• 2 Posts
  • 183 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Most of the things you said are true. What is also true is that he and his descendents established a unified, peaceful empire from Korea to Hungary, from southern Russia to Iran. He unified China, then divided by civil war, and brought in economists and doctors from the Islamic World. He promoted Buddhism, Daoism and Islam, and his successors included Confucians and Christians. He guaranteed safe travel and trade across his empire, as well as religious tolerance and a common set of laws.

    He killed thousands (the death tolls are inflated by both his enemies and his own followers - as a warning to those who they were going to attack next), but his actions benefitted millions. How can you form any moral judgement about such a figure? All you can do is try to find out the truth, report it, and let people reach their own conclusions.


  • I hope some OEM (especially those opposed to google) picks up and develops mainline linux like Pine Phone.

    Huawei is being forced to do it. But like Android, their HarmonyOS is not 100% open-source. There’s also KaiOS, which some Nokia and Alcatel, and all Jio, devices use.

    even Dalvik and the android runtime itself is an inefficient relic of 10+ years ago when mobile devices had at most 2gb of ram and a tiny low power ARM processor.

    Both the ones I mentioned are designed to be more memory efficient. KaiOS in particular is aimed primarily at feature phones and entry-level smartphones.


  • If one person demands sex in return for not harming another, it is called rape and we rightly consider it to be a crime. If one person demands sex in return for not starving the other, many people seem to find it acceptable. I would never dare judge someone for the work they are forced to do by their circumstances, but ‘sex work’ (or whatever you choose to call it) is absolutely not okay. Those trapped in it deserve better.


  • Things change slowly, then all at once. We are currently facing the same problems that Europe, the US, Japan and China faced and overcame.

    Also, have you considered moving to a different part of India? Not all regions face the same issues. The northeast is a lot less creepy and a lot more civic-minded. The west is more industrialised and ‘developed’. The south has better educational systems, and so on.



  • If you bought it, and they didn’t compensate you for it, then it is legally yours. (Of course, the work-related data is theirs unless stated otherwise.) If you ask them officially (e.g. e-mail IT support), they have to tell you what, if any, control they have. They can lie, but no one is risking jail term over such small stakes.

    As for software, they might have asked you to install some antivirus / security software, that may give them some control over your computer.

    Also, as the other poster said, they can control anything you do using your Office account. So don’t use your work e-mail for anything personal. And Microsoft may 'back-up your files to the work account’s OneDrive, so go check those systems.

    In general, I don’t think a university would do anything malicious, but they could be incompetent and leak your data to a third party.



  • Every word has stress.

    In most Indian languages, most words are unstressed. There is a distinction between long and short syllables, but that comes from vowel length, not stress. A few words (like him-AA-la-ya) do have stress, but this is the exception and usually happens due to conjugation.

    You probably mean the first phoneme is stressed.

    No, kamala is unstressed.

    And the “rum” sound you’re looking for is called the “schwa”

    Yes.


  • The Indian (Sanskrit) name is pronounced ka-ma-laa (meaning lotus), with no stress, and no gap in between the syllables. The first two 'a’s are pronounced like the ‘u’ in rum, while the last is the same sound but longer (so like the ‘a’ in calm).

    The US Presidential candidate’s name is pronounced the way she likes, which in this case is closer to ko-ma-laa.







  • Write down a list of the software you use (e.g. web browser, office suite, notepad, image viewer, video player, … ). Download Linux Mint from here and use Balena Etcher to write it into a pen drive. Switch off your computer, plug in the pen drive and switch on. DON’T INSTALL YET. Run Linux ‘live’ for a couple of hours, see if everything (speaker, printer, webcam, all the software you listed above) is working correctly.

    Once you have confirmed that all is well, copy your files into an external hard drive, confirm that everything important has been backed up, and then install Linux from the pen drive. (You can have both Windows and Linux on the same computer, but then Windows should not be given internet access or it will ‘update’ and mess up everything. This can be repaired using, for example, this software, but why bother?)