These are nothing to do with Wayland, but upon what you build upon it. Wayland provides a protocol for local programs to render to client buffers and efficiently pass these to the compositor, and to pass event information back to the application, and essentially little else. All additional functionality is a matter of how you design your compositor (of which Weston is just a sample implementation), and your compositor does not _only_ have to talk Wayland. It is important to understand the software engineering concept of coupling, namely what happens when the design of one component mandates behaviour and design of another component. Minimising this maximises flexibility, but perhaps gives you less 'for free'. An extremely lightweight compositor designed for getting work done is not out of the question, and most likely there will be a proliferation of compositor designs as there was for window manager designs in the earlier days of Linux.
Obviously you can use something slighly more elaborate, and given either bash and standard hashes (e.g. sha256), or javascript and cryptojs, you can roll your own string manipulation.
You basically have a secret phrase or two, something obvious related to the website in question (e.g. pw://domain.name/user.name/index), combine it to produce e.g. 'mypwmachine(SuperSecretPhrase-pw://domain.name/user.name/43)', and them bung that through e.g. sha256 (or bcrypt with high cost if paranoid), take the binary output, convert to base64 and take the first 16 characters as your password. Unless you're rich or a terrorist, it isn't worth the effort to crack. Importantly the difficulty of reversing a hash means one compromised password isn't too dangerous, since unless they can reproduce your string manipulations, they can't easily generate passwords for anything else. I find it fun when a website deems the output of this process unnaceptable for e.g. not including punctuation.
With the bash on windows and ps on Linux, being able to drive ps from python will be looked forward to. As a replacement for bash or python it sucks, and works completely differently. On the other hand, a python module permitting one to programmattically generate and run ps scripts, and receive what comes back would be welcome.
First SCO, the Lawsuit-That-Never-Dies, and now this: Oracle trying to turn Oracle vs Google into another one. The disease is spreading, infecting the minds of greedy businessmen and tech lawyers. The number of people susceptible is that large, and they have masses of resources at their disposal to accelerate the spread of the ObsessiveCompulsiveLaunchATechZombieLawsuitThatNeverDies disease. Run for your lives! Were all doomed! Doomed, I tell you! Doomed!
I wrote a toy example of an end to end encrypted messaging service, which also functions as a data store, in about 300 lines of php, js, HTML, using only cryptojs.
Basic idea is to generate two separate strings ( e.g. pinkSecretBunny and fluffySecretBunny ), run both through a hash, use one output as an index in a table (e.g. mysql), the other is the encryption key for the data. Given just the key+encrypted data, you need to invert the hash to have any idea of how to generate the encryption key.
It is quite feasible that, given only encrypted data, it is impossible for someone to know the password for it.
An easier example is if an encrypted zip file is found on your hard drive, but the name is lost (so you don't know it was mydirtyporn3.zip), how will you know the right password?
They could inadvertently criminalise using multiple passwords for different things, which ought to be considered good practice.
Personally, I detest large programming projects. For me, if I need over 1000 lines of code, I am using the wrong language or the wrong framework.
If you are writing a 10-line function, which you can see in a single eyeshot, you can sensibly use single-letter variables and understand what stuff does, just as traditional mathematical notation does. If you are writing a sub 100-line script, again, techniques developed to manage 100,000+ line projects are inappropriate, wasteful, and tend to turn that 100-line script into a 10,000-line behemoth.
When you write something, it should be clear from reading the source what it is meant to do, how it does it, and hopefully why it looks the way it does. It is also helpful if it actually works, but given a preference, I would rather have clarity and succinctness first, since then if it doesn't work, it won't be that hard to fix. On the other hand, if it does work for its intended use, and that use changes slightly, you're stuffed.
So to now answer the question: just about any commercially available software is an example, just about any OS, including Windows, OSX, and any Linux distro is again an example. Stuff that I don't consider 'bad ideas that work' are rare gems. But there are not enough of those rare gems for practical purposes, so I put up with Windows, OSX and GNU/Linux for now.
I am just waiting for the torrent of New Age clickbait on my facebook feed saying that physics has finally found evidence of the mystical magical quantum life force energy that their super-dooper-quantum-yoga tradition has known for centuries.
You cannot make a gun with only 300 lines combined of JavaScript, HTML and php (given cryptojs). You can make a barebones secure messaging system requiring only a standard Lamp stack that easily. I did one out of boredom in about two hours, most of that looking up APIs, the result of which I dumped at http://pgen.chalisque.org/ssms... - too easy.
Just as the internet does, the drug trade routes round blockages. Fail to provide a legal alternative that is at least as convenient and inexpensive as the $300bn/yr worldwide industry run by organised crime, and, de facto, you give them a monopoly in a lucrative business. Only a safe, convenient legal alternative can deprive them of that market, aside from possibly a worldwide police state on a scale that would make 1984 look like a teddy bears' tea party.
Good mathematicians are lazy, extremely lazy. They will create and cultivate entire abstract theories in order to avoid having to do work (while getting the same results). Laziness and efficiency are bedfellows. The difference, however, is akin to the laziness of a lion, which will snooze and play, but work when it has to; and that of a layabout who can't be bothered to get out of bed. Laziness, however, is an evolutionary biproduct of the benefits of energy efficiency, and is a large part of our nature. Sure, the more intelligent of us may be more lazy, and laziness may be a sign of latent intelligence, but sometimes I do wish life was so easy we could all eat comfortably, watch tv and get laid regularly without needing to be intelligent about stuff.
Kids play games because they enjoy them; games involve abstract problem solving in various guises; kids thus learn to enjoy abstract problem solving, and practice it more. This then spills over into academic disciplines which harness similar skills as those the games reward. This is hardly new: chess was invented to teach strategy, as was go. People who play strategy games and enjoy them are most likely better than those who don't, all else being equal.
If you are motivated only by the avoidance of exam failure, or of getting told off by your teacher, you are learning reluctantly, and this is never a good route to mastery, since as soon as the source of fear (the exam or the pushy teacher) is removed, your motivation to practice and learn goes with it. If, however, you are driven by enjoyment, then so long as this enjoyment remains, so will your drive.
In which case you need to tax the public equivalent to what the license fee brings in. The only difference with TV licensing is that those who don't use a TV are except to this tax, whereas if the money comes from the exchequer (that is, the pool of all money received through conventional taxes), then those who don't use a TV still have to pay their share.
Personallly I would have a public tax-funded digital and information infrastructure corporation (or group of corporations) ensuring quality internet and TV for all, and possiblly supplying subsidised equipment to those unable to afford expensive equipment. But whatever you do, money has to come from somewhere, and as soon as you go down the tax route, the only question you have is who pays and who does not.
Alternatives involve stuffing programs with ads and programming intendee to chase advertising money. The TV license allows the BBC to things which are good to have, but hard to make commercially viable. As soon as you make it optional, the kind of behaviour beloved of Sky becomes necessary. Competition just means you cannot have a simple single subscription either. For me a license funded BBC is a good thing, and corporate greed and market economics devastate the possibilities of broadcast TV, reducing it to a game of chasing money. Since we already have plenty of commercial TV, making the BBC commercial will add nothing, but take away a lot.
Unless you absolutely have to, do _not_ install Linux and Windows on the same physical hard drive. For many purposes (e.g. basic coding and web stuff) a lightweight Linux distro will run just fine off a USB memory stick (I use Ultra Fit's in either the 32GB or 64GB size). Then, if you are buying a laptop and you're a techie, get something where it is trivially easy to swap out either the hard drive (i.e. not Asus crap where you have to remove the keyboard to get at the hard drive), or the optical drive. For example, boot Windows of one hard drive, and stick another in the optical drive bay. If you have a desktop, you have room for more than one physical drive. This also means that, during critical stuff like OS installs, you can physically disconnect your Linux drive so that Windows cannot get at it. My favourite example of Redmond silliness involved Windows 2000 appearing to enumerate partitions one way in the partitioning part of setup, and another way for the formatting part. Basically, on my dual boot drive, Windows 2000 setup ended up formatting the wrong partition. I say it had cocked up when I noticed the size of the partition it was formatting: my shared data drive. By the time I had stopped the process, of course, the FATs were already overwritten.
Faced with a theory and some evidence apparently supporting it, the questions me must ask are:
1) What serious attempts have been made to find counter-evidence for this theory? 2) How thorough have you been in listing things which could make your theory false? 3) What sort of counter-evidence would disprove your theory? 4) What assumptions are you depending upon when reasoning from empirical data to conclusions?
If people are still playing the 'here is proof it works' game, what they are doing is probably not scientific.
If a company or research group has not done the above, at best they have an early investigation into an area and a few educated guesses as to what is going on (and only then if they make it clear that this is the case). If they have not made serious attempts to disprove their theories, and have not made clear the limitations of their current understanding, and are passing off what they are doing as scientific, it is pseudoscientific. Simple as that. Science depends on a brutal honesty rooted in the desire to prove yourself wrong whenever you can, and to be clear what you have tried, what you could have tried, what you have not tried, and how you think others could demolish the theory you are putting forward. That brutal, ego-destroying attitude is central to proper science (see Feynman's Cargo Cult Science talk for a good exposition on this for a general audience).
The trouble is, that in many areas, if one removes all the 'science that is not science', there's not a whole lot left.
Using the word 'runs' makes me laugh: poetic license in extremis. I have 'upgraded' many of my machines to Windows 10. Let me tell you that it doesn't exactly run so much as crawls in agony until you put it out of its misery by either reinstalling Windows 7, or booting from a device with Ubuntu Studio on it. Then there is all that cortana crap which you can't fscking switch off. I mean, I'd much rather have a simple scriptable way to make menus. Really: I could make something more useful for me with bit of javascript and a host with a few API hooks. It would be quicker than waiting for cortana to wake from its slumber on an older laptop! If you just had a javascript environment with a couple of predefined objects (akin to the window and document objects in a web browser), you could do something perfectly functional, and hack in whatever clever logic you want. What you can't do with MS's bloated mess, however, is hack _out_ the logic and features you don't need.
I would say, as a caveat, that the Linux world still has far to go in making things as easy as they can be. The trouble is that we've inherited a philosophy of design from that of companies where building big opaque piles of incomprehensible and incompatible crap that just about worked happened to be excellent development models for software companies. Short, sweet, beautiful and elegant examples of software programming are rarer than diamonds, and some of those 'rarer than diamonds' are locked in vaults and jealously guarded by organisations whose only purpose on life is to make money.
Porn can cause problems for many people. The root causes, however, are not with porn. One is failure to develop sensible disciplined habits around viewing it, and just as failing to develop sensible disciplined habits around driving makes driving a liability, and likewise with consumption of alcohol, and many other things. Second is trying to live a life where, in trying to meet the expectations of others, you end up effectively in a silent war with a caged and frustrated sex drive in a world saturated with beautiful young potential mates (of either gender). In this state, as soon as your brain senses an outlet, it is akin to desperation for a drink of water, or to take a pee. If you give in, and many will give in, (and many who do no will develop mental health problems due to the levels of stress, anxiety and confusion involved), your brain will remember the path to what it was desperate for (whether food, drugs, porn, sex, or whatever) as if it is a life-saving escape route. Just as with breaking under torture, once you give in once, your brain will be rewired and it will be almost impossible to hold out again. But humans do not, and cannot have, in general, anything like the infinite resolve and discipline required for the unicorn powered dream of people marrying in strictly monogamous heterosexual marriages and not having or desiring sex in any other circumstances. In the modern world, people must have safe effective and readily available outlets for sexual drives which would otherwise cause problems. Restraint is akin to holding off to go to the bathroom: an important short-term solution which in the case of toilet training everybody has learned, but holding off from taking a pee until you've found the one true toilet you can use for the rest of your life and formed and exclusive relationship with it. To be clear, I am not likening sex and lovemaking to taking a pee, but at the level of our fundamental drives, they are alike in how they work in our brains.
I like to point to an article from the guardian about pure O, and do read there how porn was used in a disciplined therapeutic setting. Discipline, awareness and being sensible make all the difference, but must be learned. https://www.theguardian.com/so...
I have found, over the years, that learning various disciplines is invaluable.
I have studied Tai Chi to the point that, to physics students, I often explain how it is just about seeking extreme mechanical efficiency (and then applying that in a martial arts context), and is basically physics in disguise: the major difference in how it is thought of and explained, traditionally, is due to two things, one of which is the cumulative effect of 'Chinese Whispers', and the other is that you do not have time to get a pen and paper out and solve a system of differential equations in order to deal with a fist flying at your face. Thus it must be understood in a way which permits you to react in real time, but in a way which is as mechanically efficient as possible.
Similarly, meditation (Buddhist and Christian) has been massively helpful, as has a grounded spiritual faith. I know Christianity often gets a bad name on forums such as these, and often deservedly so due to the mess that many (esp. fundamentalist and overly conservative) traditions have made of it, but when it comes to stability against suicide, it is certainly my experience that a solid spiritual faith is one of the best tools around.
More generally, if you train your awareness, and your discipline to react in smooth, calm ways to whatever is thrown at you (as Tai Chi aims to do), and you try to infuse this approach into as much of your life as you can, this greatly aids your ability to steer your mind when things are drifting towards mania. Then you need to find a way to strongly dominate your thinking, get yourself tired, and then get your brain to switch off at night long enough for the tiredness to get you to sleep, and with your mind calm enough that it doesn't start up again before you're asleep. Then you can at least get enough rest to stave off the worst, and buy yourself another day to improve your situation.
Music, and music production is again invaluable. Learning how delay and feedback works in DSP has been a massive mind opener, as is how feedback and resonance work, and more importantly, how they sound and feel: for me much of what is going on in mania and psychosis is a kind of ringing feedback in the brain, akin to what happens on an old school analogue synth if you turn the resonance too high, albeit with the complexity increase resulting from moving from a simple one-dimensional electrical signal to the madhouse of mayhem that is a human brain.
(I often like to say that, if you wanted to make the Inside Out movie more realistic, a good way would be to replace the simple embodiments of emotions with massive hordes of Minions, and mania is what happens when said Minions go on a massive 'banana' rush!)
Apologies if what follows comes across as a rant. Thus is an extremely sore topic for me.
As someone with bipolar diagnosis (and an autistic spectrum disorder diagnised over a decade after the bipolar diagnosis), I can say from my experience that two different people with the same diagnostic label can have markedly different problems. What works is heavily dependent on what exactly is happing in the patient's life and mind, and upon what intellectual, social, family and other resources they have at their disposal.
The idea that you can treat all instances of a bipolar patient as sufficiently similar that a clinical trial of a treatment will yield useful, meaningful and reliable information as to what will help an arbitrary new patient with the same diagnosis is something for which I have yet to come across empirical support for (consider how different software can cause the same hardware to behave markedly differently, the futility of trying to fix serious software errors with simple hardware patches, and the foolishness of taking 1000 windows PCs which regularly blue screen, and conducting a double blind randomised controlled trial on treatments for PCs with 'compulsive blue screen disorder'). I am sorry to say, that to me psychiatric research is thus brain damaged in its basic methodologies.
The idea that chemical imbalances are a cause rather than a symptom is something yet to be justified, as is the idea that bipolar disorders can be understood at a biochemical level and remedied with chemicals with any degree of reliability. Then things like whether the person has a (possibly undiagnosed) autistic spectrum disorder or not are ignored (I have recently received an ASC diagnosis), and if not ignored, old trials are not revisited in the event that new diagnostic information has come to light regarding participants of old trials which would have affectee the trial and possibly the outcome. By comparison, if a physicist discovers a component in his exoerimental apparatus has a bias, he or she will not ignore the matter if it could significantly affect the conclusions of the experiment. The psychpharmalogical juggernaut just rolls on, turning mental health into a game of drug sales, cattle management, and explaining away all alternatives: behaviour reminiscent of hard sell marketing, not proper scientific inquiry.
As for blue light, at times when extremely sensitive, blue light can, due to extreme sensitivity, be confused with daylight, with consequences for how your brain tries to sync to daylight. In times of extreme sensitivity (which can be diagnosed as manic episodes, as can episodes of manic behaviour driven differently), it is like the gain on yout brain inputs is turned up too high, is saturated, distorting, and your brain then attempts to make sense of the distorted sensory input on the implicit assumption that it is free of distortion. That, at least, has been my experience in the past (once in hospital they used bright blue-tinted flashlights to see if we were in bed, for example, resulting in my being awoken so strongly when about to go to sleep that there was no possibility of sleep for a number of hours, and jobbing nursing staff often want their jobs to be as easy for themselves as possible, and care little if that has negative ramifications for the patients).
In addition, check out 'Deprived of our Humanity' by Lars Martensson (what he writes accords much with my experience), madinamerica, Joanna Moncrieff's books (myth of chemical cure, straight talking intro), Richard Bentall's books, Lucy Johnstone's books (straight talking intro), details of successful outcomes (beyond what is achieved with typical pharmacologically centred approaches) using alternative approaches (see e.g. Daniel Mackler's open dialog documentary, on youtube now).
Feynman had a wonderful couple of quotes in his Cargo Cult Science talk:
"But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselvesâ"of having utter scientific integrityâ"is, Iâ(TM)m sorry to say, something that we
Consider how scripting languages use lists, dicts, and so on. Having data structures which are binary compatible would enable these structures to be shared copy-on-write between processes running different languages. The approach clojure takes (functional data structures) is useful here. Likewise for stuff like Gegl. The thing is unlike 15 years ago, we have Llvm, and so rather than think in terms of binaries, most of the time stopping the compile at a higher level and distributing that would make more sense. As for source languages, having the authoritative source be a data structure which you manipulate would make much of our developer tools much simpler, removing the round trip between character data and the Ide's attempt at parsing it. None of this seems particularly new, to my mind, but I just wish this dream would be reality.
The Disaster is one of how a great people got so addicted to comfort, ease and immediate reward that the few seconds it takes a card reader to get confident is too much to bear. What has become of the first nation to put men on the moon?
There is a site called Dark Patterns, mentioned by our friends at Ars, detailing this kind of 'small print designed for people to miss'. Understandable, but wrong.
More like a fly caught in a spiders web: Microsoft is encasing the flies it has caught in silk cacoons. In time, they will devour their prey, turning it into a MS branded high tech biological product of some sort, and then find a way of ensuring business buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
These are nothing to do with Wayland, but upon what you build upon it. Wayland provides a protocol for local programs to render to client buffers and efficiently pass these to the compositor, and to pass event information back to the application, and essentially little else. All additional functionality is a matter of how you design your compositor (of which Weston is just a sample implementation), and your compositor does not _only_ have to talk Wayland. It is important to understand the software engineering concept of coupling, namely what happens when the design of one component mandates behaviour and design of another component. Minimising this maximises flexibility, but perhaps gives you less 'for free'. An extremely lightweight compositor designed for getting work done is not out of the question, and most likely there will be a proliferation of compositor designs as there was for window manager designs in the earlier days of Linux.
Fund a group doing this explicitly with regards to Oracle. Call it the Pot Meet Kettle Group.
I wrote a toy demonstration at http://pgen.chalisque.org/ and explained at http://pgen.chalisque.org/abou...
Obviously you can use something slighly more elaborate, and given either bash and standard hashes (e.g. sha256), or javascript and cryptojs, you can roll your own string manipulation.
You basically have a secret phrase or two, something obvious related to the website in question (e.g. pw://domain.name/user.name/index), combine it to produce e.g. 'mypwmachine(SuperSecretPhrase-pw://domain.name/user.name/43)', and them bung that through e.g. sha256 (or bcrypt with high cost if paranoid), take the binary output, convert to base64 and take the first 16 characters as your password. Unless you're rich or a terrorist, it isn't worth the effort to crack. Importantly the difficulty of reversing a hash means one compromised password isn't too dangerous, since unless they can reproduce your string manipulations, they can't easily generate passwords for anything else. I find it fun when a website deems the output of this process unnaceptable for e.g. not including punctuation.
With the bash on windows and ps on Linux, being able to drive ps from python will be looked forward to. As a replacement for bash or python it sucks, and works completely differently. On the other hand, a python module permitting one to programmattically generate and run ps scripts, and receive what comes back would be welcome.
First SCO, the Lawsuit-That-Never-Dies, and now this: Oracle trying to turn Oracle vs Google into another one. The disease is spreading, infecting the minds of greedy businessmen and tech lawyers. The number of people susceptible is that large, and they have masses of resources at their disposal to accelerate the spread of the ObsessiveCompulsiveLaunchATechZombieLawsuitThatNeverDies disease. Run for your lives! Were all doomed! Doomed, I tell you! Doomed!
I wrote a toy example of an end to end encrypted messaging service, which also functions as a data store, in about 300 lines of php, js, HTML, using only cryptojs.
Basic idea is to generate two separate strings ( e.g. pinkSecretBunny and fluffySecretBunny ), run both through a hash, use one output as an index in a table (e.g. mysql), the other is the encryption key for the data. Given just the key+encrypted data, you need to invert the hash to have any idea of how to generate the encryption key.
It is quite feasible that, given only encrypted data, it is impossible for someone to know the password for it.
An easier example is if an encrypted zip file is found on your hard drive, but the name is lost (so you don't know it was mydirtyporn3.zip), how will you know the right password?
They could inadvertently criminalise using multiple passwords for different things, which ought to be considered good practice.
See pgen.chalisque.org/ssms.pdf
Personally, I detest large programming projects. For me, if I need over 1000 lines of code, I am using the wrong language or the wrong framework.
If you are writing a 10-line function, which you can see in a single eyeshot, you can sensibly use single-letter variables and understand what stuff does, just as traditional mathematical notation does. If you are writing a sub 100-line script, again, techniques developed to manage 100,000+ line projects are inappropriate, wasteful, and tend to turn that 100-line script into a 10,000-line behemoth.
When you write something, it should be clear from reading the source what it is meant to do, how it does it, and hopefully why it looks the way it does. It is also helpful if it actually works, but given a preference, I would rather have clarity and succinctness first, since then if it doesn't work, it won't be that hard to fix. On the other hand, if it does work for its intended use, and that use changes slightly, you're stuffed.
So to now answer the question: just about any commercially available software is an example, just about any OS, including Windows, OSX, and any Linux distro is again an example. Stuff that I don't consider 'bad ideas that work' are rare gems. But there are not enough of those rare gems for practical purposes, so I put up with Windows, OSX and GNU/Linux for now.
I am just waiting for the torrent of New Age clickbait on my facebook feed saying that physics has finally found evidence of the mystical magical quantum life force energy that their super-dooper-quantum-yoga tradition has known for centuries.
You cannot make a gun with only 300 lines combined of JavaScript, HTML and php (given cryptojs). You can make a barebones secure messaging system requiring only a standard Lamp stack that easily. I did one out of boredom in about two hours, most of that looking up APIs, the result of which I dumped at http://pgen.chalisque.org/ssms... - too easy.
Just as the internet does, the drug trade routes round blockages. Fail to provide a legal alternative that is at least as convenient and inexpensive as the $300bn/yr worldwide industry run by organised crime, and, de facto, you give them a monopoly in a lucrative business. Only a safe, convenient legal alternative can deprive them of that market, aside from possibly a worldwide police state on a scale that would make 1984 look like a teddy bears' tea party.
Good mathematicians are lazy, extremely lazy. They will create and cultivate entire abstract theories in order to avoid having to do work (while getting the same results). Laziness and efficiency are bedfellows. The difference, however, is akin to the laziness of a lion, which will snooze and play, but work when it has to; and that of a layabout who can't be bothered to get out of bed. Laziness, however, is an evolutionary biproduct of the benefits of energy efficiency, and is a large part of our nature. Sure, the more intelligent of us may be more lazy, and laziness may be a sign of latent intelligence, but sometimes I do wish life was so easy we could all eat comfortably, watch tv and get laid regularly without needing to be intelligent about stuff.
I only bothered upgrading my HP workstations to Windows 10 (for free) is so that I can install windows 10 on a hard drive and run Ubuntu GNU/Windows.
Kids play games because they enjoy them; games involve abstract problem solving in various guises; kids thus learn to enjoy abstract problem solving, and practice it more. This then spills over into academic disciplines which harness similar skills as those the games reward. This is hardly new: chess was invented to teach strategy, as was go. People who play strategy games and enjoy them are most likely better than those who don't, all else being equal.
If you are motivated only by the avoidance of exam failure, or of getting told off by your teacher, you are learning reluctantly, and this is never a good route to mastery, since as soon as the source of fear (the exam or the pushy teacher) is removed, your motivation to practice and learn goes with it. If, however, you are driven by enjoyment, then so long as this enjoyment remains, so will your drive.
Is this so difficult to grasp?
'...is funded with public money from taxes'
In which case you need to tax the public equivalent to what the license fee brings in. The only difference with TV licensing is that those who don't use a TV are except to this tax, whereas if the money comes from the exchequer (that is, the pool of all money received through conventional taxes), then those who don't use a TV still have to pay their share.
Personallly I would have a public tax-funded digital and information infrastructure corporation (or group of corporations) ensuring quality internet and TV for all, and possiblly supplying subsidised equipment to those unable to afford expensive equipment. But whatever you do, money has to come from somewhere, and as soon as you go down the tax route, the only question you have is who pays and who does not.
Alternatives involve stuffing programs with ads and programming intendee to chase advertising money. The TV license allows the BBC to things which are good to have, but hard to make commercially viable. As soon as you make it optional, the kind of behaviour beloved of Sky becomes necessary. Competition just means you cannot have a simple single subscription either. For me a license funded BBC is a good thing, and corporate greed and market economics devastate the possibilities of broadcast TV, reducing it to a game of chasing money. Since we already have plenty of commercial TV, making the BBC commercial will add nothing, but take away a lot.
Unless you absolutely have to, do _not_ install Linux and Windows on the same physical hard drive. For many purposes (e.g. basic coding and web stuff) a lightweight Linux distro will run just fine off a USB memory stick (I use Ultra Fit's in either the 32GB or 64GB size). Then, if you are buying a laptop and you're a techie, get something where it is trivially easy to swap out either the hard drive (i.e. not Asus crap where you have to remove the keyboard to get at the hard drive), or the optical drive. For example, boot Windows of one hard drive, and stick another in the optical drive bay. If you have a desktop, you have room for more than one physical drive. This also means that, during critical stuff like OS installs, you can physically disconnect your Linux drive so that Windows cannot get at it. My favourite example of Redmond silliness involved Windows 2000 appearing to enumerate partitions one way in the partitioning part of setup, and another way for the formatting part. Basically, on my dual boot drive, Windows 2000 setup ended up formatting the wrong partition. I say it had cocked up when I noticed the size of the partition it was formatting: my shared data drive. By the time I had stopped the process, of course, the FATs were already overwritten.
Faced with a theory and some evidence apparently supporting it, the questions me must ask are:
1) What serious attempts have been made to find counter-evidence for this theory?
2) How thorough have you been in listing things which could make your theory false?
3) What sort of counter-evidence would disprove your theory?
4) What assumptions are you depending upon when reasoning from empirical data to conclusions?
If people are still playing the 'here is proof it works' game, what they are doing is probably not scientific.
If a company or research group has not done the above, at best they have an early investigation into an area and a few educated guesses as to what is going on (and only then if they make it clear that this is the case). If they have not made serious attempts to disprove their theories, and have not made clear the limitations of their current understanding, and are passing off what they are doing as scientific, it is pseudoscientific. Simple as that. Science depends on a brutal honesty rooted in the desire to prove yourself wrong whenever you can, and to be clear what you have tried, what you could have tried, what you have not tried, and how you think others could demolish the theory you are putting forward. That brutal, ego-destroying attitude is central to proper science (see Feynman's Cargo Cult Science talk for a good exposition on this for a general audience).
The trouble is, that in many areas, if one removes all the 'science that is not science', there's not a whole lot left.
Using the word 'runs' makes me laugh: poetic license in extremis. I have 'upgraded' many of my machines to Windows 10. Let me tell you that it doesn't exactly run so much as crawls in agony until you put it out of its misery by either reinstalling Windows 7, or booting from a device with Ubuntu Studio on it. Then there is all that cortana crap which you can't fscking switch off. I mean, I'd much rather have a simple scriptable way to make menus. Really: I could make something more useful for me with bit of javascript and a host with a few API hooks. It would be quicker than waiting for cortana to wake from its slumber on an older laptop! If you just had a javascript environment with a couple of predefined objects (akin to the window and document objects in a web browser), you could do something perfectly functional, and hack in whatever clever logic you want. What you can't do with MS's bloated mess, however, is hack _out_ the logic and features you don't need.
I would say, as a caveat, that the Linux world still has far to go in making things as easy as they can be. The trouble is that we've inherited a philosophy of design from that of companies where building big opaque piles of incomprehensible and incompatible crap that just about worked happened to be excellent development models for software companies. Short, sweet, beautiful and elegant examples of software programming are rarer than diamonds, and some of those 'rarer than diamonds' are locked in vaults and jealously guarded by organisations whose only purpose on life is to make money.
Porn can cause problems for many people. The root causes, however, are not with porn. One is failure to develop sensible disciplined habits around viewing it, and just as failing to develop sensible disciplined habits around driving makes driving a liability, and likewise with consumption of alcohol, and many other things. Second is trying to live a life where, in trying to meet the expectations of others, you end up effectively in a silent war with a caged and frustrated sex drive in a world saturated with beautiful young potential mates (of either gender). In this state, as soon as your brain senses an outlet, it is akin to desperation for a drink of water, or to take a pee. If you give in, and many will give in, (and many who do no will develop mental health problems due to the levels of stress, anxiety and confusion involved), your brain will remember the path to what it was desperate for (whether food, drugs, porn, sex, or whatever) as if it is a life-saving escape route. Just as with breaking under torture, once you give in once, your brain will be rewired and it will be almost impossible to hold out again. But humans do not, and cannot have, in general, anything like the infinite resolve and discipline required for the unicorn powered dream of people marrying in strictly monogamous heterosexual marriages and not having or desiring sex in any other circumstances. In the modern world, people must have safe effective and readily available outlets for sexual drives which would otherwise cause problems. Restraint is akin to holding off to go to the bathroom: an important short-term solution which in the case of toilet training everybody has learned, but holding off from taking a pee until you've found the one true toilet you can use for the rest of your life and formed and exclusive relationship with it. To be clear, I am not likening sex and lovemaking to taking a pee, but at the level of our fundamental drives, they are alike in how they work in our brains.
I like to point to an article from the guardian about pure O, and do read there how porn was used in a disciplined therapeutic setting. Discipline, awareness and being sensible make all the difference, but must be learned. https://www.theguardian.com/so...
I have found, over the years, that learning various disciplines is invaluable.
I have studied Tai Chi to the point that, to physics students, I often explain how it is just about seeking extreme mechanical efficiency (and then applying that in a martial arts context), and is basically physics in disguise: the major difference in how it is thought of and explained, traditionally, is due to two things, one of which is the cumulative effect of 'Chinese Whispers', and the other is that you do not have time to get a pen and paper out and solve a system of differential equations in order to deal with a fist flying at your face. Thus it must be understood in a way which permits you to react in real time, but in a way which is as mechanically efficient as possible.
Similarly, meditation (Buddhist and Christian) has been massively helpful, as has a grounded spiritual faith. I know Christianity often gets a bad name on forums such as these, and often deservedly so due to the mess that many (esp. fundamentalist and overly conservative) traditions have made of it, but when it comes to stability against suicide, it is certainly my experience that a solid spiritual faith is one of the best tools around.
More generally, if you train your awareness, and your discipline to react in smooth, calm ways to whatever is thrown at you (as Tai Chi aims to do), and you try to infuse this approach into as much of your life as you can, this greatly aids your ability to steer your mind when things are drifting towards mania. Then you need to find a way to strongly dominate your thinking, get yourself tired, and then get your brain to switch off at night long enough for the tiredness to get you to sleep, and with your mind calm enough that it doesn't start up again before you're asleep. Then you can at least get enough rest to stave off the worst, and buy yourself another day to improve your situation.
Music, and music production is again invaluable. Learning how delay and feedback works in DSP has been a massive mind opener, as is how feedback and resonance work, and more importantly, how they sound and feel: for me much of what is going on in mania and psychosis is a kind of ringing feedback in the brain, akin to what happens on an old school analogue synth if you turn the resonance too high, albeit with the complexity increase resulting from moving from a simple one-dimensional electrical signal to the madhouse of mayhem that is a human brain.
(I often like to say that, if you wanted to make the Inside Out movie more realistic, a good way would be to replace the simple embodiments of emotions with massive hordes of Minions, and mania is what happens when said Minions go on a massive 'banana' rush!)
Apologies if what follows comes across as a rant. Thus is an extremely sore topic for me.
As someone with bipolar diagnosis (and an autistic spectrum disorder diagnised over a decade after the bipolar diagnosis), I can say from my experience that two different people with the same diagnostic label can have markedly different problems. What works is heavily dependent on what exactly is happing in the patient's life and mind, and upon what intellectual, social, family and other resources they have at their disposal.
The idea that you can treat all instances of a bipolar patient as sufficiently similar that a clinical trial of a treatment will yield useful, meaningful and reliable information as to what will help an arbitrary new patient with the same diagnosis is something for which I have yet to come across empirical support for (consider how different software can cause the same hardware to behave markedly differently, the futility of trying to fix serious software errors with simple hardware patches, and the foolishness of taking 1000 windows PCs which regularly blue screen, and conducting a double blind randomised controlled trial on treatments for PCs with 'compulsive blue screen disorder'). I am sorry to say, that to me psychiatric research is thus brain damaged in its basic methodologies.
The idea that chemical imbalances are a cause rather than a symptom is something yet to be justified, as is the idea that bipolar disorders can be understood at a biochemical level and remedied with chemicals with any degree of reliability. Then things like whether the person has a (possibly undiagnosed) autistic spectrum disorder or not are ignored (I have recently received an ASC diagnosis), and if not ignored, old trials are not revisited in the event that new diagnostic information has come to light regarding participants of old trials which would have affectee the trial and possibly the outcome. By comparison, if a physicist discovers a component in his exoerimental apparatus has a bias, he or she will not ignore the matter if it could significantly affect the conclusions of the experiment. The psychpharmalogical juggernaut just rolls on, turning mental health into a game of drug sales, cattle management, and explaining away all alternatives: behaviour reminiscent of hard sell marketing, not proper scientific inquiry.
As for blue light, at times when extremely sensitive, blue light can, due to extreme sensitivity, be confused with daylight, with consequences for how your brain tries to sync to daylight. In times of extreme sensitivity (which can be diagnosed as manic episodes, as can episodes of manic behaviour driven differently), it is like the gain on yout brain inputs is turned up too high, is saturated, distorting, and your brain then attempts to make sense of the distorted sensory input on the implicit assumption that it is free of distortion. That, at least, has been my experience in the past (once in hospital they used bright blue-tinted flashlights to see if we were in bed, for example, resulting in my being awoken so strongly when about to go to sleep that there was no possibility of sleep for a number of hours, and jobbing nursing staff often want their jobs to be as easy for themselves as possible, and care little if that has negative ramifications for the patients).
In addition, check out 'Deprived of our Humanity' by Lars Martensson (what he writes accords much with my experience), madinamerica, Joanna Moncrieff's books (myth of chemical cure, straight talking intro), Richard Bentall's books, Lucy Johnstone's books (straight talking intro), details of successful outcomes (beyond what is achieved with typical pharmacologically centred approaches) using alternative approaches (see e.g. Daniel Mackler's open dialog documentary, on youtube now).
Feynman had a wonderful couple of quotes in his Cargo Cult Science talk:
"But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselvesâ"of having utter scientific integrityâ"is, Iâ(TM)m sorry to say, something that we
Consider how scripting languages use lists, dicts, and so on. Having data structures which are binary compatible would enable these structures to be shared copy-on-write between processes running different languages. The approach clojure takes (functional data structures) is useful here. Likewise for stuff like Gegl. The thing is unlike 15 years ago, we have Llvm, and so rather than think in terms of binaries, most of the time stopping the compile at a higher level and distributing that would make more sense. As for source languages, having the authoritative source be a data structure which you manipulate would make much of our developer tools much simpler, removing the round trip between character data and the Ide's attempt at parsing it. None of this seems particularly new, to my mind, but I just wish this dream would be reality.
The Disaster is one of how a great people got so addicted to comfort, ease and immediate reward that the few seconds it takes a card reader to get confident is too much to bear. What has become of the first nation to put men on the moon?
There is a site called Dark Patterns, mentioned by our friends at Ars, detailing this kind of 'small print designed for people to miss'. Understandable, but wrong.
More like a fly caught in a spiders web: Microsoft is encasing the flies it has caught in silk cacoons. In time, they will devour their prey, turning it into a MS branded high tech biological product of some sort, and then find a way of ensuring business buy it.