No I’m going to tell you that is still irrelevant. The OP said:

I’ve had one that thought that “SSD” was a kind of RAM, and insisted on installing Windows on a hard drive.

It seems the student thought a SSD is RAM in the sense of “volatile CPU storage” and thus unfit for an OS install. And a SSD is not RAM in that sense of the word.

In the context of setting up a PC a SSD is a drive, not RAM. You couldn’t pull out your RAM DIMMs and just run on your NVME/SATA SSD as RAM instead (unless your CPU/MB support that which to my knowledge isn’t common). I’m not saying that flash memory isn’t random access memory in the general sense of the word, I’m saying that when talking about a PC specifically RAM refers to special memory the motherboard makes directly available to the CPU, and a SSD isn’t that.

Well it’s special in the sense that opposed to the most common kind of RAM, DRAM and SRAM, it has non volatile storage. Which is why it’s referred to as NVRAM instead of simply RAM. Saying RAM usually implies volatile storage in a PC, certainly does in the context of an OS install on a HDD and SSD, and in that context a SSD isn’t RAM. Yes there are minutiae to the terminology, but I don’t see how that’s relevant here.

A special kind of RAM that is power cycle persistent but has other downsides and thus didn’t really have success on the PC market?

Well, could it be considered random access memory?

Not really, a bit further down in the Wiki article it says:

RAM is normally associated with volatile types of memory where stored information is lost if power is removed.

Which is not really the case for SSDs (except for cached data that hasn’t been written yet). That said, yes you can use a SSD as RAM through pagefiles, swap partitions, or whatever, but the same is true for a HDD. So in the context of where to install an OS it’s a rather irrelevant detail. SSDs are power cycle persistent storage.

[…] "And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. […]

Excerpt from the book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer. Longer excerpt available here.

Kemp et al. 2022 - Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios

TL;DR: Societal collapse seems possible, more research is needed.

PSA if you are worried about link parameters giving away where you came from, you should really be worried about HTTP Referrer headers, which are of course turned on by default in most browsers. Be advised turning them off may break some (parts of) certain websites, but most still work fine in my experience.

In Firefox go to about:config page and set network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0.

There are rights and responsibilities associated with a proprietary model… and IMO you (and your permissive government) should not be overriding those rights for your own short-sighted benefit.

Kind of sounds like you misunderstood the initiative to be honest. This only affects games which have been abandoned by the developer, the proprietary model stays perfectly intact as long as you actually keep selling your games.

Meh, essentially it’s just writing “Telecommunicationsourcesurveillance” as a single word without the spaces to indicate it’s a singular thing being referred to (in this case the concept of directly listening on the source device before encryption happens). Might seem weird I guess, but you get used to it pretty quickly.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telekommunikationsüberwachung#Quellen-Telekommunikationsüberwachung

It means “telecommunication source surveillance”.

Well now you lost me entirely. All I wanted to say was that the Geneva Convention is (part of) international law.

Or in other words: Geneva Convention ⊊ International Law.

Hence my confusion about your confusion.

Here’s a big UN document about what Israel can and cannot do under international law…

TL;DR.

Again, I wasn’t agreeing with OP above, I was just pointing out that GC I Article 21 is applicable in Gaza since Israel is a signatory and thus Israel has to follow it (at least de jure if not de facto). This is the case even when Palestine isn’t a signatory to GC I because of Article 2.

I don’t quite follow, the Geneva Convention is international law. All international law is essentially just contracts between nation states, and the GC is one of those.

Wrong again, this is Protocol I which Israel isn’t a signatory to. What I linked is Convention I which Israel is a signatory to.

And this also has nothing to do with the claim you made even if they were, you claimed the Convention doesn’t apply to occupying forces when it explicitly states that it does apply.

Also note that I’m not saying Israel did abide by it (doubt it honestly) just that they are subject to it.

This section of the Geneva Convention does not apply to a belligerent occupying force.

Wrong, see Article 2.

The Convention shall also apply to all cases of partial or total occupation of the territory of a High Contracting Party, even if the said occupation meets with no armed resistance.

Although one of the Powers in conflict may not be a party to the present Convention, the Powers who are parties thereto shall remain bound by it in their mutual relations.

Well actually “don’t do anything illegal” seems to be the thing giving an easy win to cops and politicians here.

“Oh, they are ignoring the laws and putting people in concentration camps? Just politely tell them they are wrong, that’ll show them!”

And you are free to believe otherwise. But sadly I don’t see legal protests having any effect on a government actively seeking to undermine the rule of law.

Insisting on the confines of legality when the opposing side has shed any pretence of legality months (arguably years) ago is… a stance to take. Just not a winning one.

it’s that they’re less competent

Not sure if that’s true actually, the Nazis were supremely incompetent as well. It just doesn’t take that much competence to smash a delicate balance like the separation of powers. You basically need control of one the three branches of government and you are good to try, Trump controls two and this news is about him smashing the third.