I suspected it wasn't just battery farms, but more like what you see in less mass market scifi where the humans are used for more than just batteries... they'd also be some storage and processing for the system (and no longer humans).
However at that point I don't see the value of retaining the human form. It's for a story obviously, but a not-human computational device can still be made out of carbon processing units rather than silicon or semiconductors generally.
IMO there was one other fatal mistake. Dialup internet was also at and passing it's peek. This was the moment when anyone serious about connecting to anything wanted at least DSL if not one of those fast new 'Cable modem' connections.
Today people would think someone is an alien for releasing a console or handheld that didn't support wireless (ethernet) connectivity in at least some way. In that era, it's shocking that a communications module wasn't at least an optional swap in to allow for a selection between a standard modem or a standard (hopefully easy to source) ethernet card. Heck if there were an 'OS module' that games had to call down to it might even obfuscate the difference between dialup, lan, and later wifi modules.
No - Kid friendly should be something site's Attest to and claim they ARE. That becomes an FTC enforceable market claim (or insert other thing here).
Foreign sites, places that aren't trying to publish things for children? The default state should be unrated content for consumers (adults) prepared to see the content they asked for.
It's been too long so I only vaguely remember Wave.
It was a little too early to market. Common PCs weren't quite good enough, and common Internet was very not good enough.
The UI also didn't quite help shape normal user workflows enough so it was hard for an average user to just pick it up and be productive.
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I think I'd like to see some merger of 'checklists', 'events' (calendar / etc), and 'conversations' much more like Slack channels where each new topic is a thread / email chain.
They have rolled out something along these lines by integrating the chat in Google Meet with Google Chat (or whatever the Gmail looking interface is called).
It was a huge surprise when the whole company suddenly got notifications about chat messages in various meetings they were invited to (but wasn't participating in) as well as messages sent after the meeting was closed.
That said, I think they are on to something here and I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to make some inroads. It will take a long time though given how much of an organization's operations are running on Slack.
The silly move from /bin to /usr/bin broke lots of distros. Probably would have worked out if they'd had cp --reflink=auto --update to help ease migrations from files in /bin to /usr/bin and then just symlinked /bin to /usr/bin . However then any setups where /usr is a distinct filesystem from / would hard-require initramfs to set that up before handoff.
The python (is python2) transition was even more silly though. Breaking changes to the API and they wanted (and did!) force re-pointing the command to python3? That's still actively breaking stuff today in places that are forsaken enough to have to support python2 legacy systems.
I recalled there were some new instructions added that greatly help with this. Unfortunately I'm not finding any good _webpages_ that describe the operation generally to give me a good overview / refresher. Everything seems to either directly quote published PDF documents or otherwise not actually present the information in it's effective for end use form. E.G. https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/ -- However availability is problematic for even slightly older silicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
Eh, pretty much nobody uses them (outside of OS kernels?); and mind you, RISC-V with its 32 registers has nothing similar to those, which is why 14-instruction long prologues (adjust sp, save lr and s0 through s12) and epilogues are not that uncommon there.
How about just requiring browser, OS vendors, and phone makers to give parents real child accounts that are easy to use and keep kids off the Internet?
There are a lot of actual solutions that could be implemented that don't invade privacy, but that's the point. These rules are all designed TO invade your privacy. They're designed for you to give up your online anonymity and make you accountable for your speech and actions online.
> They're designed for you to give up your online anonymity and make you accountable for your speech and actions online.
They're designed destroy anonymity to give the in group pretext to persecute the out group. It will be propagandized as accountability but it will be anything but.
Both can be right. Some people in the debate think it's very important to check ages, while other people want to collect data, and a third group of people want excuses to shut down platforms.
The US is repealing section 230, and it appears to be a pretext for shutting down platforms that don't block anti–Trump speech. Australia has an age verification law that seems to actually be about keeping kids off social media.
I'm becoming increasingly cynical that the lack of privacy in online communication is what most of the sponsors of these bills are after, and people thinking of the real harms to children are useful to them.
This would suddenly mean no more custom browsers, no more custom OSes, and I doubt they'd cater to the Linux and BSD crowds with this one. It's something the OSS community has been trying to fight for the last 4 decades. With a full-on government requirement this would lock you to the vetted platforms while letting anything other get in would be illegal for the site owners.
It doesn't mean any of that? The point is that the parent, not the child, is the owner of the device. So the parent can restrict the device they own before handing it off to the child (or the same with accounts on the same device).
That’s what we currently have with parental controls. If they wanted the OS to check for the parent legally being an adult, that would rule out custom OSes and browsers which couldn’t be trusted (by the government) to check for that.
Not really, they'd just have to send the "I'm a child" header if the "I'm a child" flag is set. Linux could have /etc/childlocked set to 1 — a global setting instead of per account isn't ideal, but it would satisfy the law.
Batman usually doesn't do too badly. Not only is it fiction but they're often against fiction level villains who are 'hardened' criminals in literal senses. Even then the violence tends to stop at the point where actual resistance stops. (They get tied up and delivered to the cops with maybe the black eye used in the initial apprehension.)
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Contrast this with what we see repeatedly on TV when poorly trained and poorly supervised law enforcement officers beat down or outright murder someone until they're not just not resisting anymore but are outright _unable_ to resist at all. Such excessive use of force in a professional context should also be a crime that is punished with congruent weight for the breach trust in a public official absent extenuating circumstances ('I had an emotional reaction' leading directly to deadly force should not be such a circumstance).
I do recall a highly unfortunate case of someone from WA state who was on some combination of super drugs such that there didn't appear to be a reasonable application of force to result in a successful outcome. More and better tools might help. Maybe net launchers and methods of incapacitating someone at a bit of a distance for mutual safety?
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