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Comment The laws are a joke. (Score 1) 174

The laws are a joke by people who apparently flunked "Hello World".

They demand a mechanism, but don't even offer guidance on what mechanism it should be. You can technically comply while having no 2 Linux installs following the same API, making it effectively useless.

A better approach would be a purely optional userspace package (perhaps call it "Californication") that returns 1 dword with the age information encoded in it. Each person installing it gets to decide what that encoding will be.

Yes, it returned 0x0BADF00D, that's the code for 18+.

Someone else might decide 0x0B00B1E5 means 18+.

Comment Re:advice to children (Score 1) 174

Some early adopters of "Here's a complaint one, pretty please use it" included small operations like PGP. Others were small companies then, later to become large.

Not too long after, there was the whole flap around DeCSS for DVDs. The medium itself is nearly dead now, but it was individual efforts that rendered region coding largely a joke. The Chinese vendors whose DVD players didn't give a damn about region codes came second.

Comment Re:advice to children (Score 1) 174

I can buy alcohol because I don't live in Saudi Arabia. I can have an OS that doesn't know or care how old I am because I don't live in California. That law literally doesn't apply to me. If I make a distro where I am, why should I bother with age verification at all? It's none of my business if a friend of a friend or a complete stranger decides to download it and install it on a machine in California. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Comment Re:The Underlying Question: Why depressed? (Score 1) 26

You can get fired at the drop of a hat for no reason at all. Bosses blow their top over being 1 minute late. Fill out these forms you just filled out last week and again online before you can see the doctor. IRS knows exactly what you made and what you paid in witholding, and what you owe but YOU need to compute it, better not be wrong! Don't be late! Rent and mortgage take up an ever increasing portion of your monthly income (if any). 23 calls a day, mostly scams. You have health insurance even though it was damned expensive, but somehow you still owe a heap of money you don't have after a single visit to the ER.

Meanwhile, you're getting badgered about your "credit score". If you let it get bad everything gets more expensive and it gets harder to get a job (for some reason).

Yeah, you're less likely to actually die today than years ago, but your place in life is far more precarious than it was even 20 years ago. More things demand your attention.

Comment Re:Simultaneously Paid For And Became the Product (Score 1) 118

Based on the cost of products from China vs the price of products made in China but sold by non-Chinese companies, I'd say the price well more than covers the cost of everything for practically any product where they also choose to display ads.

They just want more, more, always more.

Comment Re:Thought so (Score 0) 42

Once storage became cheap and bandwidth was no longer an issue (in the home), I just ripped all of my content to use FLAC and called it a day. I've stored all the original media somewhere safe where it won't get damaged. For commercial content and devices to replay that content using other encoding methods, I'll let those folks duke it out with Dolby. Wake me up when it's over.

Comment Failed test? (Score 1) 69

What does a failed test look like? If containment fails and 92 protons interact with matter, I would imagine you wind up with a flash of energy as the antiprotons and their proton cousins mutually destruct. It's been a fair amount of time (and bottles of wine) since my last physics class. How much energy are we talking about? I am guessing it's not a significant energy release in terms of there being any real risk to anyone/anything nearby.

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