I haven’t switched to Windows 11, but I also haven’t been using Windows 10, either. I’ve seen plenty of people say that Windows 11 is fine, but you should probably check with other students at your school who use the same software you do. Make sure your machine can be upgraded to 11, at least, since support for 10 is ending soon and that could result in software or services that you need being unavailable as well.

It sounds like they want a representative sample, which isn’t something I’d be confident in my ability to help them with directly, so I’d advise them to first scan for a person who’s very experienced in statistical sampling and to then work with that person to determine a strategy that will meet their goals.

If they weren’t on board with that plan, then I’d see if they were willing to share their target sample size. If I didn’t have an option for the count I would assume they would be contacting 1% of the population (80 million people). I’d also let them know that being representative and selecting for traits that will make encounters go smoothly are conflicting goals, so I’m prioritizing for representation and they can figure out the “please don’t pull a shotgun out, human!” trait on their own. Depending on all that, I’d recommend an approach that accounted for as much of the following as possible.

• gender (male, female, non-binary)
• race
• culture and sub-culture (so this would include everything from religion to music to hobbies)
• profession
• age, broken down into micro-generations
• mix of neurotypical and neurodivergent
• different varieties of neurodivergence
• range of intelligences

Pretty sure you’re right - there’s the concern of the resources / energy needed for recycling but also, recycling decreases the need for new materials enough to offset that.

That said, AFAIK paper and cardboard are the only thing that can be both composted and recycled, so the advice of the person you replied to is still generally good.

This is the guidance I’ve seen on the topic:

Recycle:

• clean, dry paper
• clean, dry cardboard

But compost:

• soiled and wet paper/cardboard
• pizza boxes and other similar things
• paper towels
• paper/cardboard egg cartons

Don’t compost (throw away if unsuitable to recycle):

• glossy paper
• paper with plastic attached
• anything (e.g., paper towels) with cleaning chemicals or other substances unsuitable for composting on it

Ah, like using Edge to download Firefox!

Should I apologize for hurting your feelings by suggesting that Windows is bad?

Is there a right way to use Windows?

Every single App Store out there uses “free” to refer to propriety software today, because it’s free.

“Free” as an adjective isn’t the issue. The issue is the phrase “free software” being used to refer to things other than free software. And afaict, no app store uses the term ”free software” to refer to non-free software.

The iOS App Store refers to “Free Apps.”

Google Play doesn’t call it “Free Software,” either; they just use it as a category / filter, e.g., “Top Free.”

There’s a reason many are … starting to refer to such software as “libre”, not “free”

Your conclusion is incorrect - this is because when used outside of the phrase “free software,” the word is ambiguous. “Software that is free” could mean gratis, libre, or both.

There is no path to any future where someone will be wrong to use the word “free” to describe software that doesn’t cost anything.

Setting aside that doing so is already misleading, you clearly lack imagination if you cannot think of any feasible way for that to happen.

For example, consider a future where use of the phrase when advertising your product could result in legal issues. That isn’t too far-fetched.

They don’t become invalidated. They’re not capable of becoming invalidated.

They certainly can. A given meaning of a word is invalidated if it is no longer acceptable to use it in a given context for that meaning. In a medical context, for example, words become obsolete and unacceptable to use.

Likewise, it isn’t valid to say that your Aunt Edna is “hysterical” because she has epilepsy.

But more importantly, that’s all beside the point. Words don’t just have meaning in isolation - context matters. Phrases can have meanings that are different than just the sum of their parts, and saying a phrase but meaning something different won’t communicate what you meant. If you say something that doesn’t communicate what you meant, then obviously, what you said is incorrect.

“Free software” has an established meaning (try Googling it or looking it up on Wikipedia), and if you use it to mean something different, people will likely misunderstand you and/or correct you. They’re not wrong in this situation - you are.

That, or you’re trying to live life like a character from Airplane!:

This woman has to be gotten to a hospital.

A hospital? What is it?

It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.

Thought you were talking about Linux at first.

I use both Windows, Linux, and macOS - my opinion is that Windows is the least user-friendly of the bunch.

Probably a client issue. I see a note that the user deleted their own comment.

it is literally impossible for it to ever not be objectively correct

And yet here you are, using “literally” to mean “figuratively.” Excuse me for not accepting your linguistic authority on the immutability of other words.

I’m not the person you replied to, I don’t use Photoshop, but I used to use GIMP exclusively and I use the Affinity suite now. What I’ve seen pop up in discussions about a major area where GIMP is lacking, going back several years at this point:

Photoshop supports nondestructive editing, and Affinity supports nondestructive RAW editing (and even outside RAW editing, it still supports things like filter layers). Heck, my understanding is Krita has support for nondestructive editing, too.

GIMP, on the other hand, has historically only had destructive editing. It looks like they finally added an initial implementation back in February. That’s great, and once GIMP 3.0 releases and that feature is fully supported, then GIMP will be a viable alternative for workflows that require it.

the proof is in the pudding with this one

It isn’t.

as you must also ask yourself why E15 is banned during summer months in the first place.

I did. And I shared that in my comment above.

Your source doesn’t share any data on the topic, even just as a summary, but it links to summertime smog, which links to “smog-causing pollutants”, which says:

Section 211(h)(1) of the Clean Air Act prohibits the sale of gasoline that has a Reid Vapor Pressure greater than 9.0 psi during the “high ozone season,” which runs from June 1 to September 15. (RVP is a measure of volatility; high-RVP gasolines release more volatile organic compounds into the troposphere where those VOCs contribute to ozone formation.) Gasoline-ethanol blends below E50 are more volatile than straight gasoline and cannot readily meet the 9.0 psi RVP requirement. Congress created a “one-pound waiver” at Section 211(h)(4) that increases the RVP limit from 9.0 psi to 10.0 psi, but—and here’s the catch—the waiver is only available to “fuel blends containing gasoline and 10 percent denatured anhydrous ethanol.” That is, only E10 can take advantage of the one-pound waiver. Although E15 is slightly less volatile than E10, its RVP still exceeds 9 psi. It needs a one-pound waiver to meet Section 211(h)’s RVP limit in the same way that E10 does, but it is not eligible for one under current law.

The article’s justification for why E15 isn’t legally permitted is that there’s a law against it, which is circular logic. From the environmental protection perspective, it doesn’t sound like there is data suggesting that E15 on its own is worse for the environment than E10. If the only argument is a legal one, it’s not a good argument.

If you can answer that question you’ll likely find the information you’re looking for.

I did, and I shared that answer in my comment above, too - but it’s not the answer you seem to think it is.

Do you disagree that the US isn’t supporting Israel, then, or do you disagree that what Israel is doing to Palestinians amounts to genocide?

Some reading for you in case you’re somehow not familiar with the topic:

• https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_genocide_accusation
• https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/gaza-un-experts-call-international-community-prevent-genocide-against
• https://worldwithoutgenocide.org/genocides-and-conflicts/israel-palestine-conflict-history-causes-and-international-law
• https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976
• https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67922346

Even if the international courts don’t rule that Israel is committing genocide, that will necessarily have been influenced by the United States’s close ties to Israel, so that they haven’t yet said whether it is or isn’t genocide is irrelevant. According to the evidence we have, it is.

That said, see also the intro of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_the_United_States

Others, like historian Gary Anderson, contend that genocide does not accurately characterize any aspect of American history, suggesting instead that ethnic cleansing is a more appropriate term.

I’ve seen that same statement by people opposed to the use of the word “genocide” when talking about Israel’s genocide of Palestine, and it’s just as credible there as when “historian Gary Anderson” said it. At best, such a stance is pedantic; at worst, it supports Israel’s genocide by denying and enabling it.

Afaict from reading that (and one of the sources, and its source) it boils down to the fuels’ “RVP levels” (which have an impact on volatility and the amount of VOCs given off) being past a particular threshold. E10 is also past that threshold, but it has an exception that E15 doesn’t have. However, by that same measure, E15 is less volatile than E10.

The author also expressed concern about expanding corn production as a result of expanded E15 and that there haven’t been sufficient studies on the impact of E15 on the environment (particularly in the summer months). But that’s also paired with a statement saying that “consumers don’t want E15,” which detracts from the previous arguments; if true it means their impacts, if any, would be minimal.

I didn’t read every link from that page but none gave a better reason.

My takeaway is that it sounds like we don’t have any data showing that E15 is worse than E10, so the obvious move is to actually start funding those studies.

I also found https://foe.org/blog/2012-05-understanding-e15/ which is very anti-E15; however I wasn’t able to verify their claims because none of the linked articles loaded for me.

“Glue is not pizza sauce” seems like a common fact to me but Googles llm disagrees for example.

That wasn’t something an LLM came up with, though. That was done by a system that uses an LLM. My guess is the system retrieves a small set of results and then just uses the LLM to phrase a response to the user’s query by referencing the links in question.

It’d be like saying to someone “rephrase the relevant parts of this document to answer the user’s question” but the only relevant part is a joke. There’s not much else you can do there.

Third, a redirect is obvious

A redirect isn’t necessary if you control the DNS servers. If you control the DNS servers, you can MITM the website for any visitor because you can prove that you own the domain to a certificate authority and generate a new, trusted HTTPS cert. (Depending on specifics this may or may not foil the anti-phishing capabilities of Passkeys / U2F.)

They aren’t. From a comment on https://www.reddit.com/r/ublock/comments/32mos6/ublock_vs_ublock_origin/ by u/tehdang:

For people who have stumbled into this thread while googling “ublock vs origin”. Take a look at this link:

http://tuxdiary.com/2015/06/14/ublock-origin/

"Chris AlJoudi [current owner of uBlock] is under fire on Reddit due to several actions in recent past:

• In a Wikipedia edit for uBlock, Chris removed all credits to Raymond [Hill, original author and owner of uBlock Origin] and added his name without any mention of the original author’s contribution.
• Chris pledged a donation with overblown details on expenses like $25 per week for web hosting.
• The activities of Chris since he took over the project are more business and advertisement oriented than development driven."

So I would recommend that you go with uBlock Origin and not uBlock. I hope this helps!

Edit: Also got this bit of information from here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/32ory7/ublock_is_back_under_a_new_name/

TL;DR:

• gorhill [Raymond Hill] got tired of dozens of “my facebook isnt working plz help” issues.
• he handed the repository to chrismatic [Chris Aljioudi] while maintaining control of the extension in the Chrome webstore (by forking chrismatic’s version back to himself).
• chrismatic promptly added donate buttons and a “made with love by Chris” note.
• gorhill took exception to this and asked chrismatic to change the name so people didn’t confuse uBlock (the original, now called uBlock Origin) and uBlock (chrismatic’s version).
• Google took down gorhill’s extension. Apparently this was because of the naming issue (since technically chrismatic has control of the repo).
• gorhill renamed and rebranded his version of ublock to uBlock Origin.

Is it possible to force a corruption if a disk clone is attempted?

Anything that corrupts a single file would work. You could certainly change your own disk cloning binaries to include such functionality, but if someone were accessing your data directly via their own OS, that wouldn’t be effective. I don’t know of a way to circumvent that last part other than ensuring that the data isn’t left on disk when you’re done. For example, you could use a ramdisk instead of non-volatile storage. You could delete or intentionally corrupt the volume when you unmount it. You could split the file, storing half on your USB flash drive and keeping the other half on your PC. You could XOR the file with contents of another file (e.g., one on your USB flash drive instead of on your PC) and then XOR it again when you need to access it.

What sort of attack are you trying to protect from here?

If the goal is plausible deniability, then it’s worth noting that VeraCrypt volumes aren’t identifiable as distinct from random data. So if you have a valid reason for having a big block of random data on disk, you could say that’s what the file was. Random files are useful because they are not compressible. For example, you could be using those files to test: network/storage media performance or compression/hash/backup&restore/encrypt&decrypt functions. You could be using them to have a repeatable set of random values to use in a program (like using a seed, but without necessarily being limited to using a PRNG to generate the sequence).

If that’s not sufficient, you should look into hidden volumes. The idea is that you take a regular encrypted volume, whose free space, on disk, looks just like random data, you store your hidden volume within the free space. The hidden volume gets its own password. Then, you can mount the volume using the first password and get visibility into a “decoy” set of files or use the second password to view your “hidden” files. Note that when mounting it to view the decoy files, any write operations will have a chance of corrupting the hidden files. However, you can supply both passwords to mount it in a protected mode, allowing you to change the decoy files and avoid corrupting the hidden ones.

It sounds like you want these files to be encrypted.

Someone already suggested encrypting them with GPG, but maybe you want the files themselves to also be isolated, even while their data is encrypted. In that case, consider an encrypted volume. I assume you’re familiar with LUKS - you can encrypt a partition with a different password and disable auto-mount pretty easily. But if you’d rather use a file-based volume, then check out VeraCrypt - it’s a FOSS-ish [1], cross-platform tool that provides this capability. The official documentation is very Windows-focused - the ArchLinux wiki article is a pretty useful Linux focused alternative.

Normal operation is that you use a file to store the volume, which can be “dynamic” with a max size or can be statically sized (you can also directly encrypt a disk partition, but you could do that with LUKS, too). Then, before you can access the files - read or write - you have to enter the password, supply the encryption key, etc., in order to unlock it.

Someone without the password but with permission to modify the file will be capable of corrupting it (which would prevent you from accessing every protected file), but unless they somehow got access to the password they wouldn’t be able to view or modify the protected files.

The big advantage over LUKS is ease of creating/mounting file-based volumes and portability. If you’re concerned about another user deleting your encrypted volume, then you can easily back it up without decrypting it. You can easily load and access it on other systems, too - there are official, stable apps on Windows and Mac, though you’ll need admin access to run them. On Android and iOS options are a bit more slim - EDS on Android and Disk Decipher on iOS. If you’re copying a volume to a Linux system without VeraCrypt installed, you’ll likely still be able to mount it, as dm-crypt has support for VeraCrypt volumes.

• 1 - It’s based on TrueCrypt, which has some less free restrictions, e.g., c. Phrase "Based on TrueCrypt, freely available at http://www.truecrypt.org/" must be displayed by Your Product (if technically feasible) and contained in its documentation.”