I’ve often thought we should have continued burning the White House down every thirty years or so, just to keep 'em humble.

So what percentage of them would like Canada to annex the US?

Someone too lazy to update their listings to reflect a rising sticker price (or not wishing to do so for other reasons) isn’t too good to be true. If they’re an established business selling new-in-box items at more than the wholesale price they would have paid (around 50% of the lowest sticker price the good’s ever been sold at isn’t a bad estimate), then you may have found a genuinely good deal.

It’s when someone starts selling at below their cost (unless it’s obviously to clear out old inventory or the like) that things get suspicious.

You only need one piece of (timeless) advice regarding what to look for, really: if it looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is. Caveat emptor.

Seriously, ending up with nothing is always a risk you run when buying something advertised as non-functional in the hope of fixing it or recovering any undamaged parts. The fact that the components on this card weren’t original is almost irrelevant, because the result would have been the same if they were authentic but damaged beyond recovery.

Beyond weird. Dude tries to push this off on workmen who had scaffolding up against the building exterior, but what reason would they have had to make a tunnel between the units? This is just insane.

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.