The real world is full of all kinds of things that are harmful to kids, too. There's roads full of cars that can run you over, bodies of water you can drown in, poisonous plants and dangerous wildlife (oh, that says "Austria", not "Australia", I digress), etc. Seems kind of weird that when it comes to the internet though, parents' brains seem to shut off and they no longer realize it's supposed to be their responsibility not to give their kids devices with unrestricted internet access.

I suppose the difference is that it was never feasible to make real life child-safe, but since the internet is all computer, it can't be any harder than pressing a few buttons, amiright politicians?

We tried this with alcohol prohibition; it didn't work out so well. Turns out some people don't take too kindly to the government deciding which addictions they need to kick.

The iMac in that era was objectively a pretty awful computer. I had one of the indigo blue ones back in the day and it was dog slow running OS X. It came in pretty colors though, so there was that.

iOS is like this, too. It rarely completely crashes, but often just starts acting a bit squirrely and you've gotta reboot the device to clear up the issue.

I run my home media server on an old ASRock DeskMini (connected to an external hard drive array, obviously) that's running Windows 10. It literally is more reliable than our power company, because the only time it gets rebooted is during outages (and I'm too cheap to buy a UPS for it). Granted, that's doing nothing more than running the OS and a server application, but the belief that Windows isn't stable enough for such use cases is rather outdated.

I upgraded my gaming PC awhile back from 10 to 11. I honestly haven't noticed any difference in game performance. I get that around these parts Windows 11 is the devil (and I have a also friend who absolutely refuses to use anything newer than 10), but I really don't feel one way or the other about it. If anything, I'd say Windows 11 is kind of boring as far as OSes go - it's just kind of there.

And how do you plan to enforce this? If it's just a toothless guideline, you may as well skip the disingenuousness and say that no new legislation is necessary.

It did change with the internet, because unless your state firewalls off everything that doesn't follow the local laws, you're going to run into situations like with 4chan. Ironically, 4chan could possibly end up getting blocked in the UK for exactly this reason.

Now, this time I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt this time and not assume that you believe having a firewall blocking non-compliant sites is somehow a superior solution to placing age gates at the OS level, but damn if that's not the impression you're giving.

I didn't think anyone even still played with that vestigial feature held over from when this site was trying to be more like the social media big boys. This feels more like an honor than an insult, actually.

There's no strawman here. Your proposal requires the individual adult app and website vendors on the global internet to comply with state laws requiring they do $THING. We can argue all day long about how you want to define $THING, but ultimately the flaw rests in the belief that you'll be able to get a myriad of different companies to implement any form of age gating in a privacy-respecting manner.

Again, at the OS level, all three major commercial OS vendors are US-based companies operating under then jurisdiction of US laws. Requiring they comply with age check regulation is actually achievable (in fact, Apple is already complying with a UK age verification law), unlike the broken mess that is immediately obvious if you've been following how, for example, Discord implemented their age checking.

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), and since the internet is worldwide with site operators being unaware of individual state laws (or just not caring since they're outside of Florida's legal reach) - there's also adult sites that are just ignoring the law.

Yours is the first I've seen of someone actually praising this mess as the lesser evil. Having the age gate at the OS level can at least be implemented in a more privacy-respecting manner than trusting individual app developers and websites not to leak/sell your information. Yeah, there's still the "what if a kid installs Linux" loophole, but you have to remember these laws are primarily intended to stop kids from accessing adult content through their phones, and most phones have a locked bootloader anyway. Plus, with the mobile OS realm being essentially a duopoly, if Google and Apple comply - mission accomplished.

Well, I've got good news and bad news:

The good news is that it's only a buck twenty-five.
The bad news is that, unfortunately, it does not include an Apple sticker to place on the back of your car.

I had something delivered to the local CVS by UPS once. It wasn't in a locker, it was just left on an unattended shelf near the front of the store. If I order something high value, I prefer to either have it delivered directly to my door when I know I'll be home. If I have to go out and pick up the damn thing myself, that kind of defeats the whole purpose of shipping.

So what you're saying is that if I figure out where you live, I can score a free laptop?

Only if you meet the order minimum or have a paid Prime membership (and even then, there's still some limitations). Packages don't just ship themselves, you know.

Okay, here's in the same words instead, since derivation seems to be the order of the day:

Actually, defending the Trump administration's decision to attack Iran also implies a condonation of the resulting jacked up gas prices. Perhaps it's the conservatives who don't have "I bought this before we knew Musk was crazy" bumper stickers on their Teslas. There's gotta be at least a few of 'em.

Music can be formulaic, repetitive and highly derivative and still be entertaining. Stories, on the other hand, aren't always things that lend themselves well to fan-interpreted extrapolation. Hell, often even when the original authors try to extrapolate upon their own stories, the result is kind of *meh* (The Matrix sequels, I'm looking at you).