Do they have the slightest idea how much damage it would do to the international reputation of Europe if they were to make e.g. Signal illegal? I suppose some of them do, which is why it hasn’t passed before.

Government isn’t about industrial policy any more, the leaders are all too busy with the latest all-purpose political strategy: Flood the zone with useless bullshit, hope something good happens that you can take credit for.

There’s way more than enough wealth in this country to go around, if it were evenly distributed.

Sylpheed is the best. I thought everyone knew this.

Everyone who is aware of the facts agrees that the big terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were the result of a conspiracy. That the American president was in on it seems unlikely. Some of your “reasonable” questions seem ridiculous, such as the idea that a person having “limited flight time” makes any difference at all. The invasion of Iraq was the result of another conspiracy, one which was ongoing at the time and ready to use any convenient excuse to get started.

I checked the local classified ads and their prices don’t seem too far out of line with what people are asking. I guess there’s still demand even though 2020 seems like a long time ago in computer years. Not from me though, I think the PS3 will be my last. There’s no need for a newer console now that games can run on linux.

I don’t know much about Doug Ford, but this sounds a lot like one of those “every accusation is a confession” situations.

The Great Shopping Mall of Alexandria

37% of them went so far as to get a mastodon account and mention it in their twitter profile, and then maybe one third of those put some substantial effort into making it work. That’s ~90% who didn’t bother. In the one small-ish academic field where I followed some of the new arrivals on mastodon when they got there, it very much appeared to me that the failure had nothing to do with the decentralized nature of the platform. It was simply that the small number who made the transition did not add up to enough to form a critical mass and get the discussion going. Some few of them did give it a good try.

Depends on the argument I guess. Don’t bring a sweet roll to the kind where you need a war axe.

It has been falsely claimed that the measure undertaken by MCMC is a draconian measure

While it may be unclear exactly what kind of Internet traffic laws Draco would’ve written, allowing only the major landowners to run DNS servers does seem to be in keeping with the spirit of “aiding and legitimizing the political power of the aristocracy and allowing them to consolidate their control of the land and poor” as his laws are said to have done.

I’ve used them both in the past, but prefer Xfce now. So I’m probably not too biased either way on Gnome v. KDE. I’d say they’re both extremely well-supported, popular, respectable, and safe choices. They’re quite different in style though, so odds are you might find you have a preference for one or the other. Go with whichever you like best.

sign in to websites using your personal web address, without having to use your e-mail address.

What is the point of that? For convenience, email addresses are much easier to come by than is web hosting. For being securely anonymous it’s also much easier to do through email — but not by so much that requiring a website rules it out, if that’s the intention.

One way to stop the alt-right Russian propaganda campaigns from undermining trust in our institutions would be to improve those institutions in order to avoid giving those who aim to disrupt our society so much authentic discontent to work with. But that would take competent government and difficult choices, grappling with under-acknowledged problems, and making radical changes to our economy to make it more financially, democratically, and ecologically sustainable. Why bother, when you can instead simply hire anti-Kremlin influencers like me?

• Genuine disdain for authoritarianism in general and Vladimir Putin in particular
• My Internet comments are regularly seen by an audience of dozens
• Reasonable hourly rates

Give me a call and I’m sure we can work something out.

Linux sucks, Windows is worse, MacOS is useless. We must conclude that those systems are not a good choice for regular users. I recommend a simple pocket calculator instead. No graphics drivers to worry about, no firmware updates, if it goes wrong you just press the reset button and it’s ready to go again in a tenth of a second, no need to do backups, you can get a pretty good one for $20, light weight, really good battery life. Much better in almost every way.

If you have time for an answer in audio form the CBC has some ideas.

“commit today to voting for a carbon tax election”

The other guy’s line deserves a mention as well. I hope the other parties join him in calling for a carbon tax election. Let it be a referendum on whether or not to do anything about climate change. Only Poilievre can lose this next election for the Conservatives, and this just might be one way to do it.

Such a dismissive attitude towards politics — that it is only about waging election campaigns, irrelevant to the more substantial matters of government which can proceed once the election is won without the impediments of what are normally thought of as political concerns such as balancing competing interests, weighing public perceptions, and making delicate compromises — is what I object to, yes.

“I’m not focused on politics. I’ll let other parties focus on politics.”

What kind of bizarro world does Ottawa exist in when the country’s top politician does not understand that politics is his job?

Doing it when the Liberals are in really bad shape improves the odds of the NDP winning, up from 0.0 to 0+ε.