That's interesting. I always get a bout of depression when the weather changes drastically (increase in temp, drop in pressure). I noticed that when I'm able to poop again, afterwards it starts to get better. Maybe I need to take stuff to speed up digestion?
I don't know, I'm not really impressed by their mail-client or their calendar software. Lots of room for improvement, but then again there's already Thunderbird.
AFAIK he was also a mystic of a kind and what we would call a "fringe scienctist" in today language. Which makes a curious case when such a character actually builds serious sophisticated working products like cutting-edge airplane designs. The latter leading to a clue that his theories may be worth exploring (they still can be wrong, but there is a chance of finding some interesting food for thought there). Another example of an inventor of similar kind coming into my mind obviously is Nikola Tesla.
Yes, it was a way for western powers to show their support of free speech and liberal values. Now that the communist block is gone, there is less incentive to support the arts and claim cultural victory.
Actually, communism controls our own movie industry. Take the famous case of the remake of Red Dawn where they changed the antagonist from China to North Korea. That was done at the TOP levels, communist pressure on Obama, who then exerted pressure on the studio. On behalf of Xi.
John Cena learning Chinese so he could apologize for supporting pro-democracy protests in Taiwan is another one. Our bland culture is partly designed by communism.
> That was done at the TOP levels, communist pressure on Obama, who then exerted pressure on the studio. On behalf of Xi.
Source? All I can find is https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/18/407619652/... a producer named Peter Shiao claiming that "Chinese diplomats asked him to arrange a conversation with the makers of Red Dawn" but by then they "were already erasing references to China in post-production." Which seems to suggest they were persuaded by some other means, but doesn't tell us how.
Probably not some shadowy conspiracy. There was a lot of pandering to China from the studios back then because they held onto the hope that the market in China would open up to them more. But it never really materialized.
You don't need a conspiracy theory here when there is a far simpler explanation:
China has 1B potential viewers/customers that hollywood wants as an audience to grow and increase profit, so they'll do their best not to anger the chinese government. As a consequence movies avoid showing China in a bad light and they avoid topic that could get movies censored or forbidden in China.
Back in the 90s, I went for 215 KM/h with a Audi 100, but found it too exhausting. Everything goes so fast, and you have to be super-aware at all times. I doubt I drove more than 5 minutes at that speed.
You forgot a favorite reply to criticism of open source projects, namely "If you don't like it, fix it yourself, here's the code." In the past I felt that daring to criticise Gimp was equivalent to criticising the idea of Open Source itself.
B. That is familiar with the software stack used by the application
C. Has enough time and energy to investigate the root cause of the bug or a proper design for the feature
D. Has enough time and energy to design the fix/feature, implement it properly, write tests, jump through all the hoops
E. Send the pull request
... sometimes the PR still languishes for years or the nightmare scenario, is discarded during a big rewrite that doesn't actually cover this requirement...
So even the code being out there isn't a silver bullet.
Then don't just send a PR: maintain your own fork.
I think that's the bigger part of open source. You can fork it, change it to your needs, and not give a damn what anyone else thinks about your changes.
Oh, that other open source trope, I should publish a book.
Because maintaining an entire fork of any non trivial software is... trivial :-)
Let's just admit that these are complex problems and frankly after watching the hype for almost 20 years, open source proved to be an alternative and a good refuge for many things but on the end user side the early hype until 2008 or so was 80% wrong.
