America isn't even the most democratic country in the Americas, but that's clearly not the point they're making.

If the title was "...end of world democracy" you'd have a point but given how much fascistic rhetoric and policy has increased around the world since trunpism it's fair to say many countries are following the US lead here.

I build Linux routers for my day job. Some advice:

• your firewall should be an appliance first and foremost; you apply appropriate settings and then other than periodic updates, you should leave it TF alone. If your firewall is on a machine that you regularly modify, you will one day change your firewall settings unknowingly. Put all your other devices behind said firewall appliance. A physical device is best, since correctly forwarding everything to your firewall comes under the "will one day unknowingly modify" category.

• use open source firewall & routing software such as OpenWRT and PFSense. Any commercial router that keeps up to date and patches security vulnerabilities, you cannot afford.

The difficulty is that a VPN isn't just a product like ProtonVPN, it's a huge family of software and protocols.

You can block vpn.protonvpn.com, but since most operating systems come with VPN functionality out of the box, you'd have to start listening to all traffic (not just DNS lookups) and blocking ALL packets that might be VPN traffic without causing regular disruption to non-vpn traffic.

TL;DR: it's easy to prevent unmotivated users from downloading a VPN app. It's practically impossible to block a motivated user from using a VPN, and they're the users you particularly care about.

hat's a bad faith interpretation of "the people control the means of production".

I want you to consider the difference between the work needed to complete a task, and the work needed to manage a workplace: for one of those tasks, only the experts in that task can meaningfully contribute to the outcome, whereas for the other, everybody who is part of the workplace has meaningful input.

I don't know about your experience, but everywhere I've worked there have been people "on the ground" who get to see the inefficiencies in the logistics of their day to day jobs; in a good job a manager will listen and implement changes, but why should the workers be beholden to this middleman who doesn't know how the job works?

I've also had plenty of roles where management have been "telling me where to cut".

Likely a combination of 4 things:

1. They have third party firmware in their blobs that they are under NDA regarding the source code.

2. They believe in the source code is a large part of their success and don't want to reveal it.

3. They believe giving out the source code will allow many inferior variants of the software, impacting their brand.

4. Control; the more source code they have in mesa the more of their code can be rejected by mesa. Keeping their stuff as blobs allows them to put in whatever hacks they want.

Blaming the creation of a new law on anybody except the lawmakers is a pretty shit take, but blaming it on 150 year old colonialism is actually infantilistic.

Memory safety is likely to prevent a lot of bugs. Not necessarily in the kernel proper, I honestly don't see it being used widely there for a while.

In third party drivers is where I see the largest benefit; there are plenty of manufacturers who will build a shitty driver for their device, say that it targets Linux 4.19, and then never support/update it. I have seen quite a few third party drivers for my work and I am not impressed; security flaws, memory leaks, disabling of sensible warnings. Having future drivers written in rust would force these companies to build a working driver that didn't require months of trawling through to fix issues.

Now that I think about it, in 10 years I'll probably be complaining about massive unsafe blocks everywhere...

Any government which makes caffeine illegal must be prepared to enforce that law with mass violence, or let it be ignored.

Given how unlikely your average cop is going to enforce a law they regularly brea... Oh, nevermind. Yeah it'd be a shit show. Demonstrations, arrests, black markets, the whole nine yards.

Until it marks you as unlicensed because you used a new motherboard.

Even if they don't, buying this game still goes in to lining JKRs pockets, something she has explicitly considered as validation of her beliefs.

The makers of the movies, and the publishers of the books also probably didn't all have anti-trans views, but they don't have to for JKR to use them to cause harm.

I get it, the devs of a good game don't deserve to be attached to her, but you've got to draw the line somewhere and this is where I've chosen to draw mine.

• bcachefs; I currently use zfs and am not a huge fan of btrfs. Having another filesystem mainlined will be fun.

• eBPF, particularly if somebody picks up after the presumably abandoned bpfilter.

• Improved/matured support for rust written drivers. I'm not so fussed about in-tree work, but future third party drivers being written in a safer language would be a nice benefit.

• long term: the newly introduced accelerator section of the kernel might make SoCs with NPUs and the like have better software support.

• very hyped for plasma 6, and Cosmic both. I've got a lot of confidence in KDE devs, and Cosmic previews look very nice.

• NixOS has been a really cool distro for a while, but it also looks to have a solid build system from which interesting derivatives will show up.

NixOS needs what is IMO the killer feature of Arch: the wiki.

Comprehensive documentation on not only the OS but the additional packages that we use is what drew me to Arch, and the thing that makes me swear in frustration whenever I have to use Ubuntu/Debian.

NixOS is an excellent OS that has the promise of being every bit as hackable as Arch, but far more stable. Problem is, configuration is very different and needs extensive documentation to reduce that friction point.