Em Adespoton

Theoretically, the SIM has its own MAC that’s used for routing on the cellular network; however, the network is required to route 911 calls even without a SIM, and that’s done via IMEI.

Why exactly does vehicleprivacyreport want my VIN instead of year make and model? That’s me giving an unvetted third party website the unique tracking token for my car….

And only some e-bikes have a built-in cell phone.

The difference is that my ad blocker is quick and painless to set up, where TiVo involved some capital and planning.

There was a time when I could joke “what do the other two do?” but I think inflation has long since caught up.

To be fair, I think Mythbusters went off the air because Discovery would no longer pay their explosives bill. The focus on sciency mumbo jumbo was secondary.

The title and the poll don’t match?

The poll was on whether Canadians think Canada should be officially bilingual. Outside Quebec, the majority of people polled don’t— which is part of the reason why official bilingualism is important.

Is official bilingualism a myth? They’d have to poll for whether those in jobs that have a bilingual requirement are actually bilingual to answer that question.

Personally, I also question the validity of the poll, as the population sample could be really easily skewed depending on how the poll was performed.

Perplexing.

Basically, people are more aware of how they, personally, are affected by the economy.

The economy in general is doing better, but the majority of citizens are able to apply less and less of that to the things they value, and they see more and more of it being funnelled to the already wealthy.

That’s because they’re all out of business or bought up by their competitors.

My general rule is: “if they have data they can sell, sooner or later they will.”

There are very few corporations that have proved me wrong.

The “Truth in political advertising” bit stood out to me.

Just like there’s a consumer protection agency, there should be a voter protection agency.

Get caught materially misleading voters? No more going on the ballot for you. Get caught pretending to be running ads for a candidate when you’re not part of their official campaign team? Go to jail for fraud. Be blocked from doing official political business in the future.

We have protections around other critical government positions; we should have them around political candidates as well.

It should be reasonably trivial to programmatically watch the frames; original programming will have mastered audio levels and set video compression; any shift to an ad should stand out like a sore thumb.

So as long as things aren’t locked down to a DRM’d player, it should be possible to fingerprint the audio and video stream content and drop any inserted frames that don’t match.

If YouTube decides to mangle the original content to fight back… then maybe that’s finally the impetus people will need to switch platforms.

Well, in the case of Bedouins, it technically isn’t a genocide…. Seems ironic to me that a member of a group that is traditionally migratory refuses to leave. But the reason is obvious: if they leave, they’ll have nowhere to come back to and nowhere to go.

Climate change (local as well as global) has been hard on the Bedouin everywhere.

And it also points out that the Israeli expansionists aren’t just about Palestinian genocide; they don’t want anyone who’s not Jewish on the land. And I’m sure if they ever accomplished that, the goalposts would move to “only practicing Jews allowed” and following that, “only orthodox Jews allowed” — except that the orthodoxy wouldn’t necessarily line up with how we’ve traditionally used that term.

Well… yes. That’s what happens when the government effectively owns all the businesses in a country… investing in its stock market makes little sense when the government controls everything. They pick the winners and losers, not the investors.

Once upon a time print shops would only accept files in Quark Xpress format. Eventually, they came to accept InDesign documents too. They have licenses for the software and workflows and toolchains set up to integrate those files into their existing prepress and press systems.

LaTeX is purely for academic markup for postscript printing. VivaDesigner and its kind? Only niche and hobby layout and print.

That said, I only share in PDF now, so I use other software for the layout phases and don’t care that it isn’t portable to other shops.

Hmm… outsider left. And yet I’m pretty conservative in my own country.

Well, I read that as Biden saying “Are you insane?”

My personal opinion is that concealed filming in public should be illegal. Open filming should be courteous, and if someone requests they not be filmed (and they’re not a public figure/government employee), the filmer should honor that.

Otherwise, I see no problem with it, and I’ve been filmed in public a LOT.

So I guess Trump is no longer allowed to vote in New York?

I presume Florida allows NY felons to vote though…,