Well, Canada is doing a hell of a lot better than the USA. But then again their Prime Minister is an actual Economist whereas the USA's POTUS is a shit-eating Con Artist with a predilection towards pedophilia (and we have the Epstein records to prove it).

Carney also had time to employ the finer points of British humor. Anyone watching the interaction with Trump was laughing at the backhanded "compliments" that were being delivered. Kind of surprising what flew right by Trump but I'm sure most of the audience (and Canadians) knew exactly what was being said.

And those Vortex processors support some rather modern hardware - they have SD card controllers that simulate a SATA host adapter (backwards compatible to ATA) so you can run a legacy OS without giving up modern easier to get hardware. Likewise they have DDR4 and USB support. They also have PCI, ISA and PCIe bus support.

They just can't implement the Pentium instruction set due to patents so they have a 486 core running at up to 1GHz or so.

They are extremely popular CPUs for embedded PCs - the screens you see at a restaurant or food court that display the tickets electronically run on a Vortex system - either MS-DOS or probably Linux because they're highly networked system. Older systems might have used RS-232 but I'm sure the modern ones are Ethernet. And despite their text mode interface, I'm sure it's not running at 80x25 but likely some large text mode framebuffer in the kernel.

On the other hand, it means the price of an influencer goes down because it means you have no recourse if you get bilked out of you money.

So just because a celebrity is promoting something, or your favorite youtube influencer or tiktok or whatever, it means the consumer is responsible for checking out what's being shilled.

And that's only a good thing because if you're stupid enough to buy something blindly, you deserve to get scammed. And if you're forced to learn about something before you buy it, then you'll likely realize it's so sketchy and you won't buy it anyways.

Those FTX investors got scammed. Guess who's going to think twice about the next crypto thing? Sure, making them whole would be ideal, but sometimes you have to learn about hot stoves by putting your hand on one.

And the more we can tell people that celebrities and influencers are just shilling scams they can't recover from, the less influence they have over people.

The real solution is to require in person registration of some sort

That's a great way to limit your student base to those who can easily come to your school on a random day to register.

These colleges benefit from out of city and out of state and even out of country students wanting in (higher tuition fees). Students who may have to fly in only do so once they're actually in the program, and many students have to register for multiple schools and multiple programs if they want in.

I know I applied to 6 collegs and universities. Only one I could actually get to when I applied as the rest were in other locations. In-person registration just isn't a thing ever - even before applying online, you had to send away for application forms and fill them out (on paper!) and mail it back.

Maybe that's what they need to do - have people fill out paper application forms again and mail them back with essays and other things hand written (no typewriters). Mailing the application forms back was a huge packet and cost a number of dollars.

Is that if you've got somebody who can sleep 3 hours a day and be perfectly healthy that person gets an extra five productive working hours a day and suddenly we're all expected to work an extra 5 hours a day. /blockquote

Or for some people, they'd kill to have an extra 5 waking hours to do stuff with every day. Which could also be leisure and recreation activities or quality family time.

Lots of people right now are trying and it's usually fueled by copious amounts of drugs (i.e., caffeine) consumed during the day. It's also why people appreciate things like working from home.

Slashdot doesn't do UTF-8. Yeah, I know... pathetic.

Yes it does. It just filters out non-ASCII codepoints to prevent site takeovers using Unicode control characters.

There's lots of attacks you can do with Unicode including abusing the RTL override characters and applying excessive amounts of decorations to a character. Since the number of codepoints that can be abused keeps increasing it's hard to keep a blacklist up to date so it's got a whitelist of ASCII printable characters only.

Unicode support has been around over 20 years. It's just rampant abuse caused the whitelist to be implemented. You can see early abuse if you google ")5 :erocS".

This seems likely to backfire extremely quickly. AI lawyers are far more likely to be abused by debt collectors and bullying corporations than individuals trying to recover money they are to benefit individuals (or small businesses) that are just trying to get a fair shake. /blockquote

Yeah, this could get dangerous because there are often laws that protect debtors from harassment and other things, and if the people using these AI tools aren't careful, they could end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit.

Yes, debt collectors willingly violate these laws all the time, until you tell them to stop or you'll talk to your lawyer about it and then they rapidly shut up. Because they hope you're ignorant about such laws, but once you tell them you know about your rights, they start obeying them because the last thing they want is to now owe YOU money.

I could do that before manually. What I really want is to get out of the 5.15 kernel WSL has been stuck in or let me update it myself.

Why don't you? WSL kernels can be recompiled easily enough on Windows.

Dave's Garage has a nice video on how you'd do this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

  But there are plenty of sites showing how to rebuild the kernel on WSL2.

At this point, the U.S. is literally asking other countries to take its talent away. That is how it feels it will make itself great again. *sigh*

Not take, the US is literally pushing its talent on other countries. Doctors and nurses are starting to come into Canada and set up practice, for example. Scientists and researchers are applying to Canadian universities.

I can't imagine a not-insignificant portion of those people being pushed out of the US wouldn't also consider Europe

People are calling it a reverse brain drain - usually people from Canada and Europe flood into the US to pursue opportunities after graduating. It's apparently so bad some doctors who leave are being threatened with having their medical license revoked

I know of no films made in China other than when China was the set location. Primarily US films might be in Canada because it is cheaper to emulate New York City, Chicago, or Boston specifically. If the location is set is American locations, it is normally shot in America. If the film is set in Europe, it generally is shot in Europe.

The big question is how Trump plans on doing this.

First, movie funding is varied - China funds a LOT of American made movies. Look at the production companies at the beginning of the movie carefully and you'll see a number of them are from China - Tencent, Alibaba, etc., have tons of production companies that sponsor movies. And of course, yes, the movie is content reviewed before sponsorship.

Second, what part is tariffed? There is nothing that's physically shipped around or valued. If the production company spends a week shooting in Canada, what is the "thing" you're going to tax? And how are you going to price that thing? At the very most you end up with a few hard drives that have data on it, that didn't have data on it before. And then there's the post production and other stuff.

Third, retaliation will come quick and swift, and this is a lot easier. For example, Canada might put a 100% tariff on American movies - by ticket cost. So an American movie ticket now costs double. Ticket prices at the theatre aren't cheap, and you think many people are going to pay $50 to see a movie? That is basically going to guarantee American movies bomb if they don't get much traction in Canada, or international box office receipts get down to nothing. Some movies don't make their money back without international receipts

Finally, Hollywood accounting will just screw everything up as well.

It's hard enough to determine tariffs on auto parts because they cross the border so many times (e.g., raw aluminum is mined and smelted in Canada, forged into a piston in Detroit, goes back to Windsor to be put in an engine, which goes back to Detroit to end up in an F-150.

With movies, things get complicated very quickly. Especially since many Canadian production companies shoot movies in Hollywood and vice-versa (see Lionsgate Films, who have quite a portfolio of American movies). Then there's also expertise - Vancouver is known for VFX expertise. Name any VFX company and they have offices all around the world, Vancouver included.

The final point - why is Trump trying to help Hollywood? California is a rather blue state, and Gavin Newsom isn't exactly well liked by many MAGA folks.

Star Wars was one of the original franchises to do it. It was highly unusual at the time that merchandising rights were retained as generally speaking, they didn't traditionally do well.

So not-well that a little toy company called Kenner was the only one to express interest in it and demand after the movie opened was so immense they were backordered on anything and everything.

I think there was a time they had to sell coupons to get a certain toy because they couldn't meet demand by Christmas, so instead they printed up coupons that could be redeemed for the toy later on so you'd have something under the tree.

But it was Star Wars that really showed the power of merchandising rights.

Nevermind some of Japan's greatest achievements were inspired by outsiders.

Tempura, for example. Japan didn't have a habit of frying food until the Portuguese brought it over. Japan then refined it into the fine art of fried food it's known for today.

This was shortly before Japan decided to close themselves off to the world.

People moved around for centuries

And hate Ubisoft or not, the one thing they do really well for Assassin's Creed is historical accuracy. They've actually won awards for it recreating historical cities to a level of accuracy that's astonished historians and even serve as a reference work.

The problem is people think history is just what they've read in history books, when you don't take into account it's written by the winners and thus represents a very biased one sided account. Nothing shameful in realizing that history has a greater depth beyond the books and stereotypes. People are complex - and never nearly as clean as what the Comic Code Authority approved texts would allow.

Google and Trump are in negotiations on how much Google needs to pay to make the lawsuit go away.

It's not getting done anytime soon because the Art of the Deal means that Trump is asking Google what Google can do for Trump.

You know dude, part of the "mend it don't end it" shtick one usually finds on the left...that does speak to me. I grew up in a poor country. We fixed things. We didn't stay there and we didn't stay poor but the "know how to fix your shit in case of emergency" got deep into my brain early on and the living off of disposable Chinese trash does bother me and always has.

I don't like having to junk a perfectly good coffee maker or children's toy or whatever because one made-in-china plastic piece cracks to pieces and the fly-by-night manufacturer doesn't exist anymore and wouldn't make spares available even if they did.

Repair is an option only if your time is worthless.

You hate throwing away a coffeemaker? You can fix it, or you can buy a new one for $50. Depending on your financial situation, $50 might not be worth fixing - by the time you get it all said and done you'd probably have spent $200 in time and effort. And certainly hiring someone to fix it is not an option - when a technician costs $75/hr+ with a 2 hour minimum.

That's why it ends up in landfill - it's Beyond Economical Repair. It's a problem with old cars as well - you have a junker that now needs $3000 worth of parts, but it's only worth $500.

In poorer countries, sure, they can repair stuff because you're not paying first world wages - where spending 2 hours of time probably costs $10 at most to fix.

Now, if you were to buy a $2000 coffeemaker, it makes sense to fix it. But how many people would buy a repairable $2000 coffeemaker over a $50 one that will break in a couple of years.

Freemium apps depend on impulse purchases to work - if you can't get your smurfberries right now to continue the game, they can lose out on that revenue.

Apple as payment processor allows you to click "buy" and have it in seconds.

Using anyone else means you tap Buy, get redirected to a web site, log in somehow or have to manually type in your credit card number then get the transaction done, then return to the game. This is a massive context switch and will certainly take you out. Sure it might work for the first transaction or two but after that your brain might start objecting to having entered your credit card for the 3rd time in an hour to possibly stop doing it.

It's how those games can rack up kids charging thousands of dollars in transactions during a trip to the grocery store. Not so much if they had to keep entering a credit card number.

Sure they may not have to pay Apple 30%, but they can easily find people are stopping after the first transaction because they refuse to go through all that hassle again, then move onto something else. So in the end the losses are much bigger and you made more money giving Apple 30% because they could keep people playing.

When your business model relies on impulse purchases, any little bit of friction easily incurs a huge drop in revenue. It's also why freemium apps never make you create an account or do anything more than get you in the game - the effort of logging in can easily make people skip to something else. Sure they can make you log in later on to save your progress to the cloud, but that's completely optional.

Plus, even non-freemium apps may continue to use Apple for the simple reason that if you buy something permanent, you know you can always restore your purchases. Third party sites don't have that guarantee so if you bought that costume for $10, with Apple you know you can get it back, but not necessarily so on Android or other platforms. Indeed some games and apps note that Android lacks the "Restore purchases" option and you can find threads of people whining about paying $10 for their premium item all over again.

Everything else, like Netflix or Spotify, they weren't giving Apple 30% anyways so this makes no difference at all.

Apple will be just fine. And freemium apps know they can't just switch to a third party webstore or they can lose their whales. They might try, but what's the point of getting 30% more if you're making 50% less?