qplex

I do mean SARS which first surfaced in the 2000s in China.

Swine flu has been around for much longer, at least for 100 years.

Viruses like this can spread very quickly and develop to pandemias only because we can fly from China to New York in one day.

All the recent outbreaks of viruses like this have originated from East Asia.

I really wouldnt give much praise to the great governing elite that failed to prevent this in the first place, despite scientists telling them about it a long time ago.

Great idea. Decentralizing would be a very effective way to combat disease like this. It would also make society more resilient to other kinds of disasters.

If we didn't have unlimited travel across borders this epidemic would have never happened.

Absolutely nothing would need to be built to achieve this.

Let me just say that typing {}[] is super painful on many international variants of QWERTY. Typically you need to press a modifier for both (Alt Gr).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#International_variants

FreeBSD and Linux have pretty cute mascots too.

Puffy is exclusive to OpenBSD. Tux and Beastie are more generic.

Also:

"Early versions of OpenBSD (2.3 and 2.4) used a BSD Daemon with a halo, and briefly used a daemon police officer for version 2.5. Then, however, OpenBSD switched to Puffy, a blowfish, as a mascot." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon

Edit:

You're absolutely right that there seems to be some kind of power fantasy among the FreeBSD crowd about crushing Linux.

Just do an image search for "BSD Daemon" and see the g(l)orious fan-art.

Me too. People fail to grasp the difference between rendering the whole system unusable and just the OS.

On a PC pretty much the only thing that can brick the machine is a BIOS update.

I've never seen an OS update brick a PC.

Linux or Windows, doesn't matter - you can always recover via BIOS.

How can Apple users live with crap like this?

Indeed the more socialist systems (look at northern europe) are way more resilient to economic downturns.

However a country absolutely needs to stay afloat in foreign trade, or secure domestic production of essential goods.

What's to look up?

Firefox studies was called project Shield before.

Disable studies and it's gone.

So they push this background addon to 1% of users that tells them if Telemetry is enabled or not. This is much better than some vague claim.

What about the other things you mentioned?

>changing your Firefox settings and/or install "experiments", at any time, without any notice to you!

Never had this happen to me.

>and even send them telemetry data when you disable telemetry! -- they can also remotely change your Firefox settings and/or install "experiments", at any time, without any notice to you!

Please don't spread fud and lies.

While Firefox makes some connections on start-up, it will not send any telemetry data or install studies once you've disabled them.

You can check about:telemetry and about:studies

Mozilla is quite transparent about what is being collected.

See https://telemetry.mozilla.org/ and https://data.firefox.com/

Having said this, I fully agree with you. A browser (or any other piece of software) should not make any connections anywhere unless instructed by the user.

Some telemetry is on by default, at least in the official releases.

>Sedentary, no-sports? Eating farm-produced food? Watching TV? Having clothes? Driving cars?

Yes. You're getting there...

You know those great clouds of smog that surround cities? That kind of stuff.

It's not just "driving cars". The ecosystem is completely fucked because of over- and mis-use of technology.

This is a good point.

We might have antibiotics to fight serious infections but the modern way of living is still slowly killing us in many other ways.

There used to be all kinds of nice rules. Like that X would run on tty7.

I think a straight 'no' suffices. Linux most definetly wasn't a commercial project in the early years.

"When you feel bored and sick"?

Sorry. I guess I tend to think in a dualistic way.

I'm only saying one should not have to continually withstand frustration or bad circumstances. Sometimes giving up (and doing something else) is the right thing to do. Sometimes you need a break to be able to continue. And so on.

In any case you should never prime for difficulty, it only decreases performance and motivation.

And since very few things are actually really, really necessary, I find it's very hard to pass morality about "the need to do more".

What I don't agree with is that everyone needs strong goal-oriented thinking and psychology to accomplish things.

Perhaps in the strictest sense everybody has goals but being goal-oriented is another thing.

I'm not suggesting to change any goals; just to have a break from any singular activity for a while.

But whatever myth you think there is for goals that require delayed gratification simply does not exist (at least for most people).

The journey is more important than the destination and all that. Reaching some arbitrary goal doesn't bring you lasting happiness.

No ones born knowing to code, but learning to code can also be fun. Like many other things. The worst thing you can say to somebody learning anything is that "this is very hard to learn".

Really, when your mind tells you that you are bored and sick, you should do something else.

If the circumstances force you to eat shit, it's still not the right thing to do.

I'm absolutely glad that I did things _my way_ instead of succumbing to some general false conceptions of "doing the right thing".

This includes things like skipping military service and basically living as an outlaw for many years because of that.

I've also played a lot of video games and consider that time well spent.

I bought rubber gloves and it completely changed the game for me.

Washing dishes is a zen-like experience. As the utensils, glassware, cups, plates and whatever pile up, you start to feel the itch to clean up the mess. As you finally get to it, you contemplate on what a pig you've been. And when the work is FINALLY done you can admire the cleanness. Then you say to yourself that you will only use ONE plate and ONE cup and wash them straight after, only to find yourself again in the same situation a couple of days later.

So from your linked study:

>"The remission rate for combined treatment did not differ from that for CBT alone (P = .42) "

With the conclusion:

>Children and adolescents with OCD should begin treatment with the combination of CBT plus a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or CBT alone.

Basically they didn't find any difference between patients on SSRIs and therapy, to those doing only therapy.

What "most evidence". Please provide something tangible instead of analogies.

I'm not a doctor, but I really would not recommend SSRIs. At all. This is from personal experience, but there are a lot of anecdotes and research around that agrees.

I didn't really read this book, since this wasn't really new stuff to me, but skimming through it seemed like a pretty good overview:

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Connections-Uncovering-Depressio...

Thanks for refreshing my memory. Those were pretty cool programs back then.

I definetly remember Windowsblinds too (and geez, it seems they're still around ...).

I was into LiteStep, which basically was a shell replacement for explorer.exe.

I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done.

Here are some screenshots:

[0] https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-aug00g.jpg

[1] http://litestep.net/snapshot1.png

If it doesn't translate to anything useful, like better performance then yes, it's just waste of money.

People who think computers bring some great magical benefit for everyone to everything are delusional. In many cases iPads or Chromebooks are just a fancy (and often worse) substitutes for pen and paper.

Ever?

Browsers have been free for personal use for a _long_ time.

Here, see the announcement for Netscape Navigator (October 1993) [0]

>Customers who download the software do so for personal use only. Commercial users can purchase supported, licensed copies of Netscape directly from Netscape Communications. Pricing starts at $99 per user, which includes a 90-day warranty and customer support. Volume discounts are available for multiple user licenses. For information on volume licensing of Netscape, send electronic mail to sales@netscape.com.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20061207145832/http://wp.netscap...