I doubt MacOS users are any different from other computer users, especially in the post-touchscreen dumbing down of computer knowledge we're seeing where Zoomers and Boomers, according to some surveys, appear to have the same level of skill on average.

Another issue is I've met many, many, people who insist on asking me "What do I do?" when any prompt comes up. Anything. From "Overwrite these files?" to "Installation finished. Do you want to launch NewlyInstalledApp now?"

I suspect that 90% of the people who get to the "Launch command line" prompt on a list of instructions will also blindly obey the "Don't worry about the warning dialog that comes up that looks like this, just click OK" instruction from the scanner. As a result, I seriously doubt this'll help at all.

For some reason the patent clock rarely starts the moment a technology is known. MPEG-1 was published in 1991, but patents on, for example, MPEG Audio Layer III didn't expire until 2012 in Europe, and 2017(!) in the United States, 21 and 26 years after the standard was released. While there's been some patent reform since then, it's still the case that a standard can be published in the middle of patent applications, and the 20 years doesn't start until the application is approved, which can be years after publication.

So don't count on any of this being OK in 2034.

It's a shame the expired codecs didn't have mechanisms for, say, HDR, as I suspect with bandwidth availability becoming so cheap, and CPU power better than ever before, it'd be nice to be able to switch back to a simpler, albeit less efficient, codec with no legitimate patents still applying like MPEG-2. Unfortunately even trying to graft HDR onto it would be a problem - the ITU did apparently add something in 2014, but that means you won't be able to trust it until the late 2030s...

Nothing should have happened (except between Hillary and Bill if Hillary wanted it.) It was never any of our businesses.

But multiple people got their names dragged through the mud on it. So what you're saying is just absurd. Years of breathless commentary in the news, a pointless impeachment, and over what? A affair between two consenting adults where the only victim was Hillary?

Meanwhile Trump isn't even facing an investigation for half the shit he's doing, and was able to be re-elected despite constitutional provisions banning insurrectionists from being elected President.

Unfortunately, from a legal point of view, AOMedia hasn't done anything against Dolby. It's simply created a video compression codec. It doesn't use the codec, it just publishes documentation on how to use it.

It's arguable, I guess, that by claiming their codec is royalty free without mentioning Dolby's patents, AOMedia may have caused harm to Snapchat. But that would mean Snap would sue AOMedia, not Dolby.

Does this suck? Yes. But unfortunately you can't just sue someone on the basis of "who's the bad guy", you have to prove they caused damage to you in some way. And in AV1's case, not only did AOMedia not harm Dolby, they actually helped them, by creating a new patent royalty stream for them. Sucks, huh?

Moderators are, for some reason, modding my post down pointing this out, so once again:

The above comment is a complete misrepresentation of what I said. A lie indeed. In no way can my original comment be interpreted as meaning that I am in favor of Florida style age verification laws.

Powercntl doubtless has his own reasons for claiming that. But it's quite simply a lie. I proposed nothing more than CA mandating that if an OS has an optional age verification feature be there, it be used by apps and web sites needing age verification, and that strong privacy controls be added.

This is the EXACT FUCKING OPPOSITE of what Florida has done.

NOTHING HAPPENS?

Seriously?

Were you AROUND in the late 1990s? The President got impeached after years of the cable news networks talking about LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE.

What is wrong with you?

Why are you still lying about what I wrote? And now what you wrote?

I propose:

1. Requiring only that third party apps and websites respect a mechanism built into the OS if available.
2. Placing strict privacy controls on that mechanism.

You claim that this means:

1. Requiring third party apps and websites use invasive third party age verification systems or block justisdictions
2. Claim you didn't say the above when in fact you did. You wrote: "We have age gating at the website level here in Florida. Some adult sites complied by blocking Florida IP addresses from accessing the site, some sites actually are doing the age checks (which is a potential privacy issue)"
3. Now pretending the issue is in some way related to jurisdictions as if this is something new and novel and a reason to not propose any regulation at all on any level.

(And, to answer your goalpost moving, if a company wants to do business in CA, it has always had to obey the local laws. That didn't change because of the Internet. Same for Florida. Except Florida's law is privacy intrusive, impossible to comply with in many cases, and fucking stupid, while the CA one might be salvageable if it changes who has the onus on complying with calling an optional API.)

Please, do us both a favor and fuck the fuck off.

I shall foe you as you're clearly trolling or illiterate.

I'm sorry but not understanding the moderation here at all, and you're claiming it's flamebait too. So what is flamebait about it?

> Yours is the first I've seen of someone actually praising this mess as the lesser evil.

And yours is not the first or last to completely miss what I said and substitute an invented version of my views instead so you have a strawman to attack.

Listen, if you're not prepared to make at least a minimal effort to understand, just don't reply. It's easier on both of us. Florida is not using an optional operating system level option age gate to age gate websites. You know that. I know that. So why pretend it is or that I'm advocating what Florida mandates? You're just wasting all our times.

Hey CA,

Listen, I'm not saying this is a bad idea. Parents should have some control here, and yes, them having some control over their kid's blogs makes a little bit of sense though I can see occasions in which it could be abused.

But do you REALLY want to be focusing on this right now rather than undoing the giant fuck up you did with parental controls? You had the germ of a good idea there (let computers be configured to have some control over what's visible) but you mandated the wrong people - operating systems to have the functionality, instead of apps and websites using the functionality with strict privacy controls on what can be asked for and how often.

So you already did a giant fuck up, swathes of the software ecosystem are now withdrawing and blocking CA, and you want to add more laws without (1) undoing the last one and (2) having some introspection and figuring out how you managed to pass such an ill thought out law in the first place?

Knock it off! You're supposed to be the non-fascist beacon in these depressing times and you're handling Palintir your entire citizenry on a plate because you can't think further than "but the children!"

> Trump is just a symptom. He is not immortal, and when he finally kicks the bucket, the american people will simply replace him with the next grifter in line which will tell them what they want to hear.

There's the risk of that. The bigger problem is that he's basically the face the Republicans are hiding behind. Project 2025, one of the most extremist political agendas in modern American history, is a Republican, not a Trump thing. And they're using Trump to get it done.

And as long as the Republicans and corporatists own most of the outlets of information people use, and run propaganda and disinformation campaigns promoting culture wars et al, it'll continue.

At this point there are very few directions things can go in that would lead to sane governance in America, and some involve outside involvement which I'm reluctant to write anything that would encourage or give the appearance of encouraging. But I can see it happening after the insanity of the last few months and the invasions of multiple countries.

>> The Studio is a sealed box ...

> That was the redesign.

No, because Apple already had sealed boxes. Why not claim the MacBook Neo is a "redesign" of the Mac Pro then? "Yeah the lower spec, and built in keyboard and screen, is part of the redesign"

> The discrete graphics card situation is not like the PC's. First, you were severely limited as to

Blah blah blah.

The Mac Pro specifically existed so that these features were available. The fact Apple was fucking them up meant Apple needed to address that issue.

> Those drives were connected using what SATA III? So 6 GB/s. Wouldn't an external on a USB-C 10 GB/s connector be faster?

You must be trolling at this point. You're seriously arguing that the feature people are looking at when they say they want internal drive bays is the connector? (And what stops Apple from supporting faster interfaces anyway?)

I'm glad you like your Mac mini, but you clearly have no experience of why people would want an open box with open architectures that can have added features added to it internally. Could you maybe shush and let the adults talk here?

The Studio is a sealed box, I don't see how it's remotely like the pro. Anything from additional drives to graphics cards have to be plugged into its external TB slots.

(Reposted: original comment disappeared?) Mozilla is rapidly becoming the Democratic Party of the open web. Completely oblivious to its reputation or the real world, always capitulating to the pro-corporate pro-control side of the Internet represented by Chrome's Republicans, and completely unaware that its unpopularity is because it will not fight for openness, open source, and threats to the open web like the AI LLM industry.

They're just awful.

I hope, ultimately, enough moment gets behind one of the forks, probably LibreWolf because it's genuinely not corporate, for control of Mozilla to be taken away from them.

Yeah, I would assume most "smart TVs" require an account for the "smart" part, which is only an issue if you make usage of the smart part mandatory.

Roku TVs need a Roku account, for example.

This is an article which raises alarm bells over something quite normal and, given "smart" just means "Can run apps from the cloud, so will need some kind of cloud account", actually quite reasonable. It's only unreasonable if your HDMI ports are locked if you don't sign in.