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Comment Re: online petitions mean shit (Score 1) 58

Canada has about two-thirds the population of France, the U.K., and Italy...

Sorry, I just realized that was worded ambiguously. I meant that it has two-thirds the population of any of those three countries individually. So I should have worded that as:

Canada has about two-thirds the population of France, the U.K., or Italy.

Mea culpa.

Comment Re: online petitions mean shit (Score 1) 58

Canada has about 1% pop. of EU

What? Canada's population *density* is much lower than the rest of the EU, but in terms of actual population, you're off by almost an order of magnitude. Canada has about 9.2% of the population of the EU.

Canada has about two-thirds the population of France, the U.K., and Italy, or about half the population of Germany. Canada has more population than any single country in Europe other than Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and Ukraine. With UK now out of the EU and Ukraine not yet in it, that would make Canada the fourth largest country in the EU if it joined. (And even if Ukraine joined, they're within the margin of error of having the same population as Canada.)

So if your argument holds true for Canada, it also holds true for the entire EU.

You might want to rethink your position here. Just saying. I'm not saying Canada should join the EU, since being the only country that's not even remotely in Europe might result in lesser treatment, but if that happens, the reason won't be because their population is too small.

Comment Ban violent games? Good luck with that... (Score 1) 58

Not being much of a gamer I haven't followed this story (at all!) so the headline and initiative name "Stop Killing Games" made me think it was 1.3 million signatures from people who want to ban games in which people are killed. "No way that's going to pass," I thought. People love virtual murder.

Then I figured out that it's the killing of the games people want to stop, not the games that include killing.

Vaguely related, I had a serious EverQuest addiction ~20 years ago (the reason I gave up on any but the most casual of gaming), and I noticed a few weeks back that it's still available on Steam, and free to play, so I downloaded it and logged on, and even found my old character still there (though with zero gear because I gave it all away when I quit playing). The UI is dramatically different, but the general content seems the same. It's no longer very interesting to me, though.

Comment Re: You know it kind of bugs me (Score 1) 104

Moto phones bought direct have no unremovable crapware.

The pre-installed apps are just as unremovable on Moto as any other (unless you unlock the bootloader; some Motos have unlockable bootloaders). It may be that you define their pre-installed apps as not crapware, but that's a judgement call, not a statement of technical fact.

Comment Re: You know it kind of bugs me (Score 1) 104

Phones that run stock Android are usually pretty good at letting you uninstall/disable anything you don't want.

Disable, yes. Uninstall, no. If it's pre-installed it's part of the system image, which is mounted read-only and protected with fs-crypt. Actually modifying that would require root access to remount it rw and to disable fs-crypt.

That would also, of course, completely destroy the Android security architecture, leaving you wide open to all sorts of attacks. If you want to do that, get an Android device that has an unlockable bootloader (e.g. Google Pixel), unlock it, then do whatever you like. And be sure not to hire any evil maids.

Comment Re:For what? (Score 1) 62

Interesting, that explains a lot. Until now, I thought I might want to try Cursor, but I already have VS Code with Claude and GitHub Copilot, so why bother!

The integration is a little better in Cursor; the main difference being the in-line edit diffs. But I bounce back and forth between Claude Code and cursor, so I end up just using the git diff view to look at changes about 80% of the time, so it's not much better.

Honestly, my reason for using it is that I have separate Claude and Cursor token budgets -- though I set Cursor to use Claude so I'm using the same model both ways.

Comment Re:Ticking time bomb (Score 1) 8

You know what I was just thinking? I want a nieve, blind, clueless, non-sentient army of cheap EV garbage to all charge at the same time after evening rush hour, blow up the local grid, and stop in their tracks every time there's a power/cell tower outage. That's exactly what my city needs.

Why do you think they would stop in their tracks every time there's a power or cell tower outage?

Yes, there have been some issues with widespread power outages causing the cars to get confused because things don't look right, but that's a bug, not expected behavior.

And although they won't have fares if they have no cell service, there's no reason to expect them to stop being able to drive. They will do whatever they normally do when they have no fare — find a place to park. Other than for learning about pickups and dropoffs, robotaxis use cellular networks only when they break down, to request remote driving assistance (i.e. relatively rarely).

Comment Re:Layoffs (Score 1) 72

Oh, yeah, I just realized that this is an expense on the Roku side, so the taxes would cancel out. Ugh.

Then yes, you're correct that there's no possible way for consolidating two businesses to save money without direct job loss, other than perhaps reducing payouts to external companies for things that they both do (e.g. accountants).

Comment Re:Well, let's face it (Score 1) 53

You don't need it on consumer hardware

Except for, you know, illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, naturalized Americans and even American born, and all the other people targeted by their governments.

If your government breaking into your house and applying hardware-level attacks to scrape your secrets out of the RAM of your running computer is seriously part of your threat model, it's almost certainly very, very far from your biggest concern.

Also, you should probably consider turning your computer off.

Comment Re: Enshittification marches ever onward (Score 1) 53

They removed something you never should have had, that your processor never should have done, and that they never, ever told you your processor should've could do.

It may not have been in the spec, but if it was widely known that the chip could do it, then it very well could be the case that people purchased the chip because of that, in which case the company unjustly benefitted from the widespread belief that it was supported, and is now seeking to further unjustly benefit by forcing those buyers to spend more money if they want to keep that feature.

Their failure to explicitly make clear that this was a bug and fix it in a timely manner is at least potentially an implied representation that could be subject to promissory estoppel.

In other words, they're probably doing something that violates the law, but we won't know for sure unless someone cares enough to sue over it.

Comment Re:Layoffs (Score 1) 72

Maybe Roku has been paying to carry Fox content, or Fox has been paying Roku to carry content (I don't know how their deals work), and now that doesn't have to happen anymore?

Let's do the math:

($Fox + $Payment) + ($Roku - $Payment) = $Fox + $Roku

That's a zero-sum transaction. No $400M savings there.

Nope. You forgot the government factor:

($Fox + $Payment - (corporate_income_tax_rate * $Payment)) + ($Roku - $Payment = $Fox + $Roku - (corporate_income_tax_rate * $Payment).

So depending on what state the income is earned in, Anywhere from about 21% to about 30% of that could be going to taxes. So they could easily save $400M in taxes if that payment happens to be at least $1.3 billion or so. I doubt that's the case, of course.

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