The internet has many strange rules, one of the unwritten ones is "if little Timmy wants titties, little Timmy is going to find titties".
No matter how you hard you try, you're not going to stop this phenomenon. You'll just push kids to sites that refuse to comply (usually the dodgy ones), or inhabit grey areas (a lot of streamer content counts as softcore), or they'll get Nd a workaround (current VPN situation), or they'll just gaslight an AI model into generating porn.
Trying to block access isn't viable as there is always a work around, what is needed is someone sitting down with a kid to put it into context. That's not the job of the government, that's the job of a parent.
I'll put this thought out here for anyone saying "they voted for Brexit".
Given the age divide on that vote, most folks who voted for it are enjoying retirement, or are just plain dead.
Brexit is a root cause, however simple corporate greed and mismanagement are also a huge factor of the UK's dysfunction. Keep in mind, most of our large companies are owned by the US or countries in Europe (so the profits vanish overseas); a lot of our housing acts as an investment for the wealthy of other nations (driving the cost of living crisis); we've also got the "north/south" divide, where all the wealth and investment stats in and around London.
We're also exiting over a decade under a party who see poverty as a moral failing, and voted in a party that lacks the balls to make the changes needed to begin reversing these issues.
So, all things said, there's a lot more at play than just the act of national self harm that was Brexit.
So, if your field appears instantly/imminently monetisable, then the private sector is an option. However, the wider benefits of your research are VERY unlikely to reach the wider public in your lifetime. Yes, you will basically be working to make someone else rich. However, this kind of grant is very likely to succeed in academic settings as universities love patents.
If you're doing abstract or fundamental research, you're pretty much out of luck - the private sector does not want anything to do with this. However, it's little better in the academic sector because you have to spend almost all your time chasing grants, or teaching topics outside your expertise (i.e. the ones industry sees immediate value in) to survive.
In short, there is a lot of options to finish things (because everyone loves intellectual property as an asset), but very few to develop them (no-one likes to pay for the groundwork).
Windows on an external drive isn't officially supported if I remember right. Your screenshot seems to support that.
Honestly, I'd be leery of installing an OS on an external drive as they tend not to age well with heavy use.
Are you trying to necro a laptop with a dead drive? If so, depending on the model, it might just be worth replacing the internal drive so then you can go ahead with your dual boot plan.
Also, quick tip, install windows, then disable fast startup in windows, then disable safeboot in your bios. Otherwise, when it comes time to install mint, you might hit issues with windows saying "NO, MY DRIVE".
If you install mint and get no grub screen, just boot mint with your live usb and look up repairing grub - should be nice and easy.
Teaching in a school has greatly changed over the past 3 decades. It's still a rewarding career, but not one I wanted to stick with - the pressure to work miracles is too high, and the support just isn't there to do so.
It's lightweight, can run portably, and has some oddly specific but useful features such as dual window linked scrolling, syntax highlighting, and even allows regex for search/replace which is neat.
You can use it for coding (I use it for short python scripts), but that isn't it's main use.
VScode is, primarily, an IDE - not really something you use as a plain text editor.
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