You have absolutely no idea about what you are talking, and about the world. The article above talks about russian misinformation, both about the war and the space station. It tells everything that your first and single idea is not that the russian media is a liar.

I am living in a so called illiberal "democracy", Hungary, which is the member of the EU. Yet no opponent party politician entered the state funded state and private propaganda media for years. Except one case, when the only question he received whether he came on bicycle or car.

If you think that the US media is the biggest liar, than either you have not seen anything else other than US media, or worse, you haven't seen anything else than russian or similar propaganda media, which washed your brain thoroughly.

That is why there is an X button on ads. You click on it and select "I don't want this type of ad, because I have already purchased that product".

The bill doesn't say that coding is a replacement of foreign language. It says that you have to do something in the school anyway, and until now you had no choice, you have to learn a foreign language, now you can choose to learn a programming language. And yes, maybe you should be allowed to choose carpentry instead of learning a programming language.

The Hungarian prime minister's puppets brought up 90% of the media using stolen taxpayer money, including all regional newspapers and the two largest internet news site and all television channels except one neutral. They converted the state media into propaganda centers, they fund it with a hella amount of taxpayer money. This state media doesn't allow any opposition politician to enter their buildings. The state propaganda lose each and every lawsuit about their lies, but it does not make any difference, they pay the fine from taxpayer money.

Because they do not have the money to outright buy Facebook and Twitter, they would like to use law and advertisement money to convert it to a propaganda channel as well.

I do not like Facebook moderation's policy, although I do not know how could they be better, but I am sure that whatever the Hungarian government proposes is seriously dangerous to democracy and freedom of speech.

"A far better idea would be to disable the Caps Lock. This will only inconvenience the fundamentally stupid."

Ironically, just the opposite. Caps Lock is frequently used by touch-typists.

Quoting from Sean Wrona:
" I recommend using caps lock instead of shift to type capital letters to allow more flexibility in the hand that you would normally use shift with."

However, I agree - although for different reasons ;) - that keyboards should be more easily customizable even across different devices.

Tape backup is the most redundant backup by its nature. You change tapes (or a tape library change them) typically at least once a day. Moreover, most tapes are offline or write-once and some are usually offsite. The read head is behind the write head, so the tape drive immediately reads back anything which is written out and if there is an error it fixes it. In addition ecc is used if some bits go wrong later.

That is quite strange, considering the newegg's business model is not ad supported. Actually I checked now, and I do not see any ads on their pages. There are only sponsored products.

Newegg is not relevant to this discussion. An ad-supported site can only lose ad views, and if you visit them with ad-blocker then they already lost that views, they cannot lose anything more.

If they really do check for ad-blockers then the reason may be that those buggy ad-blockers break their site.

Interest based ads pay at least three times more than contextual ads. In other words you would have to see 3-5 times more ads for the same content, which is impossible. They are indeed off the table for 80% of the current web.

"Where are micropayments?"

They tried several times in different ways but almost nobody wanted to use them. Most people do not want to pay, even if it is only 1 cent and only one click. On the other hand many more people happily setup and manage and sometimes pay for an ad-blocker. Some web sites experience about 20% of their visitors use ad-blocker. I do not know why.

If you do not want to see ads, and you do not want to pay either for a subscripton, then do not visit ad supported web pages. That is so simple.

I do not buy into the security argument. I have not used ad-blockers for 20 years and I have never got a malware infection. On the other hand I regularly see problems caused by antimalware software - including ad-blockers - on customers' and friends' PCs.

I also do not buy into the bandwidth usage argument either. You are not forced to visit any website except some government related.

If you still use ad-blockers, than do not cry when google and web sites use anti-ad-blockers. Although I doubt that google's intention was to block ad-blockers, more likely they indeed want to prevent extensions slowing down the browser by misusing apis which were introduced for a different purpose with different assumptions.

What do they lose? Nothing. If you use adblocker and you have no paid subscription, then you are more like a beggar than a customer.

Do you know that you cannot have a website not blocked by the communist party without a local presence, which for a small site is practically imposible to have? In essence the chinese communists banned every foreign site if there is chat or forum or any other service which can be used for free speech. Trump could ban half of the Chinese apps, and he would be still a gentleman compared to the communist china.