GuiA

Ah yes dang. Users who are otherwise constructive members of the site break the rules only on CCP related threads. Not only that, but their rule breaking is only penalized in the minutes after which they post, only to slowly return to the mean over time.

Keep telling yourself that.

It always pains me greatly to read writers from times past about social issues whose voice rings distinctly true today still. Because it means that understanding the problem is completely uncorrelated to being able to do anything about it.

Check out Célestin Freinet too (also untranslated in English AFAIK)

The question isn't whether you can add a cover to the product after the fact, it's whether you can trust a switch on a product to do what the manufacturer says it does.

Yes, what you describe is trivial - and it would be similarly trivial to design a module that appears to respect the switch (regardless of Linux/Windows) and yet records things surreptitiously, only to offload it at a later date.

Remember the amount of effort VW was willing to expand to cheat emissions testing.

I had a laptop with a physical switch for WiFi/Bluetooth in 2006 or so (with a matching orange/blue light that would turn up when you toggled it). The problem was that this was actually all done by a software driver - when I booted into Linux with the laptop I was surprised to find that the bluetooth/wifi modules were on regardless of the switch's position.

At the end of the day, unless you have a really nice microscope, solid understanding of electrical engineering, and a few tens of thousands of hours ahead of you, you have to trust whoever you're buying the hardware from that it will do what they say it will. No amount of hardware efforts can solve the fundamental human trust problem.

There are anecdotal reports of doctors/nurses able to pick up certain typical "illness smells" from their patients. Not sure if it's ever been studied more in depth.

Caffenol is a pretty popular technique, you can find many detailed posts online comparing it with other developers.

I've used it a few times in a pinch when traveling, it's nice. Unfortunately I've never been able to find a fixer formula that's as easy/off the shelf.

It all depends what kind of work you do. I do things that touch embedded hardware and graphics and frequently find myself doing exactly the sort of things you described. If you miss it, it's certainly not gone :) (and I made a conscious decision to build my career around this, rather than fishing for npm modules).

You could theme your phpBB forum, install mods, add lots of fun flourishing touches (like custom ranks), etc. Some forums displayed avatars and post counts, others didn't . All that made every single phpBB forum feel like its own distinct community. I don't see that with Instagram.

I played similar games when I ran forums, but really you're just shuffling the problem around. Bored trolls/extreme ideologues will be delighted to play cat and mouse with your measures, and will feel particularly proud of themselves when they circumvent them creatively.

In the end, you have to decide what outcome you want - using half effective measures hoping that the racists will keep it down, or kicking them out and making it clear that they aren't welcome? You can't have it both ways.