nyan

Then it won't exactly be the first, "Teens are [doing thing]! It's horrible and we have to stop them!" overblown moral panic in the past century. (It'll suck for some teens who don't fit in with the people they're required to associate with in meatspace, but that's another thing that's always been true.)

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.

I only keep them out of my mouth because of an incident in my teens that left me with a slightly chipped tooth. 😅 So they end up stabbed through the corners or back of the workpiece, the loose fabric of my clothing, or the arm of my chair. So far, I haven't managed to do myself more damage that way than my active young cat does when he's feeling playful, so I don't sweat it unless I actually lose track of one.

(If you haven't guessed already, none of us are much good at reminding ourselves to be safe, never mind someone else!)

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.

Ford's policies make it clear that he clings to the outmoded view that addiction is a moral failing and can be stopped by strength of will alone. He'd rather feel superior than save lives.

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.

I kind of pity Powassan. Imagine a tick-borne disease being the only thing named after your community that anyone's ever heard of.

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 . . .)