The movie is passable as an origin story. As far as I can tell, mostly the only people that are finding egregious SJW agenda driven pandering in it are people who either a) haven't seen it yet, b) decided they were going to hate it and looked for every little flaw to back their preconceived notion (confirmation bias), or c) are doubling down so they don't have to admit they might have been wrong. Sure, some people just don't like the movie. And that's fine. I thought it was okay. And that's fine too. Yet others absolutely love it. And that is also fine.

Is Captain Marvel the best movie of all time? No. It has issues. Some of those issues are precisely because it *is* an origin story. Keep in mind that it has to lay the character groundwork for *people who know nothing about the comics*. If you already know much of what is going to happen ahead of time, of course it's going to seem slow or boring. But you'll find that *most* of the cinema-goers *gasp* don't read the comics. Some of the issues are maybe due to direction or scripts. I rather suspect a nontrivial number of them are due to editing decisions. But overall, the movie was entertaining and I don't feel like my admission price was wasted.

I think the biggest problem with Captain Marvel is simply that the marketing was badly flawed and agenda driven. And even then, it didn't really blow up until Larson opened her yap and said something less than brilliant at which point agenda driven shills, etc., ran with it.

"The smartphone symbols won't be included in rego numbers and are simply decorative." At least some sanity is currently prevailing, there. Though it's mostly likely due to IT systems that can almost handle ASCII correctly without exploding rather than any intelligence anywhere.

Even better is when they quote the entire email chain that has all five previous answers to the question when they ask it for a sixth time. At that point, even if it's a "valued customer", I reply back with "You quoted the answer five times in your query. Please read your your email." Sometimes I'll be more diplomatic, but there really isn't a diplomatic way to say "stop wasting my time and just read the answer already". Depending on the specific circumstances, it will be accompanied by a "this falls outside of standard support and, thus, future queries for the same information will be billed at a our consulting rate at a minimum time increment of 1 hour." Most of the time, it does cause the repetetive questions to stop. Much of the time, I get back some comment or other along the lines of "it's easier to just ask you" as if I'm their PA or something and when I do, they definitely get back a fee schedule. Occasionally, it triggers a shitstorm with managers involved, but it usually calms down when I turn the tables on the managers. "What's your email? I'll copy you on *every* query and reply from now on and you can see for your self."

"For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term." Right. That's bafflegab for "we couldn't get enough handouts and special concessions". Which they shouldn't be getting anyway.

Not all of Ontario. A very large chunk of northern Ontario (everything west of Thunder Bay, roughly) is on Central Time. (Actually, the time zone split should go through the middle of Thunder Bay but it was shifted west one railroad stop for practical reasons.)

I'll be willing to come on board on the paper straws side of things when they come up with cost effective straws that don't disintegrate in the drinks and don't screw with the flavour of the drink. (And, yes, they do screw with the flavour, or, at least the ones the local greasy spoon uses do.) Of course, I have a solution to that problem: just don't use a straw.

I've started noticing lately that many things with any amount of motion tend to stutter randomly. This is especially bad in high motion shots or in long panning shots. For the panning shots, you might think it's actually judder from telecining, but this happens on everthing no matter the frame rate or broadcast source. I'm sure some of it is due to overcompression, but when compression fails due to lack of bits, you get pixelation effects and other fun artifacts. The picture doesn't just stall or look like it dropped back to half or less of the usual frame rate.

Anyway, this being enabled by default reminds me of the whole reason televisions are usually configured by default to *distort* 4:3 content on 16:9 displays. You see, these frame interpolation and motion smoothing things work great on scrolling news marquees, talking heads, and the like. So just like removing the "black bars" that "waste" part of the TV screen (distorting 4:3 pictures), the whole reason interpolation is enabled is to make things look "better" on the show room floor.

This sounds like the representative you were talking to scammed you into agreeing to a contract extension with a 6 month promotional bonus. You may not have signed anything, but they almost certainly entered it into the system as if you did.

As far as I can tell, they can't legally prevent you from cancelling service. They can charge cancellation fees based on whatever contract is in force at the time, but preventing cancellation is not allowed. That doesn't prevent them from using underhanded and even illegal tactics for customer retention, though.

Advice to others: refuse to talk to the "loyalty" department. Just adamantly demand that you are cancelling your service, even if they do insist on putting you through to their "loyalty" department. Make sure you know exactly what your contract says if there is one that hasn't expired. If there is no contract in force, make sure you know what the terms of service say about cancellation. Also make sure you know what the relevant laws in your jurisdiction say since that trumps the contents of the contract if it differs. And most important of all, don't get frustrated and just agree to something to get off the phone with them. That's what they're trying to get you to do.

Remember. Those calls that are recorded for "quality assurance purposes" can be used to prove you agreed to something in a dispute. (You might consider recording your conversation as well. They can hardly object if they are going to record the call on their side.)

That turns out not to be true. Numerous scams have been traced to Indian sources. CBC Marketplace actually traced one group of scammers right to the actual physical call centre address. The relevant Indian police politely told them to piss off even though they had actual evidence.

I suspect the actual reason action happened in this case is that Microsoft provided sufficient "consideration" which exceeded similar "consideration" from the scammers.

So researchers have discovered that short term gains can come at the expense of long term success? *gasp* Say it isn't so!

Actually, that's been a known problem for a long time.You end up at a local maximum on the "score" function and now you have no possible way to improve so re-enforcement learning just keeps you there even though you might do substantially better if you actually took a decrease in the "score" and ended up on the path to some other maximum on the function.

(Oh, and "Fr1st ps0t!", especially if it isn't.)

Yeah, I don't get what legal theory the union thinks they can use to prevent the plant closure. Nothing in Canadian law requires a company to continue unprofitable operations. And even if it did, it's still not going to happen unless someone pays for it.

Quite frankly, the union can STFU. They should be talking to GM about what happens to their members, not the media. And the various levels of government shouldn't be doing anything about this either beyond the already existing social programs available to everyone.

You forgot this one:

0. Overbooking or overselling shall not be permitted and there must be automatic and non-optional compensation paid to the passenger that must be at least as much as the total amount paid for the ticket including all fees, surcharges, taxes ,etc. plus a meaningful punitive amount.

The reasoning here is that if you have collected a fare for that seat, then you are not *by definition* losing money on that seat, even if it is empty due to a no-show. If you can't make ends meet without overbooking, the, you aren't charging enough for your services or your overheads are too high. Neither of these is the passenger's problem. Also, isn't selling the same physical thing to two different people fraudulent by definition? (And physical space for over a duration *is* a physical thing.)

They did demonstrate that it isn't particularly hard to fool simple fingerprint scanners. I mean, they used a simple photocopy of a fingerprint. Granted, those were fairly simple scanners, but it isn't too hard to imagine similar techniques working with more advanced scanners. I've also seen some presentations by physical penetration testers that were able to lift fingerprints and fool fingerprint locks, though they often simply bypassed the reader altogether.

For most of us outside the US, we can't even subscribe to most of the services, evev if we want to. Or, if we can, the vast majority of the stuff that would motivate us to subscribe is unavailable due to assinine geolocking of content.

You expressed it more clearly, but I think that was actually my point with the throwing weight around thing.