Honestly Windows 7 and 10 are fine. Windows 11 is an absolute shit show. I don't care how fast your hardware is it is so painfully slow

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.

Damn, Windows has really improved in the last 25 years. Wouldn't know since my last Windows was Win2k and my computers only run macOS or Linux and have crashed less that 10 times combined in the last 20 years or so. A well, whatever. Good for people still using Windows, I guess.

I'm guessing it's mostly just him complaining about getting shot down for dates and forcing his way into locker rooms to drink beer.

Last time Trump was President famously they kept him from having access to classified information as much as possible because he kept leaking it and so did everyone around him. Trump didn't like that so this time all the adults in the room are gone and it's all toddlers. It must really suck to be an American intelligence officer or asset right now. I mean we had people restraining the stupidity back in 2016 and they are all gone now and the last time the number of dead intelligence officers and assets shot through the roof. These days I suspect they have a life expectancy comparable to a drain fly.

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.

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.

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?

A truly non-lazy person, then, would have to conduct a detailed spectrographic assay of all of the pipes (or at least sufficient samples from each lot) to accurately determine the precise composition of each, because all of them contain impurities and aren't merely copper and phosphorous.

In general, getting a truly pure sample of almost any element is incredibly-hard, and outside of laboratories (and even in laboratories, most of the time) it just doesn't matter. In the case of transporting anti-protons, standard "pure" copper is apparently inadequate, because it's not pure enough.

> 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.

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.

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.

Even with the reduced precipitation there's still plenty of water for residential and commercial use. The problem, at least where I live (Utah), is agriculture. 80% of our water goes to agriculture. It would be one thing if we were growing regionally-appropriate crops for local consumption, but nearly all of that agriculture is to grow alfalfa (a water-hungry crop that isn't appropriate for the high desert climate), and nearly all of that alfalfa is shipped out of state, much of it out of the country, to feed cattle elsewhere. China is one of the biggest buyers. Essentially, our farmers are selling the contents of our aquifers to the world.

If we had plenty of water, letting our farmers buy it at a deep discount and sell it to willing buyers elsewhere would be fine, just another commercial use of a local resource, which is what trade is all about. But we definitely don't have plenty of water.

The solution is simple and straightforward (though legally complicated): Don't discounts. Set the same price for water across the board, residential, commercial and agricultural. There can and should be minor differences in delivery cost, and surcharges for purification, but the base cost of the water should be set through a single government-managed market, probably at the state level, probably divided up by drainages (drainages with more abundant water will have cheaper water; if this creates an arbitrage opportunity for someone to pipe water between drainages, great!).

Yes, this would probably put the alfalfa farmers out of business, but that's good because growing alfalfa in the desert is a bad idea. It might also raise the price of local produce, but that's as it should be, putting agricultural water use directly in competition with other water use. If prices go up, people will find ways to be more efficient. Farmers may switch to drip irrigation. If you build too many houses for the available water supply, well, those houses are going to have very expensive water and residents are going to want to find ways to conserve -- and maybe the high cost of water will disincentivize new move-ins.

The bottom line is that efficiently allocating scarce resources is what markets are good at. The problem with water isn't that there are too many people or not enough water, the problem is that we don't properly allocate the water or encourage conservation in the right places. Trying to fix this through regulation rather than market pricing will always be subject to regulatory capture and will never be as efficient or as effective as just enabling a competitive market and letting it work.

>> 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?