Okay, maybe I’ve been reading too many historical accounts as of late, but the title by itself sounded like a military action meant to round up the Cree in order to violently/forcibly intern/confine them back onto their reservation.

Yes, I’ve read the article. It’s the phrasing of the TITLE that gave me such pause the moment I first saw it.

Instead, last year, a bombshell research paper authored by several Canadian neurologists and neuroscientists concluded that there was in fact no mystery disease, and that the patients had all likely suffered from previously known neurological, medical, or psychiatric conditions. The New Brunswick cluster was, one of the paper’s authors told the BBC, a “house of cards”.

500+ patients, all in one highly geographically-constrained area, makes this conclusion as suspicious as a fleet of black Ford Excursions, all filled with men in black suits, saying “nothing is going on here, carry on.”

TL;DR: BULLSHIT.

I wish Canada had a politically-independent research arm that could look into any possible subject, free of interference and with the authority of a national police force, only staffed with highly-accredited experts from every field. They would have a mandate to follow political and economic corruption and harms to the environment and peoples of Canada without censure or blowback, with the only requirement being full transparency and accountability. And with payroll bonuses being drawn from fines and other financial judgements such that they are as incentivized as possible to go after the biggest fish, first.

Now granted, the existence of this agency could very well mean the end of many political careers, as well as that of most any conservative political party. But that would be one of the small but important ways we reinforce democracy for the people, instead of letting the Parasite Class call all the shots.

Edit: just realized that most conservatives would violently push back against any open and fully transparent fact-finding organization that was a crown-funded research arm. Because it’s fact-finding, so therefore it’s intolerable.

75 years ago there were such few restaurants that margins were decent and owners could pay their staff well. A mid-range restaurant could have chefs and even servers earn decent wages.

Now there are 100× more restaurants per capita than there were back then, and margins are razor-thin and staff are being paid peanuts.

Perhaps. But F-Droid in particular has some pretty serious issues that cannot just be hand-waved away.

People certainly don’t believe that corporate schilling when it comes to home computers and cars.

Show me a single desktop/laptop computer manufacturer - aside from Apple - that deeply ties the software to the hardware.

Phones are different because the OS needs to be closely tweaked to work properly (and I would argue more specifically, functionally) on the phone. It’s why releases of custom ROMs are so model-specific. You cannot take a ROM for a Pixel XL and expect it to even boot on a Pixel 4 XL, much less a OnePlus. That kind of deep integration involves many specific settings because hardware is so wildly varied between models.

And car manufacturers can and do invalidate warranties based on software… a brand-new vehicle that has been “tuned” can and will have the warranty for a broken part invalidated if the manufacturer can demonstrate that the custom tuning software installed merely had the capability to affect the part in question. Since it’s not their software, they have no control over it to prevent it from driving the part beyond spec and breaking the part in question. Therefore, the onus is on the owner to prove that they never drove the vehicle such that the tune pushed the part beyond spec, and since you cannot prove a negative, good luck with that.

My BiL works at a dealership, and has seen many dozens of cases over the years where a warranty on a tune, chipped, delete, or software-modded vehicle was successfully denied. Hell, these days even software updates failing to be installed can cause a warranty to be denied if said updates correct a manufacturer’s mistake in the currently-installed software.

Also why are you letting ai do the thinking for you in that second link?

Because according to several different search engines, no-one has ever published any kind of answer to this kind of a question. The sales data is publicly available for each model, but nothing in aggregate when presented against the entire Android ecosystem.

Now granted, my view on AI is exceedingly dim. Even I take its answers at much more than arm’s length. But after poking at the sales figures for select models and comparing them against that of the entire ecosystem, I found its answer to be reasonably rational enough to be linked to.

in Canada, you cannot invalidate a hardware warranty based on the software that’s installed.

Software can most certainly drive hardware beyond its specs, resulting in physical damage.

Just try and tune a brand-new vehicle with third-party software, and then try to get warranty work done on a related part that broke. The manufacturer can and will successfully deny that warranty based on how that tune had the capability to drive the part beyond spec, thereby directly causing the failure… my BiL works at a dealership and has seen it happen dozens of times. Even skipping software updates can run the risk of voiding your vehicle’s warranty these days, when said updates are meant to correct software that doesn’t control the hardware correctly.

Phones are no different. If your custom OS has the ability to drive a speaker to volumes that are beyond its spec, that invalidates the warranty even if you never drove the volume that high. Manufacturers don’t have to prove that you actually did (and how can they, when it’s no longer their software that’s in control?), only that the custom software made it possible to do so. It’s up to you to then prove that you never did, and good luck with that.

And the App Store is one of the things I clearly pointed out as needing improvement, albeit not with this exact example. Apple makes more than enough money off of developer fees to hire more people to police standards and provide a more effective method of dealing with developer complaints and issues without resorting to highly error-prone automation.

I mean, I never said Apple was perfect, only that they are clearly doing something “more right” than others, as evidenced by consumer choice… within North America, Apple phones out-number Android (not specific brands, all Android phones, COMBINED) by 16%. As in, Apple has a market share of 58% in North America.

It’s only elsewhere in the world, where much poorer populations are simply not able to afford Apple products, where Android dominates. And even there, those who have the money to do so tend to choose Apple phones.

You can already do all of that with some phones that are already on the market and which have decently current specs and tech.

…Where are the consumers clamouring for those phones? Why are those phones owned almost exclusively by enthusiasts and tinkerers? Why are production runs so small that these manufacturers struggle to remain profitable going concerns?

Maybe it’s because there is zero consumer demand for what you are asking for?

Vanishingly few people want to tinker with their phones. Most just want something that works without having to dick around with it. And having an unlocked boot loader means zero warranty, because no sane manufacturer is going to warranty something they have no quality control over

The simple fact is that there already are phones that give consumers total control over OS and platform. And yet, almost no-one is turning to these phones because that’s not what they want.

Then focus on forcing all Android devices to be totally unlocked and let consumers decide whether they want a freedom-based and chaotic ecosystem, or a locked-down and orderly ecosystem.

I mean, isn’t the free market all about letting consumers decide?

And if sideloading and unlocked bootloaders were so vital to consumers, wouldn’t those manufacturers making those devices be seeing overwhelming market demand?

The point being, bootloaders are locked for security reasons, and to maintain separation between warranty concerns. That’s why most Android devices with unlockable bootloaders require OEM codes, such that warranties on those devices can be invalidated due to no longer being within the provider’s control. It would be moronic for any manufacturer to warranty anything that is not within their control.

And look at that: less than 1% of Android phones currently being used have said directly-unlockable bootloaders. And the availability of phones with directly-unlockable bootloaders has been shrinking rapidly as of late. I wonder how many of those have actually been unlocked.

Honestly, I am not seeing any material consumer demand for said directly-unlocked phones, otherwise manufacturers would have those phones as permanent best-sellers and seek to make more of the same.

Yeah, Apple has a lot of shitty restrictions in its walled garden. Firefox not being able to use its own rendering engine being a big one for me. And there are plenty more, such as a lack of responsiveness to legitimate devs when they report copycat rip-offs.

But as the Android ecosystem has shown, a breakdown of the walled garden has seen malware and scams explode in number. Many of the secondary app stores just don’t have the resources and tools to keep users safe.

Allowing alternative walled gardens is not the answer. Dramatically lowering the barriers to legitimate app developers is.

According to a staff email obtained by VGC, the decision is a cost-cutting measure and not related to the studio unionizing.

Aaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaaaaa…

inhales deeply

BULLSHIT.

I’m not even a gamer, and I can smell the anti-union stench from the far side of the country.

The Beaverton really needs to stick to satire, it was never meant as an advice column.

There has never been a communist country; only countries run by communist parties.

They were “communist” just as much as North Korea is “democratic”.

Just because a word exists in a name, doesn’t mean that the word actually applies in any fashion whatsoever. The political parties of both the USSR and China were as communist as fish are birds. Which is to say, absolutely not. They wore “communism” as a thin veneer of legitimacy over a bulwark of feudalistic authoritarianism.

And the real clue is in the name: Communism. Communal. No real leaders aside from administrative functionaries. Classless and cooperative. Everything that the USSR and China never was.

Edit: Russia became communist in 1917. By every metric with which you could possibly measure communism, it was dead by 1918.

Where is John Wick with diplomatic immunity when you need him?

Canada seriously needs diplomats who know significant levels of mixed martial arts and other forms of defence. And then we need to attach them to groups like this.

Officers like that desperately need to be made to eat their truncheons. Preferably sideways.

PowerPC performed much better and made design changes that made much more sense long-term.

There were also volume production issues and architecture advancement issues.

Essentially, they couldn’t get volume guarantees and they were at the mercy of a much slower improvement cycle than they would have liked.

PowerPC was absolutely an excellent top-tier processor, and the current Power11 line absolutely smokes anything else out there from either Intel or AMD, at the cost of being 100-200× more expensive. Like, think $30,000 USD for a single entry-level workstation, or $70,000 USD for the high-end one.

Windows 11 refusing to install on hardware it can absolutely run on.

RUFUS is not only a great tool with which to build your USB installer (it has an option to download the correct and latest ISO directly from Microsoft), but in the subsequent steps it also asks if you want to modify the installer in some pretty useful ways. Such as bypassing a Microsoft account in favour of a local account, and neutering some of the more recent requirements. IIRC the TPM 2.0 requirement can still be nerfed.

In this context I see a baseline as a language that

1. A majority of the speakers have above-trivial skills in it, say above a sixth grade level in both written and spoken.
2. More than one-fifth of the population has this ability.
3. said language has extreme density in certain geographical regions, leading to dominance in those regions

And for some countries, there would be several that could fit both criteria. Switzerland would likely have French, German and Italian meeting all thresholds, allowing all three to be baseline languages.

Unfortunately, French does not meet the minimum-used criteria for Canada, as only 18% of citizens can speak it with any great skill. However, the geographical concentration criteria would likely overrule the usage criteria (via Québec), thereby allowing it to remain a baseline language.

Secondary languages would have similar criteria, only relaxed somewhat.

And alt-right conservatives continue to openly demonstrate why Canada so desperately needs a well-funded, nation-wide network of mental health sanitariums that can thoroughly protect the wider public from them.

I would take the top-5 languages spoken in Canada and make the country multilingual based off of that.

If that just so happens to include Cantonese and Hindi, so be it.

If it includes Cree and/or Inuktitut, even better.

Sure, have English as the baseline. A baseline should always be the most spoken common language. But having an few other languages as “official” - and supporting numerous others in the way Europe does - would make Canada far more inclusive and intellectually robust.

We don’t have a drug crisis. It just doesn’t exist.

We have a trauma crisis which goes utterly unaddressed by policy makers, arising out of food insecurity, housing insecurity, massive economic inequality and lack of sufficient social safety nets.

This trauma, when left unaddressed, drives people to self-anesthetize said trauma with anything readily available… and with said “toxic drugs” simply being the most effective and efficient at that job.

Drugs are a symptom, not a cause, of our problems. You don’t band-aid a symptom unless you are perfectly fine with letting the problem get only worse. You leverage a symptom to identify and heal the underlying cause, because that is how problems get solved. Solve the problem, and the symptoms vanish.

It’s not the chemicals, it’s your cage.