Exactly. People are being abducted off the street by plainclothes “officers” (who’s to know?), put in the back of unmarked cars, and disappeared. A Canadian died in detainment from being denied access to live-saving prescription medication.

Tariffs are so far down my list of reasons for not traveling to the US.

They need a bigger screen, too. The Ask! bar, Yahoo bar, Google bar, Bing bar, and browser search bar take up so much space.

Yeah; that’s not much time, and I’m not a lawyer, but this seems a complicated legal question. I just assumed any tool that circumvents any sort of digital lock would be hosting in countries that DGAF about US laws. Even better if they have a .onion address to avoid any network blocking attempts, like z-library.

Poilievre said the Sovereignty Act would also include his campaign promise to exempt people from capital gains tax when they reinvest the proceeds of an investment in a Canadian company.

This one is insane. The 1% would accumulate so much more wealth, tax free, with this. JFC.

Film 1 is the crew desperately trying to make it home in the prologue and dying, then the alien mind control worms slowly take over a NASA research facility until it’s finally eradicated in the closing scene, with Sigourney Weaver the lone human survivor. But if you wait until after the credits, you get a 5-second teaser of a single worm wriggling out through a crack in the side of the facility.

It works in Canada without a SIM. I know because my son did it on his “wifi-only” tablet.

Do you need a phone plan at all for emergency calling? It’s required for all carriers to take 911 calls in Canada.

You had me until multi-account Outlook access. Why not just use different browser profiles?

That said, the Outlook application is necessary for lots of things, like saving email files (record keeping) and mail merges, but the number of accounts has never been a problem for me. I have 9 active email accounts spread across three/five different platforms (depending if you separate corporate vs. free), and I use web apps (by choice) for all of them, aside from popping Outlook open for the aforementioned mail merges and digital record keeping for email files.

But absolutely true for Excel. It frustrates me so much when I’m stuck on a computer with even slightly outdated versions of the Excel application. SORT, FILTER, TEXTSPLIT, and so many other functions are so much simpler than the many workarounds I used to kludge together.

But fuck Teams. The application is just as garbage as the web app. Those two fail/crash ten times more than all the other apps on my computer *combined". I’ve crashed three times in a single meeting. It must be vibe coded, bolted together, janky, spaghetti code.

I mean using the Track Pads, often for things like radial menus. A lot of PC games need more inputs than exist on a controller.

Hall effect joysticks would be great. The rest I don’t really count; obviously, better performance/bigger screen would be an incremental improvement, but I don’t need it. The OLED screen is plenty big enough.

I (personally) would never use detachable controllers and wouldn’t want more moving parts that could break. Haptics and adaptive triggers I don’t care about improving. For sound, I prefer headphones for when I want “good” sound, too, so that wouldn’t make a difference for me.

Even hall effect joysticks are only going to matter to me if my current joysticks break or develop play.

I really do think the current OLED is amazing.

This one I’m excited for. A Steam Machine would be great, and my biggest gripe with controller play on my desktop is the missing trackpads mean Steam Input didn’t work. There are games that I choose to stream to/play on my Deck over using my 1440p 32" screen on my gaming rig because I don’t have Steam Input on my desktop.

I’m not really sure what’s not perfect with the OLED already, lol. Maybe a second USB-C port would be nice, so we could charge it while using a non-hub device, or use a cheap hub to add even more controllers? That’s a minor, incremental improvement, though.

It could always be smaller/thinner/quieter, I guess, but I can’t think of anything I’d really want to change with my Deck. I have lots of minor pain points with other tech, but I literally can’t think of anything with the Deck, so I’m curious if you have any specifics, or if you’re just trusting that Valve has put some real thought and research into this and will surprise us with design changes for the better that aren’t obvious.

Realistically, everyone should probably be updating their BIOS when building a new computer. Often, early updates have the biggest fixes, right?

We all should probably be updating our mobo BIOS periodically, at least for the first years or two when there are still significant potential updates/fixes, but I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t; it’s not as straightforward as Windows Update doing everything for people.

Even if the score is kept off, there’s the angle of the Sun and cloud cover. There’s just less sunlight to be had, even if the panels are kept clear of snow.

Hell, Vancouver Island gets practically no snow at all in many areas, and solar does much worse in its cloudy/rainy season (winter).

Liquid fluoride thorium reactors are designed to be meltdown proof. A fusible plug at the bottom of the reactor melts in the event of a power failure or if temperatures exceed a set limit, draining the fuel into an underground tank for safe storage.

Source

Nuclear waste is way overblown as a concern. The total volume of waste is miniscule, relative to the power generated. Nuclear also uses almost no land for the reactor, compared with solar, and is essentially 100% dependable 24/7/365.

Solar is great, and costs are diminishing incredibly rapidly. And if the news of sodium-based batteries at ~9% the cost of lithium batteries plays out, then storing solar becomes cheap. Still not dependable for Canadian winters, of course. Solar also uses lots of land, and lots of mass of semiconductors (which of course has its own climate impacts to produce, ship, and recycle/dispose of).

I’m not super looped in to the technology specifics, but I understand that some modern nuclear designs are meltdown proof, too, so there isn’t really any rational NIMBY case to be made against them.

Having read the whole article, they don’t have any specifics that justify their concerns. They quote the price of nuclear facility construction, but don’t contrast those costs against any competing technologies, so the numbers are effectively meaningless. They complain about nuclear waste, but their only evidence is quoting NIMBYs who don’t want a facility put in close to them.

I’m open to being convinced that nuclear isn’t in Canada’s interests, but this article did not make a compelling case.

Right, but if the beans they roast come through the US, then locally roasted beans will still have American tariffs applied, and it’s often not worth applying to get a refund. The goods were not for final sale in the US, the tariffs don’t apply, but the paperwork is more onerous than the refund, for smaller businesses. That’s the point.

Sure, fair enough. But the OLED Steam Deck will also still be a great system in 10 years, especially for anyone who has a gaming desktop. With local game streaming, even with aging hardware the Deck will still be able to play the latest AAA games, and it will still be able to play hundreds of thousands of older games natively.

As a patient gamer, it’s a no brainer.

Yeah, it’s owned by Burger King, and the new owners accelerated the reduction in quality that had started a decade before the buyout.

The reason for my particular gripes with Tim Horton’s is their over-the-top Canadian branding of an American company. It should be illegal, as clearly false marketing.

They’re also franchises, and are notorious for most franchise owners being borderline abusive to their largely teenage and immigrant staff, who may not know better or have the resources to fight back against illegal labour practices.

And the food is terrible, and the coffee is the second worst in the Canadian fast food industry (after A&W).

What is there not to hate about Tom Horton’s?

Eh, for most things, sure. I’m right with you for most media, but there’s a lot to be said for confining content when it’s part of the cultural zeitgeist. Ain’t nobody talking about Game of Thrones now, and it’s only 6 years old, not even a decade.

With any sort of piracy setup, almost all mainstream media is incredibly easy to get within a few hours of release, and most “Long Tail” content can be found pretty easily, too. If it’s so obscure that you still can’t find it, then that’s likely a good indication that you’re solidly pushing into indie content that hardly earns any income, so they could really benefit from us paying for their content.

We do try to make sure indie content creators get paid, though. For example, Kindle Unlimited is pretty amazing for us. My wife and I share an account, and we read so voraciously that authors get paid out about 10× what we pay for the service. Maths out roughly like this: ~30 books/month, on average, at ~1¢/page (actual pages, not Kindle standardized e-reader pages, which are only half a page), at ~250-300 pages/book is $75-90/mo, and we pay for 2 years in advance at I think $7ish/mo.

But I’m totally with you on games. I spend lots on videogames, but almost entirely for indie game bundles at $1-2/game, typically. I have literally thousands of games I’d love to play going back decades, so I don’t need the latest releases unless it’s a game I’m super excited for.