So glad I switched from Fitbit to Garmin. Google has done everything possible to lose me as a customer.

Speaking as a motorcycle rider, ebikes are dangerous. Not because of the bike but because of the riders. They often don't wear safety gear, they don't follow traffic laws, and many bikes top out at 70-80kph. It took considerable effort to get my Class M. A bike going that fast should require licensing and safety courses and helmet laws. Most people don't realize they can squid out on the road on an ebike just like you will on a motorcycle without proper gear.

I just installed Fedora 44 on my old Win10 laptop. Because Microsoft made sure this perfectly good laptop with 16gb RAM could not run Win11. And Affinity Suite runs great on wine now. And no obnoxious telemetry tracking. Oh yeah, for games: steam and lutris too.

Yeah yeah yeah, linux linux linux

still, Microsoft is in self-destruct mode.

Who is guilty in this case, and who is too quick to judge? In the matter of guilt, is it the public officials who have a sharply constrained budget to perform investigations, or the taxpayers who constrain the budgets of government agencies so they lack, in many cases, the resources to perform investigations that prevent miscarriages of justice? From an engineering mindset, I think it's clear that there is a tradeoff between resources allocated to services and the quality of the services that can be rendered. To perform perfect investigations in every case, the resources required will never be available. In the matter of judgement, a quick scan of a news article leading to the conclusion that everybody involved in administering justice in this case seems - perhaps - a wee bit hasty to me. I get that this is the internet, where judgyness is the norm. Nevertheless, I counsel that everybody seen to rush to judgment should be incarcerated - eye open that that cohort now includes me!

Is there anything in USA law that would keep a USA-owned company that became the new owner of TikTok from selling the same data that USA legislators seem so concerned about to data brokers that would then resell it to Chinese-owned data consumers? I think not. Do USA-owned companies have a record of preventing harms to USA consumers in service of foreign governments? Again, no. To me, it seems like this legislation is all about creating the appearance of protecting USA interests without materially doing so.

The armada of Amazon delivery vans that daily clog the streets of my Vancouver neighbourhood call into question whether you perhaps exaggerate a wee bit?

I renewed my Canadian passport last month. It involved an in-person visit of about an hour to a nearby office followed by less than three weeks before the passport was delivered to my home via registered mail. If this is a broken government, bring it!

My picture of things is that Ethernet was basically ALOHAnet adapted to use the shared medium of wires rather than the shared medium of radio spectrum. I think the hard work went into creating that, and the easier work was reading the papers and seeing how it could use a different medium.

Characterizing this action with a straight face as constituting "blocking" content is... disappointing. When search engines index publishers content and offer links to the orginal stories, that's - also disappointingly - characterised as "theft," yet when they fail to offer those links, that's somehow even worse. The fact is that Canadian leaders see on the one hand see the very real problem of failing Canadian media organisations and on the other an obscenely big pile of money at Google and think they've found a fix. But why the guy with the big pile of money would go along with this scheme has never been clear.

Nobody seems to ask why publishers pay big bucks on SEO schemes if they believe those hits on their content constitute theft.

Nobody stops you from rolling your own with init.

And a distribution choosing different software eight years ago isn't the same as a private company intruding on your personal computer to change software without consent. And no, EULAs are not consent.

The offboarding (that a word?) process was refreshingly painless for me.

What's changed since then? Ericsson completed their purchase earlier this year, and you can imagine that the valuation was tied to the number of subscriptions that they had at the time of the sale. Ericsson is going to end up paying that $1e8 - not the departing executives. This is pure speculation on my part.

It does seem like many VOIP providers have lost interest in the consumer market - marketing seems to be all about business these days. Ooma - also.

I'm not giving Mark Zuckerberg money so he can violate my privacy in order to manipulate me into buying more junk at my expense to further stuff his wallet.

The first public coverage of this issue that caught my attention was fully ten years ago, on the Living on Earth show.

https://loe.org/shows/segmentprint.html?programID=12-P13-00022&segmentID=1

That glyphosate is now also implicated is pretty terrible news - the days when it was used primarily as a weed killer are over, and it's now routinely sprayed on various food crops in USA to simplify processing. That means that it's broadly present in the food system and is very hard to avoid.

If this technology can be made portable enough, it's hard to imagine why any men would be sent to create a Mars colony - it's too expensive to ship somebody that lacks the ability to create offspring. (Even in the absence of portable IVG, it makes a lot more sense to send sperm than it does to send men.) The best investment is an 18-year-old woman with good reproductive ability and the ability to absorb a technical education once on the planet.

Practically speaking, do we need men any longer?

Let's guess that if the earliest presidential primaries were held in some other state than Iowa or similar corn-belt state, we wouldn't have this disastrous policy to begin with. BTW, it also affects food prices and not in a good way.