You can get a cheap mp3 player for literally $5. Digital textbooks can be viewed just fine on a laptop, and schools have hundreds of those.
Smart phones are addiction machines. I'm very glad to see schools banning them. Hopefully, parents take note and realize how harmful they are for child development and start buying them dumb phones instead until they're older (16+).
I'm getting tonnes of them. They always say they're from Rogers, for me. They've called about 20 times.
I'm hoping they call sometime when I'm otherwise free so I can waste as much of their time as possible. It's fun to bait them, and it saves them from potentially scanning someone else in that time.
I just looked it up and I already own it from the Itch.io Bundle for Ukraine. I should play it sometime! Also on sale on GOG rn at a historical low price DRM-free.
I think that's fine, tbh. Not as many customers will pay $80+ for a subscription. Then companies that sell games with more ethical business models will be more competitive, too.
It seems like the Archive.org .zip dump's "size" is just 12580366816. I assume that's bytes, which is only 12½ GB. That seems way too small to include all the romhacks, doesn't it? I thought a lot created assets and HD textures and such. But that also seems like way too much to just be website data, and most hacks are tiny files.
Does anyone know what's in that data dump? I'm tempted to download everything, even though I'd only ever use a miniscule percentage of it.
The cynic in me is wondering if this is just Google trying to get around the movement to stop children from being given addiction machines before they're ready for them. (Smart phones with infinite-content-stream "social-media" apps)
There's a push to ban smart phones for students below age 16 at schools (and educating parents to try to get them to just give their children dumb phones until age 16 outside of school hours, too.)
But maybe that's just me being cynical. This movement only started gaining steam after The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt was published earlier this year, afaik, and Google is hardly an agile company anymore...
If you look at the actual seat-by-seat projections, current polls give a near mathematical certainty of a CCP majority.
Trudeau needs to take a page from Biden's book and step down in time for there to be a leadership race. I don't think it's fair (he's done fine as Prime Minister, imho) but he's unelectable. A PP-led majority government could do a lot of damage.
The most interesting insight from this article, imho, is that abortion rights in Florida are on the ballot in 2024, abortion rights have passed in every referendum on the topic since the recent Supreme Court fuckery, and that women coming to the polls to vote for their reproductive rights might skew the numbers more in favour of Democrats, independent of polling.
So Democrat victories in Florida (including a senator seat) are looking like a real possibility.
I had completely forgotten about the quest mode and tetronimo ball mode.
I've long-ago lost (or sold, maybe?) all my original DS stuff, but it's nice how cheap and easy it is to buy a used DSi/DS Lite and then get a flash cart or soft mod. I should pull it out and play it again. Highly recommended as a console; the DS has lots of timeless games.
I agree, except that the law, as written, is stupid.
Charging for outbound links and for sharing the robots.txt summary provided by the news outlets themselves for use is ridiculous.
Instead, they should have implemented a digital advertising tax. 20% of gross sales, maybe? Make exemptions for small groups (first $1M in #ad dashes is untaxed?) (Numbers to be determined by an actual trained economist and policy expert, not me.)
That would hurt them directly on the revenue side where they make most of their income, and make local print/TV advertising more cost-effective (helping local media companies).
And then use 100% of the tax to support journalist salaries as a tax rebate through the CRA, like CCB or the carbon rebate.
What am I missing? This seems so obvious to me idk why this wasn't the original plan.
Also, bonuses are also explicitly part of many compensation packages. It's contractually required for them to be paid, in many cases.
There are lots of reasons why this is done, too; for example, it can be used to reduce risk. If bonuses are tied to the success of a program, then the CBC doesn't pay as much for "duds" that don't earn as much revenue.
Publicly funded independent journalism helps prevent the spread of misinformation. China and Russia's foreign interference is already working, and they finally have enough leverage that they can try to eliminate the CBC.
The echo chamber of social media algorithms is driven disproportionately by early interaction, and with sophisticated content farms dodging spam detection when they pile on their own posts, Russia and China are able to shift dialogue in their direction of choice. It's a shockingly effective strategy, and it's slowly dismantling Western power and influence.
I can't speak to the US, but that's not what's happening in Canada, generally. I hear the UK public system is having difficulties, too, but idk the details.
There are some places in Canada that are struggling, particularly in remote rural areas, Indigenous or not (but even moreso for Indigenous schools for historical inequity issues that we're working on meaningfully addressing with national Truth and Reconciliation work.)
Myth: The job is mostly about delivering lessons and grading tests and assignments, so once you've done a course once, you can coast forever.
Reality: designing and delivering a lecture is just about the easiest thing in teaching. And also very ineffective teaching, so it's not done very often.
Myth: School is the same as it was a generation ago, when parents were in school.
Reality: There have been huge shifts in education, with research-supported practices replacing a lot of old, ineffective strategies. The teachers who are "old school" are usually ignoring educational research out of arrogance and/or laziness.
I pay whatever is needed to get the features I need, within reason. My current phone was ~$500 CAD (XPeria 10 V). It was the only narrow phone with good battery life at a reasonable price with 8 GB RAM at the time.
Out of curiosity, why do you need so much storage on mobile? Massive music library in FLAC or something?
I am totally content with 128GB. It's enough that I'll never run out of space for my usage. (Well, aside from photos, but those get backed up in full-resolution to Amazon Photos as part of my Prime subscription).
Granted, most of my media consumption is ebooks, which are tiny.
You can get a cheap mp3 player for literally $5. Digital textbooks can be viewed just fine on a laptop, and schools have hundreds of those.
Smart phones are addiction machines. I'm very glad to see schools banning them. Hopefully, parents take note and realize how harmful they are for child development and start buying them dumb phones instead until they're older (16+).