I can imagine Apple later removing the "paste anyway" option and requiring you to go to Settings > Privacy to confirm the action, like how they've done with running apps downloaded off of the internet

It's a function implemented in the shipped terminal.app. If you use a third party terminal app, it won't have the protection. Chances are if you're using a third party terminal you're probably sophisticated enough to not blindly run shell commands

Why is it the business of my OS vendor how old I am?

Because it's an alternative to websites asking your age.

The option is the website could verify your age. Or it could hand it off to the OS to handle that part. (Its not like there isn't precedent - things like passkeys and video decoding are passed from the browser to the OS).

If the OS handles it, great. The age verification gate is passed and you can do whatever you're allowed to.

Else, well, you then need to submit 2 pieces of ID to the website to prove your age where that personal information will be stored for an indefinite period of time on an insecure server waiting for someone to hack it.

OSes from Apple, Microsoft and Google pretty much know your age. This lets sites do the age verification check without you have to lift a finger. Of course, a certain other popular OS is not mentioned. For those wanting to "fight the system", chances are you'll just be like those using a VPN hitting CloudFlare protected sites. Either having to submit ID, or the site refusing you entry because they don't want to hold onto people's ID.

Of course, the better idea is to fix the legislation but that would likely push age verification back to the site and ID submissions. So maybe the better solution is to fix the legislation so sites don't have to check ages and just not do dark pattern stuff.

You also forgot things like virtual memory - both in separating process address spaces and in using disk as memory, protected memory, memory management, and all leading up to virtual machines (partitions) letting you run multiple OSes on the same machine.

Some of IBM's latest mainframes are just wild in their I/O and interconnects. Even the CPU specs are just strange and off the charts.

About the most annoying this about IBM is that their names for stuff like this doesn't match what most people would call the technology today - they have a totally different set of jargon for computing that's basically completely different from what people who didn't grow up with IBM computing had. I know at least one difference that tripped people up - bit 0 is the LSB in basically all of modern computing. Escept it's the MSB for IBM CPUs, and it tripped up people when it made it to consumer stuff like PowerPC. I know the first few PowerPC boards we had needed a re-spin because the hardware engineer messed up the bit orders.

Well no Switch 2 or PS5 for me. Going to stick with my Switch 1 until things settle down.

The Switch 2 is probably one you might want to get sooner rather than later (i.e., before Nintendo jacks up the price - they haven't yet).

Even if all you do with it is play Switch 1 games as memory bandwidth problems with the Switch 1 meant many games were stuck at sub-30 FPS and basically unplayable. The Switch 2 runs them at a buttery smooth 60 FPS locked which turns your games into something actually fun to play.

It's not just that the Switch 2 is faster, it's that the Switch 2 fixed a number of bottlenecks with the Tegra chip so Switch 1 games no longer ended up with sub 30 FPS or such.

The PS5 can be held off especially if you have a PS4 as there's nothing really that's PS5 only that isn't already on PS4.

But going from the Switch 1 to the Switch 2 is well worth the upgrade price especially as later games just couldn't do 30 FPS.

Chips aren't magic. In fact, they're one of the worst things in the world, because they're extremely proprietary. As in each vet has to have a scanner capable of reading each manufacturer's chip

They can detect the presence of a chip, but if they don't have the right reader, it doesn't read. And that gets you an ID number, it has to be looked up in the manufacturer's database.

That's why when that chip manufacturer went bankrupt, they told everyone they had to get their pets re-chipped with a new one, because their chip will no longer have the database backing it up.

Also, if you move, you need to update the manufacturer with your new details - how many pets have chips but their details were not updated so it was not possible to contact the original owner.

Or even worse, because chips are proprietary, they simply couldn't read the chip at all. Each reader is for one manufacturer so vets typically only carry a couple of readers.

Chips do help, as do tattoos. But also make sure they have ID tags on their collars - dog licenses, rabies tags, and AirTags can all ID your pet provided they aren't separated from their collars. (Yeah, yeah, but it's possible to collar train your dog so they always wear them, and many of the nicer ones have built in AirTag pockets). They do make GPS trackers as well, but they're kind of large so it's only suitable for larger dogs.

There's plenty of ways to ID your pet. Use all of them - the dog license and rabies tags offer very up to date information on the owner since they're renewed annually. The AirTag can both let you leave contact information as well as help you track your pet. The chip and tattoo are there in case your pet manages to take off their collar (which they usually shouldn't if properly trained).

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

Mostly just in the bulk, low barriers to entry, and pervasiveness(like a lot of things social media). The case of actors actually goes back a long way; state laws regarding compensation of child actors were spurred by the case of one who was popular in the 1920s and litigated with his parents over where the money wasn't in 1939. That case doesn't provide for takedowns; but it's also the case that filmmakers are normally looking for children to play characters; rather than to do 'candid' intense documentaries of them at home; so the degree of public exposure of private life is presumably deemed to be less; with the main issue being children who were...definitely...getting a solid education while on stage finding that all the money was gone when it became their problem.

Child-blogging, by contrast, seems to reward verisimilitude (if not necessarily truth) and invasiveness, relatively pervasive in-home mining for 'content', so presumably seems better served by removal-focused options; though there has definitely been talk about covering the economic angle in line with child actors.

I don't even know what the deal is with child beauty pageants, or how something you'd assume is a salacious bit of slander about what pedophile cabals are totally doing, somewhere, is actually a thing a slice of parents are into, way, way, into. Apparently that's a third rail to someone, though, as the only jurisdiction I'm aware of with significant restrictions on them is France.

Unless quantum computing becomes cheap and comparatively widely available quite quickly after becoming viable passwords seem like they'll be a manageable problem. Nobody likes rotating them; but it's merely tedious to do and the passwords themselves are of zero interest unless they are still being accepted. If it does go from 'not possible' to 'so cheap we can just go through through in bulk' overnight that could ruin some people's days; but if there's any interval of 'nope, the fancy physics machine in the dilution refrigerator is currently booked by someone with a nation state intelligence budget' you can just rotate older credentials.

Now, if you were hoping that encryption was going to save any secrets that are interesting in and of themselves that got out in encrypted form; then you have a problem. Those can't be readily changed and will just be waiting.

Extremely unsafe reputationally, and extremely dubious in terms of profits.

Especially for an administration who's priority is to eliminate pornography as an evil to society and why the US isn't having more babies and getting divorced way too often.

It's in the book. Everything Trump has done has followed Project 2025 (and now Project 2026) book. Getting rid of pornographic materials is pretty much the first chapter.

that yummy koolaid

Plus the whole 'fucking dystopian' angle. On the one hand we've got people bitching about 'civilizational decline'; but we want 'robot philosophers' teaching children? I'm not against the occasional scantronned multiple choice test; but outsourcing philosophy to save on those oh-so-expensive adjuncts seems like the sort of thing you only do to children being groomed for mindless servitude or because you've entirely given up on humanity as anything but an ingredient in pump and dump schemes.

Well at least someone can get their 11th version of something running correctly.

Well, we technically skilled Windows 9 (the version after Windows 8 was Windows 10), so...

Then again, if you want to toss in the fact that the Windows NT line started at 3.5, or add in the various versions of Windows from MS-DOS and NT....

Republicans Before MAGA: Tyranny and government overreach are bad! Now hand me my guns
MAGA Republicans Now: If it's alright for China, it's alright for us - as long as our cult leader is the one in power. And no one needs guns, you shouldn't be carrying them

FTFY.

MacOS was insanely brittle to write software for too, even by MS-DOS standards. The popular MS-DOS compilers had enough checks built-in to debug builds that if you had a pointer problem your program would just crash into the debugger, it was remarkable. 16-bit windows was pretty resilient too - if you had an out of bounds error and you had used GlobalAlloc your program would again just crash (allocations were rounded up to the next 16 bytes, so you might have a silent bug ... but the OS would not crash). On MacOS before Yellow Box your whole-ass computer would crash when you had a pointer problem.

Now, 16-bit Windows was nowhere near as bulletproof as 32-bit Windows, that is for sure. Resource leaks were not cleaned up for you and there wasn't a whole lot of sanity checking on structures passed to the OS. But it was far more bulletproof than MacOS that is for sure.

Win16 was resilient only because of the 386 which had a built in MMU. Classic MacOS ran without an MMU and didn't assume you had one. There were some features that required an MMU but the OS was written to not expect one. Heck, MacOS didn't really have the usermode-kernel mode functinality because that was broken in the 68000 (fixed in the 68010 - several instructions were not marked privileged when they should be)

Win16 in 386 enhanced mode had a whole pile of protections inherent in the 386 CPU which meant you could get some protections out there, though the dreaded "General Protection Fault" wasn't that far away.

Classic MacOS had none of that - no MMU, no userspace-kernel space separation (it ran in supervisor mode only). So a wild pointer can easily corrupt things.

It's why Apple had so many "next OS" projects from MkLinux (Mach kernel core with Linux around it - because at the time Linux didn't have a PowerPC port), Copland and others. It took them inheriting NextStep for them to actually move to something more robust, which was a Mach kernel with BSD.

The only reason MS-DOS was reliable was the damned segmentation of the 8086 meant your segment pointers had to be good and MS-DOS could be somewhat protected because of it. Anyone dealing with the memory map had a lot of fun with that. But it also meant a wild ass DS pointer would be more likely to corrupt your data segment than it would something MS-DOS needed. 68000 was a flat address space so a wild pointer could easily access anything. (Even worse were bad programming habits - the index registers were 32 bit, but only the lower 24 bits made it onto the address bus as the 68000 only had 24 address lines. Thus, people would use the upper 8 bits to store data with, including the Mac ROMs. That's what the "32-bit clean" meant in the MacOS days - none of the code you used would actually use the upper 8 bits of the index registers to store data so they could refer to a proper 32 bit address).

The amazing thing would be that Classic MacOS actually managed to run like that in 1999 and beyond (it took until OS X 10.2 or 10.3 when Apple stopped supporting dual booting back into Classic)