You just won't have to get gas at a gas station. You might still go to gas stations for the other various things they sell there, and some of 'em have also installed DCFC stations.

My experience with a Bolt is that no, you'd have a rather miserable experience if you tried owning an EV without also having a smartphone. In my case, it's absolutely essential for locating charging stations and checking how busy they are. As for payment, I've only ever seen card readers at EA charging stations - everywhere else I've charged, an app has been mandatory.

Unlike my Bolt, I know Tesla has better integration for things like seeing the locations and status of charging stations directly on the infotainment, and you're automatically billed for charging on their Supercharger network through an account you set up for the vehicle, so you technically don't need a smartphone with a Tesla. Even then though, there's some functionality you're missing out on without using the Tesla app to connect to your car, so I'd say in general it's probably not ideal to have an EV if you refuse to own a smartphone.

If you're not a kid, you're likely not going to even need to circumvent anything. Apple already knows I'm an adult based on my account age and the fact I have an Apple Card. I'm sure Florida's next in line to do pass a similar law and all it will amount to is a pop-up saying I didn't need to do anything to verify my age.

Hell, even getting carded in real life is like "Birth year starts with 19xx? You're good."

No law works perfectly at keeping kids away from age-inappropriate things. I was riding the commuter train the other day and ended up sitting near a very young teenager with one of those really souped up e-bikes. Another passenger asked him how fast it goes, he replied "80" (that'd be MPH, as I'm in the US).

Kid is probably gonna unalive himself on that thing, but that's bad parenting for ya.

Apple already doesn't allow apps where the primary focus is porn. This is ostensibly so apps can provide an age-appropriate experience (that aspect is actually kind of a good thing), but it's mostly about enforcing social media age restriction laws.

The whole reason why it's trivially easy to bypass with a parent's ID or credit card is because, if you look at Texas's social media age laws - that's exactly how it's supposed to work. If you're under 18, you're not supposed to be on social media without your parents knowing about it. The fact that a parent has to go in and specifically grant access is the desired intent of the law working as designed. And if a kid gets around it by swiping their parent's ID or credit card, well, that's just down to kids being kids.

It still seems kind of pricey for public schools. That's usually where the lowest bidder prevails and I don't see Chromebooks losing their budget crown anytime soon. I suspect making the Neo more reparable was mostly about complying with EU regulations.

I have both the Neo and a Lenovo Yoga with a Ryzen 5 (Zen 2) CPU and 8GB of RAM. Honestly, Windows 11 runs fine on it, at least for what I use it for. I'm guessing most of the complaints about Windows bogging down aren't really due to Windows itself, but due to too many 3rd party background processes running.

Yeah, Microsoft probably could address this with some sort of tool that tells you what's hogging up all your resources and automatically makes suggestions on what to disable, but then you'd have people complaining when their Discord app no longer auto-starts, and things of that nature.

Didn't Google just get caught including one of their models as shovelware on Chrome? Is this an attempt to make it seem like a model trimmed down to run on consumer hardware is some kind of positive innovation, rather than a waste of space that no one asked for?

At any rate, it was kind of humbling when I checked to see if Chrome had downloaded that AI crap on my laptop and then I realized it hadn't, because my machine doesn't meet the minimum hardware specs. Oops.

This really depends on where you went to school. In the southern US, public school teachers that aren't jaded and/or burned out were (at least back when I was in school) the exception rather than the rule. I got the impression that they'd all rather be doing something else, but some of them were just better than others at putting their best game face on and facing the day.

I truly never did experience any teachers who were there for anything other than the meager paycheck. My middle school guidance counselor even had a side gig delivering pizzas. Nothing like an adult who hasn't got his own act together and whose job is ostensibly to help kids make decisions about their futures.

*laughs in public school*

What I do remember most was one of my teachers who clearly was phoning it in every day. He'd read the classifieds looking for motorcycle parts at his desk while the class was doing some boring assignment from the textbooks. Every once in awhile he'd complain about how miserable the pay was, and how if you didn't like his minimal-effort approach to learning, you were welcome to stand in the hall for the duration of the period.

Fun times.

I distinctly remember owning one of these about 20 years ago. Granted, back then smartphones were for business users and tech enthusiasts, they really hadn't caught on with the normies yet.
 

My group of friends would futz around with computers quite a bit back in the late 90s. I still mostly keep in touch with all of them to varying degrees. One joined the military, was honorably discharged due to an injury, and now drives a long-haul truck. Another started as a low-paid IT support jockey and never really settled into anything you could call a career. The friend I keep in closest contact with, works a senior support position with a software company (not one of the major industry players, though) and makes somewhere around $100k/yr. Granted, that's a decent-ish living, but that kind of money doesn't go as far these days as it used to. I went into HVAC, which everybody and their brother seems to be doing in Florida, so there's a huge race to the bottom in this trade.

Success is a fuckin' crapshoot when you don't have wealthy parents.

We're talking porn. That already requires having somewhat selective moral standards to run a business in that industry. It made sense to oppose age verification when there was the potential to lose business, but the calculus changed once it became clear that this is just the new regulatory framework they have to operate under. Otherwise, compliant competitors will take the market share that Pornhub willingly relinquished.

Do you not understand how the US legal system works? It went to the SCOTUS. That's it, end of the line - it's not getting overturned. Plus, if it wasn't obvious, no politician wants to campaign on "let's let kids access porn" (which is exactly how their opponent would frame it), so there's a snowball's chance in hell that the democratic process itself would ever undo these age gate laws. Most people agree that kids shouldn't have access to adult material, so these laws have broad bipartisan support, even if the actual implementation is flawed as fuck.

Pornhub's access blocking made sense when there was still some possibility that the laws would be overturned. That ship basically sailed when the SCOTUS determined that Texas's age gate laws are constitutional. I'm really not sure what Pornhub's expected endgame is to their bury our head in the sand and hope it's all just a bad dream strategy.

Most of the devices kids use these days have locked bootloaders. You're not installing Linux on a current gen iPhone or iPad, and Samsung locks their stuff down too.

If some kid really wants to fap to porn on his desktop rig that he installed Linux on, that's something only the clutchiest of pearl clutchers is worrying about.