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Submission + - Canadian grocery giant Loblaws advertises, in the sky (thestar.com)

Submitted by Striek
Striek writes: Non-paywalled link

A large LED aerial drone display appeared over Toronto’s skies late Thursday night promoting Loblaw’s [a major Canadian grocery retailer] health services app in an advertisement that the city says they were not made fully aware of.

Videos and photos posted online show a large-scale drone advertisement for President’s Choice Health that sparked a heated discussion online about the use of airspace for promotional material.

In an email to the [Toronto] Star, a City of Toronto spokesperson said that while they approved the rental of Fort York National Historic Site for a third-party drone operator, they didn’t know that Loblaw would be behind the display.



The City was not informed of the client associated with the display and is updating its booking requirements to add disclosure of this information as a requirement for future bookings,

said spokesperson Nichole Jankowski.

The advertisement could be seen from multiple vantage points downtown with several phrases urging viewers to ask the Loblaw-owned platform medical questions. Some of the questions on display included “Can melatonin lose its effect? Is that third coffee keeping me up?” and “Do I really need 8 hours of sleep?” The sleep-related questions are followed with a QR code.

Commenters in threads on Reddit and posts on X, where videos of the ads surfaced, criticized the company’s use of airspace, including a tweet that calls for this sort of advertising to be banned. Loblaw confirmed the advertisement in an emailed statement to the Star.

The drone show was intentionally short and carefully considered to minimize brightness and disruption. All appropriate permissions were obtained for the show, including airspace approval secured through NAV CANADA and ground space approval secured through Fort York.

reads the retail company’s statement. According to their website, Loblaw used the ad to launch their health app:

Torontonians along the waterfront can look to the skyline at approximately 11 p.m. ET on September 10, as a series of health-related questions appear overhead during a 15-minute aerial display,

reads a release from Loblaw Companies Limited. Prior to Thursday evening, the Fort York landing page on the city’s website posted that a display would be happening. In order to stage a drone show, such as the one on Thursday evening, organizers have to apply for an SFOC-RPAS — a permit for flying a drone at an advertised event — with Transport Canada. The federal agency, who has jurisdiction over the airspace, said that they issued an SFOC-RPAS for the event, but would not provide any more information about the applicant due to “privacy requirements.”

Submission + - Linux Mint needs to stop making apps and focus on Linux (nerds.xyz) 2

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Linux Mint is expanding its collection of homegrown software with Xepub, a new EPUB reader, and Clockenstein, a new calendar application supporting Google Calendar and CalDAV. The projects were revealed in the Linux Mint August monthly update, which was published on September 11.

NERDS.xyz argues that this growing collection of apps raises a bigger question about Linux Mint priorities. With Mint already based on Ubuntu, which itself is based on Debian, should its developers spend resources creating more applications that duplicate existing Linux software, or concentrate on Cinnamon, Wayland, hardware compatibility, upgrades, and the operating system experience itself?

Comment And when they kill the license servers? (Score 1) 22

by Striek (#66308416) Attached to: Xbox's New Disc-to-Digital Program Gives Physical Games a Digital Future

That game will then be playable completely digitally, without the need to ever insert the disc, as long as you (or a member of your family account) is logged in.

The ability to convert disc-based Xbox games to digital copies could be especially important, as rumors suggest Microsoft’s upcoming Project Helix console won’t be available with a disc drive. That means claiming a digital entitlement could be the only way to achieve backward compatibility for hundreds of millions of Xbox game discs going forward.

IOW, for as long as Microsoft keeps the necessary department funded and the license servers running.

Comment Re:Is it ragebait, or (Score 1) 217

by Striek (#66297464) Attached to: X's Algorithm Feeds Off Ragebait and Impacts Democrats More, Study Finds

The older people get, the more set in their ways they become, and the less they like change. So basically, people become more conservative as they age, and less tolerant of things they don't understand. They also accumulate more wealth and favor keeping more of it (fiscal conservatism). And so on. This is generally a well-understood phenomenon.

Anyone who was not a liberal at 20 years of age had no heart, while anyone who was still a liberal at 40 had no head.

- Winston Churchill (among others)

Submission + - Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code (archive.ph) 1

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned.

Submission + - 23 Years after SimCity 4's release, "Eternal Commuter" bug finally fixed (reddit.com)

Submitted by Striek
Striek writes: RIP Maxis. The greatest city-building game lives on, however, thanks to 23 years of modding efforts by the community.

The "eternal commuter loop" was a longstanding bug in SimCity 4. It features very interesting "region" gameplay, where you can make many different cities that border each other and connect/interact. Due to hardware/software limitations back in the day, limited info was shared between these city borders and only one city was actively "loaded" at at time.

https://www.simtropolis.com/ob...

Due to that lack of live-info-sharing, Sims who traveled across city borders to find a job could accidently get stuck in an infinite loop if they went in a circle and ended up back in the city they started in. Without ever finding a job destination, those Sims would move out of your city and cause ugly abandoned buildings.

This bug was previously considered unsolvable as it was locked away in parts of the game code that were inaccessible. The Network Addon Mod historically updated to Version 50 today, and thanks to advanced Dynamic-Link Library modding, a fix has been implemented for one of the oldest and most frustrating bugs in this game. Free for download on Simtropolis!

https://community.simtropolis....

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Real Programs don't use shared text. Otherwise, how can they use functions for scratch space after they are finished calling them?

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