nyan

When was the last time a federal government managed to balance a budget? Trudeau-the-elder landed a smallish surplus once, back in the late 1970s, I think. I'm not aware of anyone having pulled it off since.

As with any devil's bargain, one must evaluate whether it's really worth it or not.

If all advertising on the Web disappeared tomorrow, would some valuable content be lost because the people putting it up are not willing to fund their site out of pocket? Certainly yes.

Would even more worthless garbage be lost? I think that's also a "yes".

I'm willing to accept a smaller Web with some losses in order to get rid of obnoxious advertising. So are many others. You appear to disagree, as is your right. In any case, it would take a major legislative movement and/or cultural change to cram the genie back into the bottle at this point, so the argument is most likely moot.

You may be able to prove that a photo with certain metadata was taken by a camera (my understanding is that that's the method), but you can't prove that a photo without it wasn't, because older cameras won't have the necessary support, and wiping metadata is trivial anyway. So is it better to have more false negatives than false positives? Maybe. My suspicion is that it won't make much difference to most people.

Thing is, most types of power generation have some kind of issue. Of the cleaner options, hydro, tidal, and geothermal can only be built in select places; solar panels create noxious waste at the point of manufacture; wind takes up space and interferes with some types of birds. Plus, wind and solar need on-grid storage (of which we still have little) to be able to handle what's known as baseline load, something that nuclear is good at.

Nuclear is better in terms of death rate than burning fossil fuels, which causes a whole slate of illnesses ranging from COPD to, yes, cancer. It's just that that's a chronic problem, whereas Chernobyl (that perfect storm of bad reactor design, testing in production, Soviet bureaucratic rigidity, and poor judgement in general) was acute. We're wired to ignore chronic problems.

In an ideal world, we would have built out enough hydro fifty years ago to cover the world's power needs, or enough on-grid storage more recently to handle the variability of solar and wind, but this isn't a perfect world, and we didn't. It isn't that nuclear is a good solution to the need for power—it's one of those things where all the solutions are bad in some way, and we need to build something.

It's been an issue in the Ukraine a couple of times already. So far, nothing has come of it.

Manufacturing of solar panels produces a different kind of contamination, though—it's just not located at the point of power generation. Wind is probably a bit better, with fewer exotic chemicals required, but "rooftop wind" isn't exactly a common catchphrase.

X is forbidden from offering services in Brazil until and unless it complies with the local courts (the company refused an order to suspend some accounts, then wouldn't appoint a local representative as Brazilian law requires). Local ISPs are required to block it. I don't know about Australia.

Exactly. This is as much a virus as the program I wrote as a first year CS student that rebooted the computer due to a bad pointer dereference was a virus. (That one would probably just segfault today, but I started back in the DOS dark ages . . .)

AI is a conspiracy theory—companies are just hiring people in lower-income countries to impersonate machines!

(/s, of course, but with just enough truth to it that there's probably someone somewhere out there who thinks the above statement is plausible.)

Do you think we have ORIGINALS or Greek or roman written texts?

We do have originals of some much older texts, though (cuneiform on clay that was fired after impression seems to be a pretty good archival medium, overall). We'd probably have a lot more original Greek and Roman documents if they hadn't been destroyed in wars and other disasters, or recycled for various purposes. There's a big survival rate difference between documents that receive basic care throughout their lives—no rough handling handling, minimal direct sunlight exposure, and some degree of temperature and humidity control in the storage area—and those left to fend for themselves. That's why old documents in surprisingly good condition sometimes turn up in caves, which tend to have constant temperature and humidity levels.

(But, yeah, current electronic media doesn't have much chance, with select optical disk media stored under carefully chosen conditions offering the best chance for your files being retrievable decades later, if you can find a drive to read them on.)

Air Canada is not a vital service (some of the little bush airlines that are the only way in or out of remote communities might be, but not them). Believing that the government should intervene on their behalf is such excessive hubris that I can't even.

Someone overreacted here, but it wasn't just the police. Who calls the cops over a water gun, for crying out loud?!