from one side, or the other, or both, regardless of what he does.

The problem here isn’t that Framework failed to keep track of the ideology espoused by every major developer on the projects they contributed to or endorsed, which, to be honest, isn’t something I’d expect of them. The problem (as usual for a corporation) is how they handled complaints. Trying to sweep stuff under the rug in the Internet age just results in someone setting the rug on fire. If instead, Framework’s response had been “We’re sorry, we didn’t know, we won’t give money or free advertising to any projects this guy is involved with from now on,” the whole mess would have died down by now except for a few people grumbling about how they should do more research before sending money out.

I’d add external floppy drives to that, and any means of digitizing VHS tapes and audio cassettes. Many people will need these once in a lifetime to try to recover information of personal value from obsolete media, but almost no one will need them more than once.

I HAVE broken discs in similar sets (Mr. Robot, Planet of the Apes) taking them out of those awful cases

So someone actually came up with something worse than the Scanavo DVD cases (on the grounds that I never actually broke a disc taking it out of a Scanavo case, just thought I was going to)? That’s . . . brutal.

Phone numbers are the equivalent of IP addresses. It’s just that the accompanying DNS solutions are pretty badly broken and the firewall options are all iffy.

Seems to me that the happy medium here might be a lower tariff. 100% was never justified, but 10% or 25% might be. Just enough to allow European and Japanese manufacturers (I don’t give a damn about the US at this point) to price their vehicles somewhat competitively even though they don’t have the advantage of ignoring labour rights.

You think that would stop him?

What they should withdraw is the Notwithstanding Clause itself. It’s a nasty thing.

what’s the point of taking art classes?

The point is the same as taking classes for any other skill, from baseball to carpentry: you have to learn technique before you can engrain the skill through practice. Some people can pick it up on their own if they’re motivated enough, by studying other people’s art, watching artists working, reading books, etc., but it’s more difficult and time-consuming without an instructor’s feedback. Sometimes they even figure it out wrong, and develop a very difficult and time-consuming method of doing something when a much simpler one exists.

So it’s optimal to both have the classes and do extensive practice outside of them. One is not a substitute for the other.

I’m pretty sure that you can find one researcher, somewhere, who will agree with anything you say, including that the weather is being affected by a war between Martians and the people living inside the hollow earth. Especially if you’re offering a large bribe to said researcher to make a statement about something outside their field while they’re somewhat drunk, and then mutilating their remark out of context via the process fondly known as journalism.

In other words, “one researcher” predicting something is pretty much worthless.

It’s complicated?

There’s been a fair amount of concern in the developed world over the past several decades regarding how to handle a large number of aging Boomers in need of elder care. Immigration from less-developed coutries is one way of offsetting the demographic weirdness that we’re dealing with. That may have been the original point. So, one government sets up policy with the idea of making sure there are enough young people around to hold the country together when the Boomers are no longer able to work. Successor governments didn’t tamper too much with that policy because it didn’t seem to be doing any harm as long as they could keep kicking the infrastructure can down the road. The can has now hit a brick wall, and we have to deal with the fallout from that.

Most parts of the justice system haven’t grown to keep pace with the population and its needs. Not enough judges, not enough court staff, not enough jails and prisons or staff for them, either. Cases have to go to court within a certain amount of time after charges are laid, and we don’t have enough capacity to hold all the necessary trials within the required period of time. It doesn’t matter how carefully they handle and sort files, it just can’t be done. So some cases get dropped, and not everyone agrees on which ones.

This situation shouldn’t come as a surprise, given how badly underfunded every other government service in Ontario is.

I think they’ve funded a couple of series, although not nearly as many as Netflix has.

It looks to me like she was practicing civil disobedience, or trying to. Civil disobedience has a long and honourable history, but there’s an equally long history of people being punished for practicing it, and she should have been prepared for retribution when she started violating campus rules. Doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong, it’s just How Things Work.

The question is, would another student doing the same things for no cause at all receive the same punishment? If so, to what extent does she deserve to be let off because she was acting for a cause? Or is the entire court case in itself a method of drawing attention to said cause, rather than something she actually expects to win?

(Note, please, that I have every sympathy for her cause. The shit that’s going on in Palestine right now needs to be stopped. I’m just a realist.)

It’s never been proper solar time from the beginning. The timezone boundaries are distorted to align with political boundaries, which messes up any alignment with solar time.

You can decide to make a left turn without knowing whether you’re going to end up in Kamloops or Kapuskasing by doing so. That’s the level of steering that’s going on: no one is looking past, at most, the next couple of intersections, and the GPS is on the fritz.

Some of them may be hollows in the soil created by other causes—methods like ground-penetrating radar don’t have a fine enough resolution to figure out what exactly is in the detected locations, and there’s been no money to excavate. However, given that we have a whole bunch of missing human remains out there somewhere, and these sites were investigated as likely locations for them, it’s likely that the majority are, in fact, graves. If not, there are graves somewhere else that we still need to find.

If you’re talking about the issue I’m thinking of, it wasn’t really specific to ASUS, but could be triggered by overvolting an X3D CPU on any board. Most of the big manufacturers (ASUS included) have revised their mobo firmware to make that impossible now.