Em Adespoton

Theoretically, the SIM has its own MAC that’s used for routing on the cellular network; however, the network is required to route 911 calls even without a SIM, and that’s done via IMEI.

Why exactly does vehicleprivacyreport want my VIN instead of year make and model? That’s me giving an unvetted third party website the unique tracking token for my car….

And only some e-bikes have a built-in cell phone.

I remember when I had to set my VCR to record a program I wanted to watch; if YouTube gets that bad, I’ll just do the same thing; pre-record the video stream and skip the commercials.

The difference is that my ad blocker is quick and painless to set up, where TiVo involved some capital and planning.

So… Joe Biden is America’s Thin Blue Line?

With the limited size of our domestic population, it always blows me away that there are enough Canadians living in countries like Lebanon to populate a small city.

Has UW never met Barbara Streisand before?

Basically, yes.

Well, I’d say that trust in the police and the 911 system is also at an all-time low, which could result in fewer crimes being reported to them.

Not that I think it’s actually a significant enough amount to account for the notable reported decrease, but you asked….

There was a time when I could joke “what do the other two do?” but I think inflation has long since caught up.

But wait… didn’t China say the re-education camps were a hoax, that Muslims have the same rights as everyone else in China, and that any issues they’d been having had already been resolved?

If recommendations are being provided to me as a service and the algorithm that goes into it is relatively transparent, I have no issues.

If advertising is based on the value an advertiser sees in the product being advertised, I have no problem.

If I’m the product being sold or an ad distribution network is involved, I’ve got a problem.

That’s how epistemological analysis works… if the general structure is the same but everyone pulls different meaning out of an event, something probably happened. If everything lines up exactly, someone probably faked the letters. If there’s totally conflicting stories, the record has been tampered with too much to say anything. If there’s no record, there’s nothing to say one way or another.

You realize that a significant portion of the bible is the collected letters and works that were at the time (that it was assembled) considered credible, right?

There’s a period of around 80 years that’s pretty hard to account for, but unlike the four gospels where there’s little corroborating evidence that tracks back into that 80 year period, the epistolary works are pretty likely to be authentic. They also reference a bunch of other letters that didn’t survive, something that tends to make them more likely authentic than not. And they involve people who were eyewitnesses of a man named Jesus (or Joshua or Yeshua if you prefer) and his younger (step) brothers.

The rest of the statements about him were solidified by 80 years or so after his death, but all the accounts don’t quite line up — which is actually a good argument for them being based on actual events.

So while there may be plenty of room for debate as to how much of the biblical teachings actually originated with a man named Jesus, his actual existence seems more evident than, say, Shakespeare.

To be fair, I think Mythbusters went off the air because Discovery would no longer pay their explosives bill. The focus on sciency mumbo jumbo was secondary.

The title and the poll don’t match?

The poll was on whether Canadians think Canada should be officially bilingual. Outside Quebec, the majority of people polled don’t— which is part of the reason why official bilingualism is important.

Is official bilingualism a myth? They’d have to poll for whether those in jobs that have a bilingual requirement are actually bilingual to answer that question.

Personally, I also question the validity of the poll, as the population sample could be really easily skewed depending on how the poll was performed.

Perplexing.

The “Truth in political advertising” bit stood out to me.

Just like there’s a consumer protection agency, there should be a voter protection agency.

Get caught materially misleading voters? No more going on the ballot for you. Get caught pretending to be running ads for a candidate when you’re not part of their official campaign team? Go to jail for fraud. Be blocked from doing official political business in the future.

We have protections around other critical government positions; we should have them around political candidates as well.

It should be reasonably trivial to programmatically watch the frames; original programming will have mastered audio levels and set video compression; any shift to an ad should stand out like a sore thumb.

So as long as things aren’t locked down to a DRM’d player, it should be possible to fingerprint the audio and video stream content and drop any inserted frames that don’t match.

If YouTube decides to mangle the original content to fight back… then maybe that’s finally the impetus people will need to switch platforms.