"Now" is an expensive luxury. Don't be surprised it's priced rather luxuriously.

Yes, everyone loves to believe that they are (and always will be) smart and tough enough that THEY don't need any of those pesky nanny-state consumer protection laws. Mr. Galt, is that you?

All of that means that you're buying your discounted hardware with your personal information and your willing agreement to be another statistic in their advertising numbers.

I suspect that's a fair trade for a lot of people, considering how little they actually value their privacy.

You kept the "N hours" but conveniently forgot the "just keeping them entertained" part. Hooray for honest discourse!

Look here: I spend N hours already keeping him fed, sheltered, healthy, and educated. I also have my own responsibilities related to and financially supporting those. If I have a few hours left over, do I want to spend them watching over his shoulder while he plays PokeSmurfVillage or whatever game he's into this week? Fuck no. But I guess that makes me an incompetent parent. Right?

Parenting is a whole lot more than supervising your children while they play. There, you learned something today. You're welcome.

Well, this is where I bow out. I agree entirely that rehabilitation is more worthwhile, but less emphasized (at least in the US, where I live) than retribution. But if we're beginning the discussion with a complete overhaul of the entire criminal justice system, then I think I'll sit out. I came here to talk about Google's payment authorization scheme.

Have a good day.

This "good old days" thinking is lazy and often wrong. My kid has basically all the screen time he wants (I don't set limits), but he plays outside with our neighbors for hours a day, running up and down the street or playing basketball. And you may not have noticed it, but games are quite social these days. He's always trading pokemon or game secrets with his friends who play the same games, or even playing some of them online with the neighbors.

Nobody is saying that surrounding them with screens 24/7 is the answer. And it's not like other modes of entertainment are without risk. I have to supervise my kid to some extent no matter what he's doing--playing with neighbor kids, making something with glue, paint, scissors, etc., or playing games on the tablet. This isn't about parents abdicating their duties to the tablet. This is about an unreasonable system.

If the intersection by my house had no stop signs, I'd go to the city council and say, "Hey! There's an uncontrolled intersection right next to my house, and I can't let my kid out the door without direct supervision, or he could get hurt. There need to be some stop signs there!" That's the answer, not "pay closer attention to your kid you lazy parent!"

Likewise, if I can't let my kid play on the tablet without hovering over his shoulder the whole time to make sure he doesn't accidentally buy $99 worth of fooberries, the best answer isn't to just suck it up and watch him play his game for an hour. The answer is to put in some damn stop signs, and that's all people are asking for here.

This is exactly the problem.

Current situation: Thank you for entering your password to authorize the purchase on screen. I will not bother to mention that you've also authorized unlimited additional purchases over the next half hour.

Bare minimum acceptable solution: Thank you for entering your password to authorize this purchase, as well as unlimited additional purchases for half an hour.

Slightly better: Please enter your password to authorize this purchase, as well as unlimited additional purchases for half an hour.

Good, and easy solution: Thank you for your purchase. Authorize additional purchases for the next (30 minutes | 24 hours | Forever | No thanks, ask for my password next time ).

Yes. You know what, you sound like you are either a child yourself, or someone who hasn't lived as an adult long enough to learn that rules are never perfect, but "everyone should just do the obviously right thing all the time" is not a feasible substitute.

You're definitely going places with that attitude! (Places where the toilet is right next to the bed, most likely.)

Also, you do realize you're commenting on an article about a LAWsuit, right?

That's a compelling rebuttal, but consider this: when a minor (16 or 17 usually) is to be tried as an adult, or an adult is to be declared incompetent to stand trial (insanity defense), a lot of the court's time is taken up deciding one way or the other, independent of the question of guilt. If that process had to be followed for every criminal prosecution, every day, then yes, it would be utterly impractical.

Was not disappointed.

Wow, what a disingenuous comment. Of course the GP didn't mean it would be bad if they did, or that no adults act like children. Obviously he/she meant that there's a certain threshold beyond which a person is (legally) presumed to understand the consequences of their actions, and we call it adulthood. To answer your second, equally ignorant question, it would be totally impractical to make this judgement on a case-by-case basis, as well as introducing some seriously perverse incentives.

Ah yes, the rallying call of the childless. I'm sure that if you ever have kids, you'll have the means and inclination to devote N hours of your own time every day simply to keeping them entertained.

Fallout New Vegas has a man-portable 25mm automatic grenade launcher. It has an on-screen display scrolling what looks like code while the weapon is firing.

The code? It's a piece of BASH scripting. With a crippling syntax error ("if" without closing "fi").

If this was the height of alternate-history pre-war embedded software technology, I can understand why derelict car engines can explode in a nuclear explosion.