merc

Yes, my point is that they don't have a political ideology.

Like, the IRA was bombing things because the goal was Irish independence. They wanted the UK out of Northern Ireland.

Al Qaeda was bombing things to get the US out of the middle east. They wanted no US troops on Arab soil.

Boko Haram wanted an area to be fully under Muslim law, with no western books or education.

That's the normal definition of terrorism, a group that's terrorizing the population in pursuit of a political aim of some kind. It isn't normally considered terrorism if there's no ideology involved, and it's just in defence of a criminal enterprise.

In the case of the narcos, I don't know of any political aim. I don't think they have any particular ideology, other than "we want to keep making money selling drugs to Americans". To a certain extent, I can see how they could be considered terrorists because they're terrorizing the population, the courts and the government to get their way. But, in the past there has normally been a line drawn between a terrorist organization and a criminal organization.

I'm guessing... Malta?

Yeah, Canada's day-to-day culture is very American. The same TV shows are popular, the same sports, same celebrities, etc. But, the legal and political setup is still very British. And, it's times like this that we really appreciate how different that part still is from the US.

Yeah, Canada couldn't join the EU as a normal member state. It's not just electricity, everything's different. Different rules for highways and cars, different food safety rules, different worker safety regulations.

But, what if they started with freer movement of people. What if they made it easier for doctors and nurses to have that degree recognized in the other jurisdiction. And just make it easier for Canadians to work in Europe and Europeans to work in Canada without the current visa approval process.

Changing up the entire electrical system might be the project of a lifetime. OTOH, the EU made that recent ruling that every charger / chargeable had to be USB-C. Even though the electrical systems are different, USB-C is the same for everyone (well, ignoring that's a mess of a spec with thousands of weird variations). So, the various parties could work together on future specs involving USB-C and whatever comes after that.

Yeah, the UK would be bargaining from a weak position. As a founding member of the EU it was bargaining from a strong one and could get concessions.

But, maybe if they say "hey, let us in and give us some exceptions and we'll let you talk to our good buddy Canada"...

Terrorist / Terrorism seems to be a magic word in US law and policy.

If a country has organized crime in their country it's no big deal. If there are close ties between the rulers and the criminals, that's unfortunate.

But, if the criminals are now labelled as terrorists, then you get to go on the state sponsors of terrorism list, which comes with all kinds of sanctions and restrictions.

If you look at so-called "terrorist" organizations, there's almost always elements of "terrorist" activities, but also evidence of other random criminal activities, and often legitimate political activities too. Take Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA. Some of their funding came from fuel and drug smuggling. So, where you draw the line between a "terrorist" group and a criminal group is pretty arbitrary. I think most people would say that the Mexican cartels are primarily criminals though. While they do kill people in ways that are intended to send a message, the message is generally "don't mess with our profits" rather than some political ideal.

Every country has some corruption, definitely including the US. So, what happens if a Mexican politician was accepting bribes from Narcos and passing legislation favourable to them? When does that become the state sponsoring terrorism?

Putting the "terrorist" label on Mexican cartels seems like a prelude to doing things that violate Mexico's sovereignty. If the cartels are merely violent criminal organizations, it's a problem for Mexico's government. If they're "terrorists" then the US can lob missiles into Mexico, because it has a long-standing policy of violating the sovereignty of countries that "harbor" (i.e. contain) terrorists.

Firefox and the Chrome engine are open source projects. Anyone can modify the browser to enable ad-blocking in some form if a user is sufficiently determined.

Technically, sure. But, these are extremely complex software products, and it would be one hobbyist vs. an entire software division of a trillion dollar company who are determined to make sure you see ads.

Let Canada join in too.

With the threats from the US, Canada could use some closer ties to Europe too. There are already historic ties to the UK that have weakened over the last few decades.

IMO there's some bad blood between the UK and the EU. The EU probably wouldn't want to just take the UK back after Brexit. And, from the point of view of the UK, the Brexit voters are still out there, and if the EU makes re-entry too humiliating, they'd raise a stink.

But, if you include Canada it's no longer just the UK rejoining the EU. It can be a new thing, the Canada-UK-EU pact: CUE. Conservatives who were pro-Brexit might be mollified because they tend to be more likely to be monarchists, and this can be seen as strengthening ties between two countries where Charles is the head of state. It also gives Canada and the UK a bit more bargaining power together than if they both tried to strengthen ties to the EU separately.

My guess is that if this allowed for freer movement of people and media, Quebec would be happy to have closer ties to France, Belgium, Switzerland and the other places in Europe where French is spoken.

We all should be working together to protect ourselves from Trump. And, even if the US survives Trump and elects someone sane as president in 4 years, recent history has shown that the US just isn't a reliable partner anymore. It's just too volatile and chaotic. Given the proximity, Canada will inevitably have strong ties to the US, but there needs to be some "plan B".

Unfortunately, there are only 3 companies developing browsers right now: Google, Apple and Mozilla.

Apple's browsers are only available on Apple platforms. In fact, if you're on iOS you have no choice, you have to use Safari. Even browsers labelled as "Chrome" or "Firefox" are actually Safari under the hood on iOS. But, on any non Apple platform, you can't use Safari.

Google is an ad company, so they don't want to allow ad blockers on their browser. So, it's a matter of time before every kind of ad blocking is disabled for Chrome users.

Firefox is almost entirely funded by Google, so there's a limit as to what they can do without the funding getting cut off. They seem to be trying to find a way forward without Google, but the result, if anything is as bad as Google if not worse:

"investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term;"

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/

All these other browser people like are basically reskinned versions of Chrome or Firefox. They have a handful of people working on them. To actually develop a modern browser you need a big team. A modern browser basically has to be an OS capable of running everything from a 3d game engine, to a word processor, to a full featured debugger.

It looks like it's only a matter of time before there will be 0 browsers capable of blocking ads, because the only two companies that make multi-platform browsers depend on ads for their revenue, and both of them will have enormous expenses because they're obsessed with stupid projects like AI.

https://dev.to/mdchaney/cobol-dates-may-20-1875-and-disinformation-5ggh

1. There is no "date" data type in COBOL. Dates are stored however the programmer wants, but usually numeric character strings
2. There's no "default" date, even if there were such a data type
3. Even if there were a default, 1875 would be a bizarre choice

That (obviously) doesn't mean Elon Musk is right. It just means that this explanation of it being some magical COBOL epoch value is wrong. What's more likely is that the Social Security database is very old and has a lot of iffy data in it.

My guess is that it contains everybody who has ever had a social security record, including all the duplicates, all the typos, and everything else. At some point there were probably hundreds of thousands of records that were transcribed from paper into a computer, and it was considered safer to keep the iffy data and make a plan to deal with it later, vs. remove someone from the database who should legitimately be there.

I would also imagine that the systems that take the records out of the DB probably have filters in place that remove the (known) bad records before they're used.

All I did was point out your weird parasocial relationship with a CEO of a game store company. It's very strange how you reacted to that. You must realize just how weird it is, how empty your life is. Get help dude.

Says the guy who's passionate and on a first name basis with the CEO of a game store chain.

You're on a first name basis, even a parasocial relationship with the CEO of Gamestop despite never having met him. Who here is intellectually deficient?