The laws in several countries are going to require it. My preferred way is for the OS to offer a flag of "This user is of legal age in this region based on information provided to the administrator of this computer." I'll leave it up to the people with compilers to comply or not with their local laws.

My proposal is stuff the flags in a sysctl user.$UID.age var. and then let the browser send info off to other sites just like it does with language selection. That way a pam module (or systemd) can set an over/under age of majority for the region and then let the browser send a "yes/no" flag. The pam module or sysd can calulate that based on a birthday or a +18 flag so you may have to log in to reset it but the birthdate is never sent to the browser let alone to the end web sites.

This gives schools a way to control content. It allows parents to control content. It allows home router vendors to claim to control content. It allows web sites to stop annoying users about being above 16,18 or 21 depending on what they are pushing. The politicians will look at it and say the industry is working with them while patting themselves on the back.

The other solution is let the politician's owners come up with a solution and that will be an expensive id solution that tracks everyone through the web with no way to opt out.

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.

This debate has been going on for at least a couple of decades. I remember back in the Usenet days, when AOL and other early ISP users first started showing up in droves with whacked out untraceable bang paths that people were trying to sort out technical solutions, usually involving some servers tarpitting some domains, with the inevitable consequence that valid users (by whatever definition any given Usenet group had) were blocked.

In a way, AI bots aren't any different than the spam problem on fax machines and email; universal low-barrier delivery meets large scale programmatic swill. AI allows complexity that earlier spambots couldn't dream of, when the most sophisticated way of defeating filters was spelling "porn" as "pr0n" and a bit of header fuckery. In the end there is only two ways to go; either do what filtering you can and accept some degree of false positives, or go to identification systems that will, one way or the other, compromise anonymity, because make no mistake, once you start storing any kind of data linking an account to an actual human being; biometric, picture ID, phone number, mailing address or whatever, it won't take long for the court order to show up demanding you hand over all the de-anonymized account data to find the person distributing child porn, drugs, or calling their local political representative dirty names.

I'm in favor of fixing this properly before the politicians mandate something stupid.
My proposal is a sysctl value set by a pam module (or systemd on systems infected with that). The browser then does something like language verification much like the HTTP Language headers. Those can be intercepted, checked or forced in environments that have to provide web access to kids like schools. A web site should be able to ask for something like Australia's under 16 and can return a AGE_AU_VIC_Under_16=True if and only if configured to do so. This allows things like online news papers to allow under 16 access to news but not the discussion forums. The proposal still needs work, but it allows for parents to set things as they wish and keep the politicians out of it while letting them claim they fixed it. In the past local ISPs were required to give out software to lock down kids computers and the take up was smaller than the number of people who supported the law.

Neo and Android-based Chromebooks, and "good-enough" Office alternatives like Google Docs and I would argue even LibreOffice (I use it almost exclusively these days), mean Microsoft is suffering a differentiation crisis. They'll likely have the corporate lock for some time to come, though they've managed to fuck up Outlook so badly that I have to be wondering if the only thing really keeping the big guys locked in as Teams at this point.

MS's ability to leverage Windows as the platform is decaying, and the "bells and whistles" approach has managed to alienate a lot of users. People are at the point where they use Windows because they have to, but there's enough platform-agnostic functionality out there that the old lock-ins they relied on to keep Windows dominant are becoming more like prisons for their own development teams.

I know MacOS has its critics, and in its own way it has its UI lock in, but after using it now for four years, and my use of Windows now being reduced to an RDP session at work, I have to say the experience overall has been pretty pleasant and productive. The lack of update nagging, the sheer horsepower of Apple Silicon, an actual *nix prompt instead of WSL, printing that isn't an absolute shitshow (and this is saying something because Windows used to be the reigning heavyweight champion of plug and play printer handling).

Windows 11 is its own type of hell, and every time I'm forced to use it I find it a slow, bloated, unintuitive mess. It feels like Windows 7 if you had let your 12 year old kid download a whole bunch of dubious software and now the desktop and taskbar do strange things while spam spontaneously appears. If someone had shown me Windows 11 fifteen years ago I would have gone "Holy shit man, your Windows 7 machine has been rootkitted!"

You don't read the news, do you?

The Land of the Free is really becoming the Land of the Constrained. Pretty soon it will also be the Land of the Non-voter.

I can still run Eclipse without any issues on old M1 MacBook Pro with 8gb, about 5 years old now. Frankly Apple Silicon is just a beast and no matter how much people try to hand wave it away, these machines with the MacOS optimizations are beasts. I still take my M1 out on the road because if it gets damaged, it will still have paid for itself. I honestly cannot imagine going back to Intel/AMD and Windows, and every time I'm forced to use Windows, even on decent hardware, I'm come away realizing just how inferior the whole ecosystem is. It's sole advantage, and it's a big one, is that the software library for x64/Windows is massive.

The number of people that ever repaired their laptop has always been exceedingly small. Why would Apple give a damn about such a niche?

If even people who are in the US legally can be arrested and held, then it's just plain inhospitable to foreigners. I mean why not just close the border, don't let anybody in and be done with it, rather than pretending you ever want to see anyone that isn't American?

AppleCare means why the fuck do I care whether you can repair my Mac or not.

I would argue that when sweeps are largely indiscriminate, and being in proximity to a raid is enough to end up in custody, so that the odds of "wrong place wrong time" greatly increase, it becomes a much stronger argument for not being in the US as a foreign national at all.

Mistakes may happen, but the nature of ICE detainments rises far above mere mistakes. The intent of the current system is to make the US sufficiently inhospitable to foreign nationals that they don't come. So, I take that point, and won't come. And by the looks of depressed visits since last year from my fellow countrymen, many of us are choosing that route.

I'm unlikely to ever visit the US again. My daughter and I had planned on going to Comic-Con at some point in the next year or two, and we both agree now that while the risk of detainment is rather low, it is non-zero. There are other places we can go, and being Canadian, there are plenty of places in our own country that we haven't seen.

You don't see a problem with being arrested by an immigration enforcement agency as a US citizen? You think that eventually being released is a meaningful remedy?

And if a US citizen can be detained by ICE, why the fuck would a foreigner want to come to the US?