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Comment Re:Don't push Canada content, and no to the french (Score 2) 119

I live in Ontario, Canada. You're an idiot, and don't speak for me. There are idiots everywhere on the planet. You're one. See you at the polls.

~22% (I'll round it to 25%) of Canadians speak French as a first language, and using rough numbers that would be ~10 million Canadians, which equates to 1/8th of 1% of the world population. If forcing kids to learn a language that ~0% of the world uses seems rational, you've lost the point of education.

I'm unlikely to read anything dumber than this today. French is a single class, its easy. You remind me of when I was in grade 7 and two morons in my class took up the cause to protest that we had to learn the subway stations even tho, in their words, 'they would never use it'. So that's fun, you make the same fundamentally stupid mistake that some grade 7 kids were making about the value of learning things - the point isn't to teach things that you need, the point is to teach you thinks so that you learn how to learn. That French *can* help you if you're not some kind of moron allergic/scared of the greater world is part of the point.

3 Inches of Blood

ROFL. Youre whining about CanCon then complaining about a Canadian band that isn't being played on the radio? The stupidity astounds me. I dunno what small town you're from, but it's doing you no favours.

Comment Re:Identity Crisis (Score 1) 119

the fucking country speaks English

I hear French all the time on the streets of Toronto, parents at school, in public transit. I am from Toronto. Despite being from an Anglophone family with two parents who don't speak a lick French, all of my school was in French until I was in grade 6, and then half of it was in French until I was in grade 9. I understand French fluently (although I don't really need to speak it) and I know many other Anglophones who are fluent in it here in Toronto.

You're a moron. Don't talk about things you don't know shit about.

Comment Re:Project, much? (Score 2) 119

Netflix doesn't "broadcast" anything. Users pull it, if they so desire.

Netflix makes content available, and they choose what is available, based on the geographic location of the person watching it. Doesn't sound much like a pull model to me. The ask of Cancon is simply to regulate that there's a particular balance of Canadian produced content. Suggesting Cancon is about regulating the balance of consumption belies the fundamental stupidity at the base of your argument.

Comment Re:Uhoh (Score 2) 127

There are lots of higher-level technical jobs that pay annual salaries far exceeding $100k. If it takes only three years to recoup the $100k, if the employee works for them for five years, they've still saved a fairly considerable amount of money.

On top of that I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's possible to take fees paid to the government as tax-writeoffs. Sufficiently large firms might well simply write off the money spent this way directly against their taxes.

Comment Re:Uhoh (Score 5, Insightful) 127

its not meant to make them stop using it. its meant to stop them from using it to replace there entire workforce with them. if someone is Reilly talented and worth the money there gonna have to pay for it. otherwise hire local.

You know what would work better than that?

Subpoenaing the hiring managers and HR staff and their records to see what sorts of applicants they've received domestically and to interview existing staff of the company and any 'heathunter' types they've used to fill jobs before to find out if they're actually having trouble filling jobs or if instead they're simply trying to replace more expensive domestic employees with foreign workers at reduced salaries.

There have been far too many examples where laid-off or soon-to-be-laid-off employees described the active process of training their replacements with great detail. If they wanted to really make a dent they would take those claims seriously and investigate accordingly, and levy heavy, heavy penalties. I'm thinking something like 10x the original employees' salaries kinds of fines.

Comment Re: All that is old is now new again (Score 1) 22

That is a very good point. duckduckgo.com (to use an example) does not summarize the search results for you, and, once you know what to look for the ads are clearly marked. To be honest, purchasing ads on duckduckgo.com is likely a sign of good taste on the part of the advertiser as well. Honestly, I hadn't even considered using a non-Google search option for a long time. That is almost certainly part of the problem. Thanks for your response.

Comment Re:All that is old is now new again (Score 4, Informative) 22

There was nothing automatic about Google's trustworthiness. It simply counted up links that lead back to a particular page. If it had more links it was (supposedly) a better page. Almost immediately webmasters around the world started gaming the system. Google still restricts some of the things my account can do for hidden links that were added to some ads on websites that I ran in like 2001. GoDaddy and all of the other big web hosting companies of that era all rose to prominence on the strength of gaming the PageRank system.

I am sure that other industries tell the same story.

PageRank might seem trustworthy to you, but that's only because you weren't trying to game the system back in the day. I can assure you that, right from the start, people were abusing PageRank in precisely the same way that upsets you now. The only difference was that registering a domain back then cost $70 for two years, and you probably created the links you used to game the system by writing Perl. That raised the barrier to entry significantly. However, there was still real money to be made in that arena, and whether the winners paid Google directly, or paid for back links to their content (or both), I can guarantee you that the road to your trust was paved in money.

In the end Google has decided that the most reliable way to have publishers show that their information is trustworthy is to force them to pay for the privilege. Coincidentally that also happens to be the method that makes Google the most money. For years an entire SEO industry has thrived around the idea that if you pay someone enough money they can trick Google to steal your information instead of your competitors. Now we are finally at the endgame and Google doesn't even send traffic. They simply summarize the information for their customers. Chances are excellent that you don't even leave the google.com domain.

Google's competitors are simply doing the same thing at a different domain. All of them make their money by charging publishers to show up prominently in search ranks. Whether you are rooting for Oceania, Eurasia, or Eastasia it's Big Brother all of the way down.

Comment Re:100M is enough (Score 1) 153

Well wtf does he mean by speedtest then? If he's doing it from his phone or wifi connected laptop, then it's going to reflect the speed of his wifi. If he's doing it from his router, and complaining that the speedtest is wrong because his wifi is slower than his router uplink, I'd say that's a statement only a doofus would make.

Comment Re:Or (Score 1) 72

Trouble with trying to run a study on the Amish is that their lifestyles are pretty significantly different all around. Comparing groups on either side of a hard dividing line (there was a study in the UK of shingles vaccines where over/under a certain age was a hard line in the sand) works well because the lifestyles of the population groups are basically the same.

Comment Re:Soo (Score 2) 86

I'm assuming that this works because when the AP is communicating with endpoints in fixed locations, the AP can tell when signal quality changes as attenuators move through the space. This might work better with modern 'beam forming' APs using modern 802.11 standards, but theoretically one could constantly measure the signal strength between a stationary endpoint and the AP and observe when that signal is weaker than it otherwise should be.

If there are insufficient stationary endpoints it might not work so well unless it can somehow measure reflectivity with enough precision to know that something moved through.

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