Fight the good fight. Despite being early adopter of Gmail, I moved away from everything Google after they demanded I perform age verification. Thankfully I've seen it coming and they were unable to hold my data hostage.

"And we are just letting it happen because why the fuck not?"

Who is "we"? You? Are you letting it happen?

"...our love of moral panics and knee-jerk reactions."

Like your post?

I don't trust Google, therefore I suspect this is about loading ads and claiming they were displayed even if user never got to see them.

You are past having an ideologically driven opinion and now well into intentional blindness. No, what you say is not at all true. People can afford cars and alternatives to cars are often prohibitively expensive. Driving is not optional for most of the country, especially in rural places where they grow food. Also, most real jobs, like growing food, cannot be done remotely.

You'd think with the successes of the original 16-bit Apple machines, then the Mac platform, full of third party software of every kind imaginable, it should have been self-evident that third party apps would be natural and beneficial. But people like Jobs just can't help themselves: their instinct is to control their platform and exclude everyone else. So they indulge the Reality Distortion Field hard enough to convince themselves that such a scheme is viable, all evidence of history to the contrary, and capture all the money.

The jail breakers are the real heros. They're the ones that pierced the Field and corrected this dysfunction, where no amount of explaining had any impact. They left Apple with two choices: go to war with jail breakers and become a pariah, or correct the bad thinking that prevailed to that point. Fortunately they chose the latter.

Or maybe unfortunately. The residual tyranny that did survive is more than I've ever considered tolerating. Maybe it would have been better if Apple had self-immolated the iPhone with Jobs' vision.

It is somewhat correct. For one like Linux, Darwin is open-source. Many of the commands in Mac OS are also linux commands (grep, cat, etc..). It is a POSIX like OS (both take inspiration from UNIX). Also, both use the same file driven layout. (same slashes, same . notation for hidden files, etc etc etc). It is certainly more like Linux than say, Windows.

There is nothing about such a mission that mandates obsolete, 2x order of magnitude money torching. Please stop it with your commie shilling.

It doesn't really matter in the long run. Sooner or later the US with elect another (D) president and the teacher's union and/or some other pressure group will once again cut NASA's space program and take the money. After than, NASA or whomever will be forced to adopt cost effective solutions.

They can't afford any of your "solutions".

What about people in the bottom 50% of wealth/earnings?

I've been wondering for many years before the first traffic camera appeared, why the toll-roads aren't enforcing the speed limits automatically. The time you enter and exit the highway is recorded down to a second. The distance between these two points is known — your average speed could be computed on the spot even with the early 90-ies technology...

The polite police officers would be standing right behind the toll-booths issuing tickets without the drama of hiding in the bushes, then chasing you at highway speeds...

And, yeah, you could lower it by stopping at a rest area — but it'd still be a tremendous disincentive to speed.

I was and continue to hope, that such universal enforcement, affecting all voters, would cause the limits to go up to reasonable figures — or even be abolished completely...

I've run into these people, they're the worst

When have you last checked your compiler's output?

So what you are saying that all engineering improvements over past many decades, from tire, suspension, and brake technology to all electronic safety features that monitor, warn and often intervene do not matter at all, because reaction times is what matters during normal driving. All I have to ask after this - have you driven a car before?