That’s not strictly true, because online shops for tradespeople often have a toggle to control whether VAT is included (and switch it off by default).

That’s a special case though, because VAT is handled differently between businesses

A VPN can absolutely protect you from hostile software elsewhere on the network, so long as you don’t accept traffic from any source other than the VPN. Doing that correctly is a fairly sophisticated thing to do though, and a sufficiently sophisticated threat might find a way to attack you still.

It all depends on your own technical ability and whether you’re protecting yourself from a script kiddie or palantir.

It sounds like the only person we know was using LLMs was the plaintiff. He believes the court was as well, but I’m not aware of any reason to believe his accusation

Who said anything about overthrowing the whole system? There are plenty of examples of people who got what they wanted by violence, like the suffragettes or the IRA

If you’re attributing “war fighters” to this administration, then you’re mistaken. Maybe they imported it or something, I don’t know, but I know for a fact that the British armed forces have been using the word for a long time. I suspect other NATO and/or commonwealth countries do as well.

It’s supposed to be a generic word which doesn’t imply gender or which service they’re in, or precisely what they do, just generally being a label for everyone involved in carrying out war.

You probably saw something which said the key can’t be remapped, which is likely to be true but only because windows won’t let you, rather than being any kind of technical problem

That’s nonsense. To do what it does, it sends a signal to the operating system. It’s entirely within the operating system’s power to do something different when it gets that signal

I can’t see how they’d do it, proton gets installed by the steam client. That client doesn’t run with root privilege, so at the very least they’d have to trigger a password dialog which would be highly obvious.

It does matter, because that Google integration didn’t happen by magic. Whatever the site is, they chose to do things that way.

The only way Google stops things like this is if they get actual pushback, and the only realistic way to achieve that is to make the people using their service reconsider.

Like fuck it is.

All sucking up to trump achieves is making yourself more vulnerable to his next mood swing. The smart leaders have been scrambling to insulate themselves from the USA, not make themselves more dependent

Pretty sure that would be advertising from space, rather than in space, which would definitely make a difference in this case

Yes, and they have a plan for what happens if the rocket explodes. It wouldn’t be completely safe against an explosion this intense, but the dragon capsule (like all manned vehicles, aside from the very notable exception of the space shuttle) can eject itself from the rocket to protect the crew from explosions

Nobody was hurt. As a general rule nobody fuels a rocket without planning as if it’s going to explode in exactly this fashion. The pad didn’t survive, but nobody was anywhere near this thing when it blew up

Pinning the CPU clock uses more power, and generates more heat. If it were “sensible” to do so, then the CPUs for consumer devices wouldn’t have variable clock speeds to begin with.

Since people do care about devices getting hot in their hands, and draining batteries, this is a stupid and lazy fix for a problem of their own making and they’re expecting users to put up with the problems it causes in exchange for Microsoft being able to treat their operating system the same way social media companies treat their feeds

Chernobyl is in Ukraine, not Russia, so sending the money to a russian company would be especially transparently fraudulent.

Whether that rules it out or not, I choose not to speculate

Also, the answer to your actual question is no. There’s definitely no way to block people from using any particular characters at the kernel level.

What you seem to be asking for is a way to absolutely forbid all software from writing certain characters to files, and/or from reading those characters. Aside from requiring that the kernel inspect all data in detail before letting other software have it, which would slow everything way down, it would prevent anyone from reading or writing binary data which happens to contain those sequences of bytes by coincidence. Binary data includes things like the programs which make the system work, so blocking those characters would be terminal

It ought to look like a bunch of □, which is the glyph generally used to indicate that the font has nothing to represent the character.

Specifically you’d expect U+25A1 □ WHITE SQUARE

Which is more than the law requires. What they’re supposed to report is an age bracket. You don’t need to store someone’s precise date of birth, and you certainly don’t need to make it available to other software, to report a broad age bracket

Optional as far as systemd is concerned, perhaps, but it’s designed to support a whole suite of software which will expect it to be used.

They’re also making dubious decisions about how it will be done, such as how they’ll handle the fact that date of birth is PII and something advertisers will be delighted to know. The laws they’re trying to support require very limited information, but they’re storing far more than that and they’ve actively decided not to protect it properly.

However optional it may be, they’re effectively defining the standard for what will be stored and how it will be accessed by all of the software which will use it

Yellowstone would really suck, but it would suck differently than nuclear winter.

For starters, I don’t think it would be directly catastrophic on the other side of the world. The Americas would be pretty fucked, but some places would probably only see climate problems rather than the actual end of days.

Also, nuclear winter would include nuclear fallout. It would involve far less actual material coming out of the sky, but what it did bring would be poison in a way which volcanic ash wouldn’t really match (not to say volcanic eruptions aren’t poisonous, but they’re not persistently and insidiously poisonous like radioactive decay could be)