I can’t say I knew, but it doesn’t surprise me. The AI folk, among others, want to spy on us as much as possible, but they also know that if they opnly target the kids, they’ll get destroyed by lawmakers and courts and public opinion, so they need to pretend that they’re only fucking over adults.

If you’re trying to ask whether LibreOffice is dead then I think the answer is no. Because right now, even with minimal updates for small bug fixes or security or what not it does what a lot of people need it to do.

What I look for from that office suite today is very similar to what I wanted from it a decade ago and probably a decade from now it will also be filling a very similar role. So of course it’s good to modernize and continue to make improvements, but at the same time a lot of the things that humans want to do on our computers for work and hobbies are largely the same as what they were in decades past. So if we have something that’s stable then we win.

What you say is true but it’s off topic because that’s not the current situation. What we’re actually seeing right now is that parents literally do not want to take their devices away from their kids and they don’t want to supervise their kids. It really is that simple.

This is not a situation where most parents are trying to do the right thing and they can’t do enough and they need an extra hand. This is definitely a situation where many parents aren’t even putting in a good effort.

You know like what if they didn’t give their kid a cell phone. What if they took the cell phone away at 9:00 p.m. Most parents would never dream of doing either of those things.

Right, but the politicians didn’t sell the law at 30% efficiency. They sold it at something like 95% efficiency. So they lied and they haven’t solved anything.

Maybe they could have used all of that money to run campaigns to help convince parents to properly supervise their children. Maybe that would have done more than this 30% figure.

But that’s nonsense. If the bills sponsors had been honest about the fact that it would fail for the majority of children, then it would have never passed in the first place. They lied to push it through and now you’re painting a rosy picture around a complete failure.

Or maybe it’s never going to work because you can’t enforce it properly because the parents don’t want it to be enforced. And the damage you’re talking about is not backed up by as good science as you think it would be if you were going to pass a law such as this.

But many people are of the mindset that oh my God. Oh my God we have to do something and this is something and therefore it’s better than nothing, and they’re wrong. If you don’t have a good plan, that doesn’t make your bad plan reasonable.

Objectives lol nobody knows what those are.

Fuck Trump. The consequences for the rest of us are what’s important.

It sure sounds like you’re doing something wrong then because almost all of us who use that software don’t have that issue.

3 million plus legal fees by the defense, so probably closer to 3.5 million.

OK, maybe better than nothing. Until they start selling more of your data lol.

That depends on the search engine, of course.

Of course we didn’t win. the more hoops you have to jump through, the fewer people who will install their own apps and then you lose all of the community support. And Google didn’t promise not to change their plans in the future. So you know that they’ll promise this now. Maybe they’ll backtrack a little if they have to and they will try to ratchet things up six months later anyway.

Real solutions involve either breaking up monopolies or breaking up monopolies, which is why some of the other cell phone vendors’ actions recently look positive. If there are two versions of Android that are popularly used, then the banks will have to support both of them and then everyone can run away from Google whenever they feel like it. But if there’s only one popular version and Android itself gets more and more locked down then that is Google seizing the entire market and they will cut out all of the other cell phone manufacturers as soon as they can. that will be just as bad as Apple.

It’s not an order of magnitude, lol.

You got the framing question wrong. You should have been asking if age limits should be implemented at all, and then whether the current proposals will work (which they won’t), and then whether they cause side damage (which they do).

And then you must understand the key point: once you build these surveillance tools, they will be expanded. You say “only 18” but once the framework is in place, why not add in “credit check” or “gender” or “nationality”.

And actually, we already know how the checks are implemented: they involve identifying people specifically. There is actually no way to do “only 18” checks; it is a physical impossibility. You always have to gather more data.

And finally, the basics of individual liberty as well as safe computing involve you choosing what software you want to run on your computer, and that you have control of your machine. For this type of age checking to work, it must take control away from you, the end user. And companies like Windows and OS X love it, because that would destroy the FOSS world.

No one is stopping to ask whether it’s all worth it? … Actually, I think millions of us make comments to that extent every day. We’re kind of upset that these scam artists are dominating the stock market enough to fuck with our retirement plans. If the rich people were gambling with their own money, that would be stellar. But they aren’t. And… I sure wish we could stop them.

The way he worded his question suggests that actually he might have some STDs. Because he didn’t say, hey, I got tested two months ago and haven’t slept with anyone around then or since. In other words, he could have comforted you on the STD front, but he chose not to, because he was accidentally being honest.

Also, because the two of you don’t know each other that well, it’s better for everyone if both parties are extra safe. Because you just don’t have that long track record.

Right right. I’m using a ten year old Linux laptop and it works perfectly. It has always been true that Windows abuses RAM… Apple didn’t do anything amazing. And they didn’t need to.

That’s the point, right? Google is trying to lock down Android even more, and third party vendors can see the increasing risk. If they fork now, they can maybe undercut the increasing monopoly efforts.

Step 1. Add AI. Step 2. Add (broken) switch. Step 3. Pretend to fix switch. Step 4. Hide switch in sub-menus. Step 5. Remove switch.

… And all they actually need to do is make “AI” an extension. Let the users install it if they want to, or don’t. That’s the whole point of extensions. But they would never dream of that, hell no.