Canadian here, I guess offer directions to the airport so they can get a flight to British Columbia?

This is entirely regional though. The further you are from the equator, the more seasonal variation there is in sunlight levels, and heating/cooling loads. Around here our solar production is minimized during the season when our energy needs are maximized. We also don’t have variable rate billing, though we only get partial credit for excess generation, so battery storage will never pay for itself until something changes.

My utility gives a 50% credit on excess generation. Thing there is the utility is still the one taking responsibility for having the capacity and scalability to respond to variation in demand and production. When I was getting quotes, adding storage would have doubled the cost of the system for a day or two worth of storage. Probably would cost double again to have a system that would keep up through the winter.

I’d be technically impractical, but I’ve always thought there should be a system for weighing of individual users feedback. I follow a lot of trade related communities and 100% see a lot of issues where bad, wrong, and sometimes just plain dangerous advice gets a flood of upvotes from the amateur community while the handful of downvotes from qualified individuals gets drowned out. I think OP’s idea of making upvotes easy and downvotes difficult exacerbates this kind of issue.

I can also see the issue where a mod team simply blesses the users that they agree with and it just reinforces the echo chamber effect that is already an issue in some communities.

Canada recently stopped charging interest on their student loans, that goes a long way to affordability. The other thing though is just plain cost of education. It can be cheaper to get a 4-year degree from a Canadian University than take one year of a comparable program in the US.

Something kind of unique about UnRaid is the JBOD plus parity array. With this you can keep most disks spun down while only the actively read/written disks need to be spun up. Combine with an SSD cache for your dockers/databases/recent data and UnRaid will put a lot less hours(heat, vibration) on your disks than any raid equivalent system that requires the whole array to be spun up for any disk activity. Performance won’t be as high as comparably sized RAID type arrays, but as bulk network storage for backups, media libraries, etc. it’s still plenty fast enough.

I guess that works. There’s also Soda-Stream( and other carbonation systems) that just directly injects CO2 into a bottle. Then you can add whatever flavourings you like. Personally, I like doing something like 50/50 heavily carbonated water and fruit juice of choice.

While that’s true for taxes alone, there are income gaps where a small increase of income can result in a loss of various benefits that were worth more than the increase. This can be things like food stamps, subsidized rent/childcare, etc… People end up stuck because while they could potentially earn significant advancement and increased wages over a 4-7 year period, they’d have to weather a significant deficit through intervening years.

Ideally there should be no cliffs, and all these social programs should have a sliding scale of benefits so a person can always benefit from increased income. Part of the problem is they’re managed across multiple levels of government that don’t always play well together, and a sliding scale might mean more benefits paid out to people that don’t currently qualify. That’s probably actually a good thing, but gets spun politically as undesirable.

The bike thing is real. So often I hit my bell or call out “on your left” when about to pass people from behind. About 50% of the time those people immediately move to the left, which is why I always try to indicate far enough in advance for them to get in my way, realize their mistake and move back before I catch up to them .

I used to have the opposite issue. It was always the wire right near the jack that would wear out from having my phone in my pocket so my wired ear pods would always wear out in less than a year. Then I got a set of Bluetooth earbuds that had a wire between them. They lasted 2-3 years before the wire wore out. Now I’ve got a set of fully wireless buds and they’ve so far lasted longer than any other ones I’ve had.

True, it’s hash-like in that the comparison is using some mathematic representation of the source material. It was intended to be a little fuzzy so it would still catch minor alterations like cropping, watermarks, rendering to a new format, etc…

The example I heard of was someone that was using an app for a remote doctors appointment. The doctor requested photos of the issue, a rash in the genital area of a minor, supposedly one included an adult hand touching the area involved. That photo ended up in Google’s cloud service where it was flagged, reported to law enforcement, and that users while Google account was frozen. The investigation quickly confirmed the innocence of the photo, and provided official documentation of such, but last I heard Google would not release the account.

Not really. The plan that Apple backpedaled on was to compare hashes photos on device to hashes of known CSAM material. They wouldn’t see any user-generated photos unless they was a hash collision. Other companies have been known to report false positives on user-generated photos and delete accounts with no process to recover them.

Even in places where they have to use the actual ingredients, there’s a lot of tricks to making it look different in photos. That burger might only be partially cooked to reduce shrinkage, then the burger and bun are frozen so they hold shape for the photo. Vegetables carefully picked out and arranged, tomato/pickles blotted dry, and the sauce applied with an eye dropper to provide visual balance after the rest of the burger is stacked.

I will say from my experience, that tends to apply to advertising photography for large franchises. If we’re taking about food photography associated with a high profile event or restaurant where food is actually served, there’s minimal difference between the photo plate and what’s actually served. Sometimes the photo plate is just one picked out while producing the ones being served, sometimes it’s the first/last plate and a person takes a minute to pick out the best looking of ingredients from the same container that was used to serve the rest. Sometimes it’s just an extra minute arranging the plate nicely compared to the last 150 that were done quickly to keep up with service. Often the photographer then gets to eat the plate they’ve just photographed.

Also location it’s stored. Some people carry it differently, but fat often builds up around a persons mid-section and causes that pear/apple body shape. Muscles gain bulk on the ones being used. A person can loose the inches of fat around their waste, then build up muscle mass in their arms/shoulders. The fat loss is noticeable because a person starts using a different belt notch or their pants fall down, but the added muscle bulk around the arms will be less likely to require replacing/adjusting one’s clothing.

True, though Apple does contribute some things, like MagSafe for iPhones is becoming part of Qi 2. I think Apple get a bad rep just because they’re a large target sometimes, but I don’t recall other big platforms releasing a bunch of their work as FLOSS either.

I’m also on the fence about the repairability thing. It’s nice to be able to open up an old computer to add more RAM/Storage/etc., but I also get that making everything integrated and soldered improves durability and reliability. I do think they take that a little too far sometimes. While RAM/SSDs should typically last a long time, the battery life often becomes the limiting factor for usability so making that repair simpler would go a long way. Pricing can be hard to bite too, while I don’t mind the idea of soldered RAM, I don’t like that upgrades are pretty heavily marked up compared to most manufacturers.

Then again, I’m still in the ecosystem, so unless there’s some government oversight setting standards for Apple to follow they’ll continue doing what’s profitable and their sales keep steadily growing despite the occasional bad press.

The trick in my area is my ISP is a crown corporation that competes with the privately owned ISPs. They don’t give a crap what you do(as long as it’s not too illegal or damaging their service), the standard on their fiber is upload speeds are 1/2 the download speed and you can pay an extra $10/month for symmetrical. I put it to the test once as I was testing online backuo software. GDrive has a limit of 750 GB/day uploaded data, and I did that consistently for a couple months straight(IIRC that was pretty close to maxing my upstream at that time). Never heard a peep.

Plus pets, home/vehicle ownership, commute times, etc… Lots of things that some people have/choose to commit a significant amount of time. Sometimes it’s also not about the total time commitment, but the windows of time available. Things like kids/pets can make it difficult for games that assume you’re actually going to be continuously attentive over 20+ minutes at a time when you can be interrupted by breaking up a fight with the pets, having to let the new puppy outside regularly, hearing the cat about to hack up a hairball, cleaning up the ice cream the kid just dropped, etc…

I think it was based on things like radio play time, ratings, sales, etc… So Disney and other big names would have got a proportially bigger cut than smaller artists.

Personally, I think there should be a stronger separation between commercial, non-commercial, and personal use. Friends sharing/copying some media isn’t a big deal to me, but someone making copies and undercutting the original artist should be subject to some pretty strict consequences.

I also think there should be some protections put in place to protect the actual content creators, because most people’s issue with copyright isn’t usually with the people actually creating things. The issue is corporations that insinuate themselves between the creators and consumers, funneling all the profits for themselves. It’s a pretty shitty system where artists make covers of their own albums so they can get a reasonable cut of the proceeds.

Canada had a system where we charged a levy on things like blank media, then distributed that levy to right holders. I don’t think it was a very good system, but maybe something that could have been improved upon.