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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)NY
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1,155
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2 yr. ago

  • Perhaps a designated area nearby where cars are expected to park and people and their family could walk to see the show could have been a solution.

    If there's any space nearby that could reasonably hold, say, 50 parked cars. If there's a mall, or an office building that's empty at night, within a few blocks you could maybe make it work, but not in the middle of a large area of houses.

    My guess is that there would still be problems, though, because it's cold outside in December and nobody seems to know how to dress for the weather anymore. They're using the cars as portable heat sources.

  • Exactly. The combination of "bank" and "startup" is innately terrifying. Don't put more money than you can afford to lose in a place like that.

    (Aren't there any laws in the US regarding who can call themselves a bank? Or is this another case of Americans being unwilling to do something sane and obvious because some politician has convinced them it will infringe on their "freedom"?)

  • Yonge Street was designated as such in the 1790s. Bloor is equally old. If you're expecting the modern traffic level and thoroughfare status to be reflected in a name given more than two centuries ago, I'd like to know exactly how your time machine works.

    And anyway, as far as I've ever been able to tell, the difference between a street and a road is that a road was probably outside the municipal limits when named. Assuming that it didn't just get designated "road" because someone on the urban planning committee was tired of "street". There's no generally respected hard-and-fast rule for anything except "crescent", "highway", and "freeway".

  • I expect that's pretty much what's going on: trying to determine whether William Jones has living descendants and, if so, which of them owns the property.

    One wonders about the property tax records—if no one's been paying up, maybe the city could seize it for a century of back taxes without doing the detailed search.

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  • I don't care whether we pick Standard Time or Daylight Savings Time or create a new timezone that splits the difference, but we should choose one and stick with it.

    Part of the problem is that the timezone boundaries have been distorted out of their proper geographical shape by politics, so one or the other edge of each distorted timezone always has some desynchronization between wall-clock time and sun position. Which edge it is varies depending on whether ST or DST is currently in force.

    Or, we could just completely decouple the wall clock from solar time and put everyone on UTC. It makes synchronizing long-distance travel and communications much easier, and if the clock happens to say "5:00PM" or "7:00AM" when the sun is high in the sky and you're eating lunch, what does that really matter? Unfortunately, there are some people who seem unable to accept that the number on the clock is arbitrary.

  • I'd rather have nice sharp jaggies. Antialiasing tends to give me the impression that someone's smeared my screen with Vaseline.

    I acknowledge that this is a minority preference, and the algorithms involved in antialiasing are interesting even if I don't like the product.

  • We already have a Canadian Governor General doing the actual job, why not just formalize it and do away eyes the crown.

    The Governor General is appointed by the Crown as its representative, technically. You can't have the former without the latter.

    We could move to having an elected President as head of state as well as a Prime Minister who tends to the day-to-day business of government, as some other countries like France do, but it wouldn't really change much of anything . . . except adding the trouble and expense of another federal election. Seems like a lot of work for nothing to me.

    Then again, I have no Indigenous ancestry and no bad history with the Crown, and I can see why people in the Yukon might feel differently about it.

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  • And whoever buys it won't also have some kind of ulterior motive? Chrome isn't likely to be a money-maker on its own. If it were, Firefox would have less trouble staying afloat. Anyone who buys Chrome most likely will have plans for it that are no more in the end-user's best interest than Google's.

  • But even when arguing from a practical standpoint it’s next to impossible to find a job that will hire a person with no address and possibly no government ID (need an address to get documents!)

    There are ways around that part, if we cared enough to implement them. There's a street in—I think it was Italy?—that actually has no physical existence. Addresses on that street are used to give people with no permanent housing something to write on forms that ask for an address, so they can collect mail, including legal documents and government support checks, or apply for jobs. That doesn't solve the problem of living space directly, of course, but it might be enough to provide a starting point for some people. Or it would if we had enough reasonably-priced housing.

  • "No evidence of foul play" just means there's no proof that anyone set out to kill her on purpose. It doesn't mean that there's no evidence of negligence, although the police may not think they have enough to bring criminal charges in that vein, either. The burden of proof in a criminal court is high, and there's no point in wasting the court's time if there isn't enough evidence to convict anyone.

    Civil court has a much lower burden of proof, and I hope the victim's family sues Walmart's pants off, because it really does look like there was an issue either with the equipment or with employee training that contributed to this.

  • All browsers using Google's Blink engine are distasteful. Vivaldi is less bad than most, despite being closed-source, but to echo many here, you're better off with almost any Firefox derivative. Libre Wolf has a good rep. I use Pale Moon, but its old-fashioned interface isn't for everyone.

  • It depends on the VM, but some of them have working graphics hardware acceleration. Virtualbox should be relatively easy to set up with modern Windows guests, but isn't free for commercial use. qemu/kvm is free for all uses, but may require some tinkering to get everything to work. qemu also supports video passthrough—using the VM to drive a second video card installed in your machine—which some gamer types prefer.

  • If all we cared about was saving the lives of the already-addicted, all we'd have to do is prescribe medical-grade opioids of known dosage to anyone who says they're an addict, and the death rate would instantly plummet—not to zero, but to something around the much lower status quo from before the "epidemic" began, when prescription opioids were more easily available. Most of these people die because they're taking adulterated drugs, or drugs of unknown concentration that they can't dose properly. With a cheap, secure supply, they'd have more leeway to sort out other aspects of their lives, and some of them would eventually quit the drugs voluntarily.

    Problem is, we're more worried about people not becoming addicted in the first place, and everyone seems to think that the best way to do that is to restrict the legal supply. The two pull in opposite directions.

    If we can find a better way of fixing the second problem, maybe we can fix the first one too, but I'm not holding my breath. In the meanwhile, governments will insist on grasping at straws in order to deal with the unintended consequences they themselves have created, and some of the straws they clutch at are going to be downright evil, like this one.

  • My question at that point would be, "So, did you sell a house in Vancouver, win the lottery, are you related to Galen Weston or someone with similar assets, or is artisan-made soap just that profitable?" Or, more likely, is the show financing them in return for permission to film?

  • Moose are technically deer (taxonomic family Cervidae, which also contains reindeer, red deer, roe deer, etc). And a big bull can weigh almost a (US conventional) ton. I don't know whether that's enough to trash a modern semi (based on an old memory of an apparently undamaged semi and a dead moose on the shoulder of an Ontario highway in the 1990s, I'd guess probably not, or at least not always), but I wouldn't want to be the driver of the semi, either. Hitting them in an ordinary passenger vehicle—like any Tesla product—is something you really don't want to do.