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)

They can’t. Of course, they can’t really do it on a remote server either but they choose to pretend they can. If they really wanted to, they could run it through a machine learning system on your phone and just send the result to discord. That wouldn’t be secure, strictly speaking, but it would be good enough for this purpose. The kind of model they could send to a phone wouldn’t be very reliable, but that’s the problem they have anyway so nothing of value is lost

Given that we’re discussing the behaviour of phones, I’m quite certain that there was never a time when they generally had line out ports. Also, I can’t imagine people are connecting their Bluetooth speakers to the wrong interface.

What you’re describing is still wishful thinking, because there’s no world where every consumer device is going to have accurately calibrated volume regardless of whether there’s a protocol which specifies it.

That’s pure wishful thinking. The vast majority of users wouldn’t even know what line level is, and you can’t expect end users to have audio engineering expertise. You also can’t expect anyone other than an audiophile or actual audio engineer to be able to get alll of their consumer electronics conform to such a standard

Agreed, perfectly reasonable precaution so long as it’s possible to calibrate it per device

I get really irritated when my phone limits volume with a notification like this, because the phone has no idea what hardware I have playing the sound. They’ve made some unfounded assumption about how loud 80% volume actually is, and interrupt whatever I’m doing to complain about it

I don’t think sake could serve the role beer did, historically. Certainly in medieval Europe, they made what today would be considered a weak beer to drink for basic hydration. That was by far the easiest way for them to ensure the water was safe to drink.

I’m pretty sure if you tried that with sake, you’d die

Oh yeah. I didn’t even spot that the cop was a bear

Is there a layer missing? The joke seems to revolve around a shadow which isn’t there

I imagine he means things like Chromebook, rather than Chromebook itself. Mass-market consumer hardware which comes with Linux by default

The safety designed into Rust is suddenly foreign to the C family that I’m honestly not sure you can do that. Even “unsafe” Rust doesn’t completely switch off the enforced safety

Those two things aren’t being claimed by the same people.

There are people with functioning brains, who are aware that AI is shit at programming, and there are managers who have been sold a sales pitch and believe that they can replace half of their software engineers.

AI doesn’t actually need to be effective to cost a bunch of jobs, it just needs to have good salespeople. Those jobs will come back when the businesses which decided to rely on AI discover the hole they’ve dug for themselves. That might not be quick though, because there’s no rule saying that major businesses will have competent leaders with good foresight.

There are a million ways to back data up, many of them are as simple as “copy it to removable media”, and don’t require any clever operating system features at all.

What removable media you can use depends on the quantity of data, and how long you need the backup to last. Maybe DVDs, or USB drives. If the data is valuable enough, you can also pay for cloud storage and upload it

The point of this sort of thing is to attract public attention, not to directly persuade the authorities.

They might not care about the starving prisoner, but they’re much more likely to care about the general public turning on them.

How effective it will actually be in this case I couldn’t say, but historically it worked very well for the women’s rights movement.