Not really. It's more like requiring all vendors who sell cash registers used in restaurants to support checking photo IDs because some restaurants also serve alcohol.

There's no safe way to prove your age to a website. Any scheme requires trusting some arbitrary third party that could secretly be the government doing timing comparisons between the verification and DNS queries and stuff to unmask anonymous users. At least with operating system or browser vendors, they presumably have a strong commitment to minimizing the risk of someone publicly posting "John Doe just visited sexwithseaturtles.com" or whatever.

It's not really that terrible. If you're going to do age verification, you have two choices: browser or operating system. All else is all but guaranteed to be either a privacy disaster, a usability disaster, or both. And either way, every operating system needs to support multiple users, or the "I used dad's iPad to browse porn and buy firearms" problem makes the verification useless.

And major operating system or browser vendors that cater to the general public should make it available by default, because doing so prevents the "You downloaded the AdultCheck module, so you must be a pervert" logic that some people might use to attack people.

What's terrible is the idea of mandating that it be performed at the OS level, rather than just mandating that the OS doesn't get in the way. Browser-level verification is actually far preferable, because there's no need to bake that into an authentication framework when you can just send it out to a browser window. Leave that tiny bit of integration complexity to the companies that actually require it. But this only works if the OS supports multiple users, so that the browser's cookies and storage are not shared across multiple users.

For devices that don't have multiple users, baking it in at the OS level really is the only way, but it could just as easily be solved by baking it in at the browser level and changing the OS to allow multiple users per device. Unfortunately, such technical details are way too subtle a point for most lawmakers to understand, so obviously they did it in the most wrong way possible.

Wait 'til they realize that Android is distributed under a license that allows people to copy, redistribute, and modify it.

As usual, a law created by people who didn't think of the consequences then got modified to fix some of the worst consequences, but because they still did not think of the consequences, the modification created different consequences. And this is why we need better lawmakers.

When "AI-enthused defense contractors with names out of Tolkien" are literally a genre I suspect that he chose that particular citation because he knew it would lead to a few amusing crashouts.

Correct, as anyone can see by looking at who they rounded up.

"Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist "

But in the next state over, the next company will also treat you as badly as they can get away with.

The natural model for a programmer's union is the Screen Actor's Guild. That's another field with a wide range of talent. SAG members can get the best pay their agents can negotiate, lots for stars. But everyone is protected from exploitation.

I guess we can add a whole new category to the Darwin Awards.

Probably a Linux nerd (on /.? The hell you say) that carried the xST vs xDT timezone markers before the brain caught up that "Standard" and "Saving" are both "S"

> next will be Jedi training school full of pointless teen angst.

Wasn't that "The Acolyte"?

Isn't much of the point here the cultural shove? Sure, there's the line-go-up stuff; but that doesn't explain the companies gutting quite profitable software development operations to shovel money at Nvidia for things that have no demonstrated ROI; if it were nothing personal, just business, the level of enthusiasm for taking on poorly characterized risk would not be as fervent as it is. It's absolutely about resentment of the human resources that has been running at least as long as the demonstration that it would actually take some shoving to get them all to come back to the office, likely significantly longer.

It's the significantly less common case, for some combination of a lot of high-visibility stupidity being lethal and lethal accidents being public in ways that the details of nonlethal accidents aren't; but destruction of gonads under sufficiently foolish circumstances qualifies a living recipient.

They already pretty much are. You have to do at least a little performative fretting about the risks, which spoils the enjoyment of pure cheering at the best crunching sounds; but there's no way we'd justify the level of recreational head trauma something like football produces if we didn't fundamentally regard the players as relevant only the the way racehorses are.

There are obviously cases where complete vertical integration makes no sense; literally all of them if you interpret 'complete' at full strictness; but when someone actually says "privatization" they basically always mean contracting out something large enough to be or have been an internal program. Sort of the way you don't say "outsourcing" unless it either was or plausibly could be an internal function. Ordering copy paper from staples or having a meeting catered generally doesn't count.

That doesn't mean to say that it's always a bad idea; but when someone says 'privatization' that's a "we'll have SAIC do it" proposal not a "employees and the DoE use laptops they got under a GSA schedule contract rather than from the First People's Computational Manufactury" proposal.

I've never seen generators on cell towers, and the batteries last a few hours. They're meant to cover the occasional western world power outage, not a major one.