The legislators will, flat on their back , taking it and enjoying it.

Itâ(TM)s the moments of sheer terror that made it fun. Submarines once, submarines twice.,,

The problem is that the people who could afford this and would do it are exactly the people the rest of society is better off without.

As a counterpoint, The Linux kernel and much of the userspace in various distros is done remote. It can work, even on highly collaborative projects. Like anything, some will enjoy that more than others.

Required physical equipment can be a limiting factor, of course. Though I have done firmware development from home because the dev board wasn't expensive nor is a debugger for that hardware.

Yea, but as long as the size of your budget determines how much staff you get and how important you are, no.

John Boyd was part of those battles, recounted in Comer's excellent biography of him, titled "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War."

They were the ones who publicized the $400 hammer and $600 toilet seat.

While I like those stories and many pointed out serious problems in government procurement, some also fail to tell the whole story because the headline is what someone wants since it causes outrage.

We used bolts that cost a lot of money and looked the same as a 10 cent one from a hardware store, but ours were designed to perform to an exact spec, traceable to the ore, and tested to ensure they meet specs. You don't want that bolt to fail to performa at a critical moment when you are above, on, or below the ocean. We had bronze tools that cost a lot but looked like ordinary tools because sparks around oxygen tanks can cause issues. My point: There is a lot of wastefull spending and overpriced stuff in government contracting, but sometimes there is more to the story than simply "Military spends $x00 for something that is $10 at Walmart..."

One big problem is how the government budgets. You generally have to spend all you money on an annual basis, and if you give money back that you saved, you risked getting less next year because "you didn't need as much as you said last year..." So, come Q4, you go on a spending spree to spend whatever is left; trying to spend more is better than trying to spend less.

There is a nicotine source that isn't at all age locked. I guess the teens will move on to these "cigarettes" you hear about from time to time.

They even come in cool Menthol.

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+.

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.

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.

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.

Yup. I know teachers whose districts have all sorts of "safety" controls in place for computers the kids use; all that does is make it harder for teachers to go to sites they use and are approved while the kids access porn and anything else they want. The stupid get caught, like the one that thought it was a good idea to print the porn on the schools printer...

Anyone can click yes a question, or put in a fake birthdate. Scanning a drivers license would work, but not everyone has a license and using someone else's or a fake one (depending on if it uses a barcode) is pretty easy. So, how do you really effectively?

Clicking on it it is not the goal,seeing it is so that the product registers in your mind. Clicks are just a bonus.

We would have to re-arrange society to ease many of the stressors in life. I predict we'll be needing those drugs for a while.