(alt subject : "Oops, all data breaches!")

Nothing to see here, just normal day-to-day government work circumventing the 4th amendment by outsourcing data collection to the private sector. This kind of thing happens all the time.

Move along, Citizen!

[Sadly] I bought two more Sonos speakers yesterday. We have an obscene number of them because we love the "music everywhere". Our house is actually wired for speakers, but that ends up costing significantly more than Sonos just for the speakers and amps. The Play5 speakers were very good quality (and bricked with teh App 2.0 update). I'm not a big fan of them... but they fill the need for whole home audio significantly better than anything else on the market.

(And they were an IT nightmare, especially with Unifi equipment; they only use STP not any of the newer variants so you need to tune the system to their requirements rather than more standard needs.)

There are so many unknowns in "dark matter" that they can't really claim it doesn't interact with itself. Some of the theories have it not interacting with itself, but that's not a good argument. There are too many possibilities. ...From here on I'm just spinning ideas...
FWIW, I came up with a theory that there are nine basic flavors of dark matter, each about 1/10th the mass of the universe, and the various flavors don't interact with each other, but they do interact with themselves, and are as varied within themselves as ordinary matter is. So you'd have nine types of dark galaxies.

This is a really BAD theory, but it's fun. The problem is that dark matter tends to be associated with galaxies, and local dark suns should be quite noticeable in that circumstance. We don't see that kind of result, so there aren't any local dark suns. I'm not sure we could detect them in another galaxy, but they should affect stellar motions within our own in a noticeable way. Unless you want to special case our own galaxy, dark matter needs to be rather diffuse for some reason...nothing much larger than a G class sun, possibly a M class. The reason you can get away with something that large is that lack of friction with ordinary matter means that you wouldn't get anything captured into a binary orbit with a normal star.

Sonos eventually owned up to the mistake, considered bringing back the old app again, then booted its CEO and marched its new leaders out to apologize profusely to win back the company's furious customers.
Now, Sonos says it has a brand-new app update, infused with lots of generative AI features.

So, instead of bringing back the things that customers wanted, they doubled down on shoving what nobody asked for. LOL. LMAO, even.

And they're welcome, as a business to swallow those aquisition expenditures, or fund their own Canadian content, or not do business here.

The list of developed countries that don't have domestic cultural protection policies is low. The US doesn't have one because of its size (or I'll throw you a bone - HOW AWESOME THEY ARE) - it simply doesn't need one.

Kind of hilarious in light of how pro-protectionist things have swung there. If the US audience started consuming predominantly anime TV, movies, books, etc overnight (purely just because of how good they are, right?) you'd bet your ass US would do the exact same thing.

What you don't get is that French is useful for many people - it just wasn't useful for you - and you project that because to you, personal experience is reality. Calling Mandarin, Spanish, Hindi, and Arabic more useful languages for living, identifying with other citizens, and employment in Canada is fucking bananas - and I'm married to a Taiwanese woman and speak some Mandarin!! Nothing you've said has changed my mind. Your points are noted, but still remarkably dumb.

so why aren't they given force adoption

I feel like we need a "take Murdoch5 to a real job" day or something. I'd literally pay to sit you down some time and explain how the real world works.

Don't forget, he's also a 34 time convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, and also almost certainly a pedo.

That's before we even get to his business accomplishments which include bankrupting casinos, and failing to sell steak, vodka and football to Americans.

This is awesome for renters.

And rental homes, at least near me, are usually lacking in insulation since the owner isn't paying the utility bills and the typical landlord has no interest in improving their property if it doesn't provide them an immediate financial benefit.

Being able to help offset needing to run the air conditioner more frequently would be nice.

Has he(George Santos) done anything to help the Republican Party?


Yes, he has. He has made a bald-faced mockery of the rule of law. That's priceless for supporters of an imperial presidency.

The fact of the matter is that the very existence of unregulated bookies like Kalshi incentivizes actions that may not be reversible, like, I dunno, bombing another country or burning down an orphanage.

I don't think it's been ignored, but it might have been siloed. I was aware of it, and I'm not even close to an expert in that field. (OTOH, that bit about Teflon was surprising. I'd have expected Teflon to be totally inert.)

That's probably a underestimate. But, yes.
The real problem, though, is that many of them intensely support him. I think many of his supporters tend to be more firmly committed than were Nixon's.

Calling him a loser is incorrect. That he has occasionally lost is correct, but find someone who hasn't. Sometimes it seems he's playing a different game than the one we expect him to play.

But I rather agree with the rest of your characterization. And think it leaves out quite a few correct pejoratives.

I think the problem is that there's a conflict between good security and ease of remote use. They've been pushing ease of remote use with "adequate" security. Now that security is no longer adequate, but they don't want all the customers to be angry with them.

Supposedly Google's policies are to follow whatever names the locale the user is in uses. In some cases, this is legitimate, as there are several disputed territories around the world and Google isn't a position to pick and choose. On the other, clearly ridiculous situations such as where a President writes an EO, which merely orders his government to do something, and doesn't impact the rest of the country, are an absurd extreme of this.

But, if that's what they want, I'd totally understand if the Canadian government declares all Trump properties in the US having the name "Pedophile Palace", so someone who tries to find Mar-a-lago on Google Maps in Canada is instead presented with that name.

Maybe cheap and petty is the way to deal with cheap and petty.