balnaphone

The point of the OP is that users can and deserve to have the reliability that cryptographically-secure boot systems provide, without the Big Brother backdoor.

For people without underlying risk factors, the illness is generally quite minor. Those at risk should stay home, and avoid contact with the potentially infected. For those who share accommodations, mixed risk factor domestic populations, perhaps systemic help could aid in sorting that out.

I decided to post here only to demonstrate that people exist with other views. I'm satisfied that anyone reading this will understand that these views are not unheard of.

The lack of intellectual integrity here is astonishing. The OP, the BBC claiming these "excess deaths" are automatically COVID-19 deaths, is just more evidence of this. If any person locks another person up, it is legally recognized as a harm done to the victim. The government is the party that needs to justify itself. The constant shifting of policy, predictions, and rationale of the government's policy itself is an indication of the shaky basis of this action.

Specifically, the justification of not overwhelming the health care system, which is chronically overwhelmed anyway, is not compelling. The policy came first, with aspirational goals rather than scientific thinking, which was then back-filled. The government has put itself into a win-win situation: if lots of people die, that provides the justification for the action; and if few people do (which won't be known for a year or more), then the credit for "saving the people" goes to the policy makers. I happen to see it the other way around: if many people die, it shows these measures are useless; and if few do, then the government has caused the people massive harm for no just cause.

The veneration of the health care workers is also disgusting, this ridiculous clapping and so on. These people aren't slaves, they go of their own free will, and there are many jobs ("essential" jobs) that are far more dangerous. The purpose of life is living, not being safe. More mind-programming for the masses.

Regarding your assumption, you didn't respond to my point at all. Nobody needs to seek shelter from me, if they've already decided to barricade themselves in their home.

> COVID-19 will double the number of people suffering from a food crisis, pushing it to 265 million, estimates the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

You can read the report to see the effects of policy versus the effects of the burden of disease.

I don't need to cite anything regarding the other claims. The people who have assaulted human dignity by putting half of humanity under house arrest are the ones who need to prove that this draconian intervention will result in a net benefit, vis a vis the concerns I've pointed out. Cite your sources that it will -- I'm sure to hear crickets chirping on that one.

====

From the Cambridge English Dictionary:

lockdown noun [ C or U ] mainly US UK /ˈlɒk.daʊn/ US /ˈlɑːk.daʊn/ a situation in which people are not allowed to enter or leave a building or area freely because of an emergency.

From the Oxford dictionary:

quarantine noun /ˈkwɔrənˌtin/ , /ˈkwɑrənˌtin/ [uncountable] a period of time when an animal or a person that has or may have a disease is kept away from others in order to prevent the disease from spreading

From the American CDC:

"Isolation" separates sick people with a contagious disease from people who are not sick.

"Quarantine" separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick.

The mental state of a person attacking another person with a knife, or a virus, is not at all comparable to a person going to bake sweets, cut hair, or any of the other productive employments people engage in.

Actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea.

Secondly, since that unfortunate soul is locked in their home, how are they touching anything I've touched, and how are they breathing the air I breathe?

Lastly, why did you decide to make this about me personally?

Quarantine is for the sick, not the healthy. I'm equating lockdowns with tyranny, yes.

Shutting down the global economy has resulted in hundreds of millions of people experiencing food insecurity. It will result in an enormous cost in terms of deaths, morbidity, and impaired mental well-being, for people in the UK and around the world.

> Really is shameful

It's shameful that any country put practically their entire citizenry under house arrest.

If someone is scared of catching something, they should stay home. If they want, they can live their life in a full-body condom, covered in bubble-wrap, soaking their hands in chlorhexidine, sipping O2 from a tank. Nobody is or should be putting a gun to their head to come out.

The UK government, and governments around the world, have indeed failed. They've failed to protect the liberty of the people, and in fact have become tyrannical.

There was a post here yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23149771) about the (in)security of Linux, but the primary purpose of an OS is utility, not merely security. The leadership of the Linux project made very smart analyses of what priorities come first. Despite there being billions of insecure old devices scattered about, running old kernels, I think the kernel authors made the right call.

The problem rests with the manufacturers who abandoned support for those devices and left no escape route for users to update the kernels themselves. Most disgusting are these phone and car manufacturers, and apps, which have enabled wholesale spying on users for many years now. These devices are literal bugs, reporting realtime locations, conversations, and who knows what else to Big Brother.

Its a pleasure to see that some people still care enough to make the world a better place, in a way I can understand.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2764955

Quote:

> Oxygen concentration inhaled by healthy subjects wearing a surgical mask covering an N95 respirator decreases to about 17%, and the concentration of carbon dioxide increases to about 1.2% - 3% in a short period of light work (2-3). Although participants did not show any obvious changes in physical function and did not have any discomfort ratings, the average carbon dioxide concentration inhaled was far higher than the limit of 0.1% of indoor carbon dioxide concentration in many countries. With prolonged mask wearing, untoward reactions may gradually appear. In another long-term study, after wearing an N95 mask for 12 hours the CO2 concentration of subjects increased to 41.0 mmHg, far higher than the baseline value of 32.4mm Hg at the beginning of the test (4). The subjects mainly reported headache, dizziness, feeling tired and communication obstacles. In real life, the situations and time of wearing masks are much longer than the above experimental research settings.

However, there has been a major push recently to circumvent the limitations of optically connecting the telescope arrays; there are a few different approaches, of which I'm not aware of any fatal flaws. Seems likely it's a matter of time and physics and engineering; very difficult, but achievable.

See for example: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/51042/Tegmark...

I strongly disagree, having dealt first-hand with the fallout of identity fraud. These escape hatches negate the purpose of names. The problem with storing "legal" names is the custodial burden of storing any personally identifying information; however, the benefit of dealing with a bona fide person may outweigh the cost.

In the case of an academic institution, it is completely reasonable to use a legal name as the standard. If a person doesn't like their name, then the onus today is on them to change it. This article doesn't propose any constructive alternative, that maintains the integrity of the academic system which is relied upon, in an important way, for things like visas, scholarships, and employment.

The preachy disagreeable manner that this article was written in doesn't help. The appeal to collective cause indicates a defective and illogical mode of thinking. The argument as presented lacks a logical basis, instead trying to appeal to emotion through example and anecdote. Who is this person, to dictate my duty? And furthermore to decide the meaning of basic terms, such as what a name is?

No thanks.

True, but it is very popular in astrophotography.

Also, there are many recent advances in super-resolution imaging, compressive sensing, and sub-diffraction-limit pixels, often based on results from Donoho, Candes, and friends. Taking advantage of signal sparsity (i.e. that the set of physically possible signals is much smaller than the set of all possible signals, and physical systems have many constraints upon them) has led to a lot of surprising results over the past 15 years or so. Another approach that has yielded results is aperture synthesis, which has been applied to optical systems for at least the past 15 years. And in some certain circumstances for spysats, optical heterodyne detection can also be used to great effect.

> you are always going to be limited by the diffraction limit of the telescope

While the diffraction limit of a system is definitely a constraint, it's not as simple as this anymore.

The PS1 platform prospered because it was cheap, and relatively welcoming for developers (lots of tooling, libraries, infrastructure), and it ended up selling over 100 million units.

It's very tough to argue too much with that kind of success.

You seem to enjoy closed-source platform libraries (WinForms, AppKit), and want to promote developing software that relies on them. The survival characteristics of this approach don't seem very strong. Good luck!

To run this code on debian, I had to install python2, python2 pip, python2 virtualenv, and the gimp-python plugin. The init code for the plugin dumps around 1GB of cache files into your ~/.cache directory, mostly in ~/.cache/pip/http , which then get built into a virtualenv in the git tree for the project.

Unfortunately there is no obvious license, so nobody can build on it directly, although some of the underlying codes have permissive licenses.

I tried out the super-resolution plugin on several test images; it didn't give good results. Motion deblurring had problems also. Both worked poorly on dealing with input compression artifacts, and on dealing with blurry low-resolution inputs. Both performed reasonably well on relatively clear high-resolution inputs (and where I already knew that blind deconvolution could easily recover the blur kernel), with no obvious artifacts in the output.

Right off the top, it's made clear this author doesn't know what he or she is talking about. From at least the time of de Moivre, around 1740, the problem of estimating an accurate true value from multiple differing measurements was recognized in its own right as a problem. By 1810, Gauss and Laplace had discovered the basics of statistical estimation, the form of the normal distribution, results including the central limit theorem, and regression techniques such as non-linear weighted least squares. Now, almost 200 years later, the problem still exists, and is being worked on in various forms and circumstances.

To give a simple example, take 1000 frames of well-exposed video of a still scene, with constant illumination, and constant exposure settings on the camera. Now try to estimate how many photons, within a constant multiplicative factor, are coming from each point in the scene. Most of the measurements will show a normal distribution, but at the extremes of exposure, something more complex is going on (perhaps to do with sensor non-linearity, censored sampling, or something else). This is one of the basic theoretical problems in HDR imaging, and is an active area research (i.e. unsolved, as of today).

It's very hard to get past that paragraph -- which is the first one in answer to the question "why?".

This is meant to suggest you may wish to revise your risk analysis.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

[2] https://www.aapcc.org/annual-reports/ , in particular see page 1239 of the 2018 full report https://piper.filecamp.com/uniq/meDKF2EpE2jsmTOs.pdf

Extraneous agent detection in vaccines: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Attila_Farsang_Dr/publi...

Detection of Avian Retroviruses in Vaccines: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3647912/

Vaccines, on the other hand, especially experimental ones, have been historically known to suffer from contamination (biological or otherwise), and result in strange, hard-to-diagnose problems. These problems are suffered by a tiny population (the experimental group), with no broad societal, medical, or research support -- which makes sense, since the highest societal priority is typically to help as many people as possible. The three main concerns with the vaccines themselves are that (a) there's no biological pressure to attenuate negative effects, (b) the biologic components themselves may infect the patient, without any point of comparison commensurate with widespread viruses in the field, and (c) the other ingredients (stabilizers, preservatives, etc.) in vaccines are often toxic in their own right. In the past it has taken many years, even a decade or more, to get it all right.

Exposed to god-knows-what in their untested vaccine? Absolutely not, even five years after release ("my body, my choice"). There is a long history of contaminants in biologics, and vaccines in particular. Problems like GBS (Guillain-Barre Syndrome), tumors, polio, and who knows what from PCV. If I recall correctly, wasn't SV-40 injected into 25 million Americans, and perhaps hundreds of millions world-wide? Well-tested and analyzed vaccines like BCG I have no problem with, but being a guinea pig for whatever was cooked up in a rush over the last few weeks? Count me out.

The headline has it backwards -- the more significant (unbounded) risk is from the therapy, not the SARS-CoV-2 exposure.

>> It depends if you think of your country as an accessory burden or as the ensemble of your fellows.

This "depends" clause doesn't logically follow, since the "slavery" label applies in either circumstance. If one's country is an "ensemble of your fellows", then volunteering for military service may logically follow from that; forcing others to do so, does not. In either case, whether one feels connected to one's country or not, being compelled by force to participate in the military can legitimately be seen as a form of slavery -- since the victim is unable to withdraw unilaterally from their compelled service.

If one cares deeply about their own countrymen, why would one want to enslave them, and remove their choice and freedom in the matter?

https://www.linuxliteos.com/

Installation on a machine with 2Gb RAM resulted in a system that works just fine, for running scripts, compiling medium-sized projects, running web browsers, media playback, etc -- all on a credit-card sized machine.

The desktop is based on XFCE. The post-installation steps I took are listed below.

    # emable swap to compressed RAM
    sudo apt-get install zram-config
    
    # log to RAM for speed, less wear on eMMC
    echo "deb http://packages.azlux.fr/debian/ buster main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/azlux.list
    wget -qO - https://azlux.fr/repo.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
    apt update
    apt install log2ram
    
    # remove icon generator that hogs machine
    sudo apt remove --purge tumbler
    
    # remove powerline garbage
    sudo apt remove --purge powerline
    
    
    # Liquorix kernel, see https://liquorix.net/
    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:damentz/liquorix && sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install linux-image-liquorix-amd64 linux-headers-liquorix-amd64
    ## NEEDS linux-firmware from focal distro
    ## see https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/all/linux-firmware/download 
    ## for latest link
    wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/l/linux-firmware/linux-firmware_1.187_all.deb
    sudo dpkg -i  linux-firmware_1.187_all.deb
    rm linux-firmware_1.187_all.deb
    
    sudo apt install powertop iotop
    
    # fix font rendering
    cat <<'EOF' > ~/.fonts.conf
    <!-- disable embedded bitmaps in fonts to fix Calibri, Cambria, etc. -->
    <match target="font">
       <edit mode="assign" name="embeddedbitmap"><bool>false</bool></edit>
    </match>
    EOF
    
    
    # remove spectre mitigations, make computer fast again
    sudo perl -pi.bk -e 's|splash"|splash mitigations=off"|' /etc/default/grub
    sudo update-grub
    
    # disable and completely remove AppArmor and snapd
    # https://www.simplified.guide/ubuntu/remove-apparmor
    sudo systemctl stop apparmor
    sudo systemctl disable apparmor
    sudo apt remove --purge apparmor snapd
    
    
    # suppress this language related updates from apt-get
    echo 'Acquire::Languages "none";' | sudo  tee -a /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00aptitude
    
    # remove irqbalance 
    # see https://github.com/konkor/cpufreq/issues/48
    sudo apt remove --purge irqbalance

Since Sweden doesn't have a lockdown, this statement is meaningless. A major objection to lockdowns is their involuntary nature. In general, there is a big difference between choosing to stay home, and being coerced (with the threat of force) to do so. One is "choosing to do what you believe is best", the other is "prison".