I'm pretty sure that Ford would be overjoyed if everyone north of Parry Sound vanished spontaneously so that he no longer had to pretend to take us into account. He doesn't understand the North (or anything much outside of Toronto), and doesn't want to.

Not sure where you're getting that from—this isn't about anyone helping radio stations. The idea is that the government would impose laws and taxes on large streaming services operating in Canada that are somewhat similar to those currently imposed on radio stations in Canada.

Yeah, if that's what the footage shows then she appears to be at fault here, and a liar to boot. "Assault with a weapon" may be a little too heavy to stick, but hopefully some lesser charge will.

It would be pointless with my mother, anything involving technology developed after the 1980s goes were in one ear and out the other.

I just told mine, "If someone calls claiming to be me and says that 'I' am in trouble and need money, ask them [about thing from my pre-Internet childhood], and if they get the answer wrong, hang up, because it's someone else imitating my voice." No tech understanding required.

Unfortunately, it's rare that we can control what hashing algorithm is being used to secure the passwords we enter. I merely pray that any account that also holds my credit card data or other important information isn't using MD5. Some companies still don't take cybersecurity seriously.

intelligent regex

That would be much, much worse than what we actually have. Complex regex are positively Lovecraftian. You'd be chanting "Ia! Ia! Cthulhu ftaghn!" before you knew it.

Cracking an 8-char on an ordinary desktop or laptop PC can still take quite a while depending on the details. Unfortunately, the existence of specialized crypto-coin-mining rigs designed to spit out hashes at high speed, plus the ability to farm things out into the cloud, means that the threat we're facing is no longer the lone hacker cracking things on his own PC.

Only problem is that you wouldn't be able to visit most sites, because Mosaic only supports HTTP 1.0. You could go for Lynx, though. Just remember to disable the cookie support.

Open up the back of the device and check inside. If you see something that looks like a lump of modeling clay with wires sticking out of it crammed into the corner, your device has been compromised, and you should maybe try to remember whether you bought said device during a visit to Lebanon. After you put it in the middle of an empty driveway with a wall of sandbags around it and call the bomb squad, that is.

(Trying to associate literal exploding pagers with hacking borders on the surreal.)

For those unable to read the article, and who haven't heard about this through other channels . . .

The issue is that Quebec is actively throwing Francophone minorities in other parts of Canada under the bus, which goes beyond them being "reluctant to defend" them. The Quebec government doesn't seem to care that the weapons it's using against its Anglophone linguistic minority can be turned around to attack Francophones in the rest of the country. What they do doesn't necesarily stop at their borders.

It's been a while since I had any reason to talk to a Franco-Ontarian about Quebec politics, but Quebec used to be considered snooty, obnoxious, and out of touch at best.

One of the problems with this law is that it can strip people of their advocates. If someone is placed in a care facility 150km away from home, that means a three-hour round trip for anyone who wants to visit . . . assuming that person has a car and a driver's license and the weather and roads are good.

Let's say you live in Cochrane, don't drive, and your loved one has been placed in a home in Kapuskasing, which should be ~130km. If you want to travel to see them, your only public transit option at the moment is an Ontario Northland bus that runs three times a week. Incidentally, you'll arrive in Kap just after 1:30AM and will be stuck there until the bus back comes through just before 6:00AM the next day (assuming it is the next day and not the day after—the schedule's difficult to interpret). Kind of difficult to advocate for someone when visiting them is a two-day expedition, and they may no longer be in any condition to explain what's wrong over the phone.

I understand wanting to clear the hospital beds, but this is something that needed a lot more thought, especially when dealing with conditions in the north.

One question I haven't seen an answer to yet: if this thing had been loaded with the maximum available warheads, although they presumably wouldn't have detonated, how large an area would have been contaminated with how much radioactive material from their rapid unscheduled disassembly? The Russian nuclear arsenal may be a bigger threat to the Russians than the people they want to attack, even without taking the possibility of wind blowing fallout from a successful strike back into Russia into account. Not that Putin cares.

I would have been more amused if they had "mined" the gold from old tailings piles (the ones around Kirkland Lake used to have enough gold still in them to make that feasible, although I don't know whether that's the case anymore), or at least some mine with an associated settlement, rather than one located way out in the wilderness.

The ones that were better than I expected:

• QA in Another World: I love the fact that they lean into this being a game (as opposed to a gamelike isekai), and that the characters exploit that fact. Other iterations of the "trapped in a game" trope in anime haven't done that. (Shangri-La Frontier does, but the stakes are a lot lower there.)

• No Longer Allowed in Another World: Just a nice change from stereotypical isekais and stereotypical isekai heroes.

• Atri: I had really low expectations of this one going in, but it turned out . . . okay. Not brilliant, but okay.

• Slime: The last cours was sufficiently bad that this one was an improvement, even if it's certainly not the best in the series.

The ones that were worse than I expected:

• Dahliya: It's just . . . where's the conflict? What little does show up gets resolved within an episode or two. There's pretty much nothing to drive the story here.

• Tasuuketsu: Started off very strong, but the rest of the season didn't live up to the first episode. Then again, I don't know what could have. Not awful, but merely okay.

• Bye Bye, Earth: Interesting world, but they did a horrible job of showing it to us. A lot of things needed a couple of sentences of explanation that they just didn't get, and the little labels that kept popping up were worse than useless.

Best of the season: NieR Automata (although I had sufficiently high expectations of it going in that it didn't exceed them).

Hardest to watch: Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction. I think I'm seven episodes behind right now, and having a hard time mustering the desire to continue on. Anything that has bigotry as a major theme is a difficult watch for me right now, given what's been unfolding in the real world lately.

Most incomprehensible art direction choice: Delico's Nursery. The backgrounds look like tracings of photographs, or maybe carefully coloured-in photocopies of photographs, and the effect in combination with the characters is just . . . strange. Maybe it's a carryover from the manga, which I've never read?

Best dragon award: I Parry Everything, but mostly by default, because I don't remember any other dragons of significance (even bad CGI ones, which would be ineligible).

Y'know, if something seems too good to be true, it pretty much always is. Batteries are no exception.

In other words, the article specifically says that they don't know (or at least, the RCMP won't say) what led to most of these firearms being reported as lost (we have external invormation in a few cases, like the trailer theft mentioned by another commenter, but not for most). There isn't even enough information there for us to be able to tell whether all detachments use the same criteria in deciding whether a firearm qualifies as lost.

The article isn't clear on what is categorized as "lost" in this context. Are these all "we know for sure they were stolen" or are some of them "we couldn't find them when we did inventory, but they might just have ended up in an incorrectly-labeled box"? While neither of those is good, one is clearly worse than the other.

Oh, for the love of . . . If you need, or even just want, accessibility options, including larger pointer targets, they should be available to you, but as options, since not everyone needs the same ones, and things that help one person's issues can actually make another's worse.

The killer combination is to have both ramps for those who need them and stairs for those who can use them, coequal and well-maintained. Sometimes space may dictate that you can only fit one in, in which case you should choose the ramp, but a dozen different Windows skins would take up less space on the install media than one flop "feature" like Paint 3D, and I assume it's the same for a Mac. Part of the reason for the currest state of affairs is that corporations are horrified at the thought of giving people actual choice and letting them find what works best for their level of ability as well as their preferences. They might make $0.01 less per unit that way, you see.

If people liked it, that’s what we’d have. Surely this is a simple concept?

It's bullshit. Most people choose from among the handful of things the corporations offer them. You have to be exceptionally blockheaded to stay with an OS that no longer receives security patches, even if you prefer its interface paradigm, and if you're not the one controlling the machine you may not even have the option. The type of retrofitting I've done on my work machine is just that—work—and I understand why people may not want to do it, or may not be able to do it if they'd have to fight a draconian IT department for permission.

Furthermore, most people aren't designers or even terribly compute-literate. They don't necessarily understand which design elements are causing them to be so inefficient when they move to a different OS version, or how to revert them in cases where that's possible. They're stuck with Microsoft-Apple-Google's poor design decisions, until the same corp hands them another set of poor design decisions. The corporations don't want to decouple the UI from the OS the way Linux and other Unixoids do and let people choose, because the shiny new UIs are an advertising opportunity and impress certain types of reviewers.

TDE. Mate would work too, I suppose, but I imprinted on KDE3 early.