In some places electrical resistive heat is expensive but that is not the point here. Some people try to argue that incandescent bulbs are not efficient electrical heaters which is just not true. One interesting practical effect of this is that compact fluorescents save significantly less money in colder places. That is what the document I linked to was all about.

Often the idea comes up that incandescent bulbs are bad at heating a house. The first law of thermodynamics suggests that this can not be true. If you are not sold on the theory consider this discussion of a study where the heating efficiency of incandescent lighting was checked experimentally:

Benchmarking Home Energy Savings from Energy-Efficient Lighting

A quote from the document: "With conventional lighting, between 89 to 96 per cent of lighting energy use is converted to heat and contributes to space heating as internal gains."

I have tried various media centreish things over the years. The problem is that for a particular amount of computing power bigger is better. Once you cross the transition to something with a fan then larger fans are quieter. Presently I have a bog standard ATX case in the living room. The large ATX power supply has a large slow turning fan. The CPU has a huge heat sink with a large slow turning fan (I think it is a Golden Orb II). Video is integrated. The result is a lot quieter than the projector it drives, even when the projector is on low mode. That is with the computer sitting right beside the couch. I presently have a dual core Athlon in there. If I run short of CPU I can just add cores. Much simpler than fooling around with hardware acceleration.

Adding a video card with a big heatsink (no fan) gets me a free living room computer using Linux multiseat (which seems to work well now). I control the projector session with one of those wireless multimedia keyboards with a built in trackball. I no longer bother with media centre software or a remote control. That includes recorded TV. It is just a computer that happens to be in the living room. It ends up being a lot simpler.

The original poster was talking about "Indian civil society". I am not sure what events in some other random country have to do with this.

Research has shown that commercial pilots make lots of errors all the time. These same pilots are really good at catching errors. If you recorded everything they do it would significantly add to pilot workload as they would have to try to anticipate less important things. They would have to try to do everything right the first time. This would reduce pilot effectiveness and thus safety.

I may be insensitive but this strikes me as quite funny. Someone reports a bug. Since the vender is famous for heel dragging the submitter gives them the chance to commit to a reasonable time frame.

Submitter: Here is a significant security vulnerability that you guys have missed for a zillion years. ... 3 days of silence ...

Vender: Hey! Thanks ever so much for your bug report! We are working really really hard to come up with a response on that 60 day thing! Just give us another 3 days and then we might actually commit! You didn't have anything else better to do with your life anyway right? Have a super day!

Submitter: You seem to be confused here. I do not have to take your crap. Bug disclosed. have a super day!

Vender: Oh no! You never warned us that you were not willing to let us screw around with you indefinitely! How terribly irresponsible of you!

Sounds like a happy ending to me...

It turns out that the free running human circadian cycle is quite close to 24 hours. There was a study that came up with something like 25 hours. Subsequent experiments did not. A possible reason for the discrepancy (or so the legend goes) was the presence of two 60W light bulbs in the experiment that came up with the 25 hour figure. They were for comfort light during the dim part of the experiment. It is sort of impractical to keep people in total darkness for long periods. These days, people doing this sort of experiment use very low light levels ( 10lux) for the "dark" phase.

For the Linux/BSD using crowd there is Redshift which does more or less the same thing as f.lux. I've been using redshift for a while now. I've noticed that here at my somewhat northern latitude (Winnipeg) that it is not really right for people who want to better regulate their circadian rhythm as it follows what the sun is doing, which of course is part of the problem. I think I am going to have to try setting the latitude to zero.

I admit that the CNN article is one of the better discussions of this topic to come out of a news outlet but I of course like my summary better. It is located here.

... In a signal-enabled environment there can't be any policy that would ensure the deterministic state of the flag, even if you set it explicitly before each flag-dependent operation. ...

My understanding of this is that the problem occurs when the kernel fails to clear the direction flag before calling the user space handler. I have heard nothing about anything to do with the hardware interrupt that might of originally caused the signal (which seems to be related to the sort of thing you are referring to).

Bruce