It can be done. The website provider can generate a request that it forwards to you. You then pass on this request to the age verifier, who can answer “yes person is over 16” without knowing why you want to know, or who generated the request.

The requester wouldn’t know your age, just that you were old enough.

There are a few problems.

One is that the website could embed some identifier in the signature of their request. But any information there can be easily send by the web site provider to the age verifier directly if they wanted so this is not a big problem.

Another problem is that the age verifier could look at times when requests were submitted and create a sort of “fingerprint” based on when requests arrived for different sites. This could be partially helped by having browsers request age verification randomly in the background any time you use a browser.

I thought the same thing. In the Netherlands it’s not allowed to have realistic looking toy weapons. I basically think that’s a good thing.

Is that a problem? Is there a special reason these should be replaced?

For popular stuff I stop seeding when I’ve uploaded 10x the download size. For other stuff I keep it uploading forever.

I’m curious why you think Python is unsuitable. Both of my kids picked up Python pretty easily.

100 Gbit? Is there even such a thing as a 100 Gbit link? I want to know more!

Meh. I lose power every 3 or 4 years on average. A UPS just doesn’t make sense for me. (When I lived in Virginia it was once a month on average, so for sure it made sense…)

I wanted to buy music, but a CD that I got in the 00’s had some “protection” so that I couldn’t rip it and listen to it on my MP3 player.

Now, I ripped it from a Linux computer and had no problems, but was so upset that the record companies tried this. I realized that it’s not about right or wrong, but just about power and money.

Godzilla was from 1954!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla_(1954_film)

Definitely worth watching.

https://archive.org/details/BigGMovies

That was a wild ride!

The biking culture in Amsterdam is fine. The problem is tourists standing on the seperate bicycle lanes - colored red, with pictures of bicycles on them - and thinking that they are being assaulted when a cyclist rings their bell to wake them out of their cannabis-induced stupor so they can get to work.

Fat bicycles modified to go faster than 25 km used to be a problem, but they get stolen so quickly now it’s less of an issue. 😆

Fluid ounces measure volume, so analogous to liters. As opposed to ounces which measure weight, so analogous to newtons, although everyone uses kilos to measure weight in day to day life.

There are also Troy ounces, which are for precious metals, but I honestly couldn’t say what those measure…

I reboot every box monthly to flush out such issues. It’s not perfect, since it won’t catch things like circular dependencies or clusters failing to start if every member is down, but it gets lots of stuff.

I was at a party explaining that we were finishing up a release trying to decide which bugs were critical to fix. The person that I was talking to was shocked that we would release software with known bugs.

When I explained that all software has bugs, known bugs, he didn’t believe me.

I didn’t know there was a -delete option to find! I’ve been piping to xargs -0 for decades!

I had a Helios that literally just started having trouble powering SATA disks a few days ago. I got it in 2019 I think, so only 5 years of life.

I use Linux LVM and either ext4 (for older volumes) or btrfs (for newer volumes, because I want the checksums across the data) so in principle I could throw the disks in a PC as a temporary solution.

I have put the disks in SATA to USB 2.0 caddies, and the Helios 4 kind of still works, but I’m ordering a couple of Orange Pi 5 and with USB 3.0 disk enclosures to replace it. It was kind of time anyway, since Nextcloud has dropped support for 32-bit CPU.

Or join the EFF which already does great work in this area. They don’t always succeed, but I doubt a GoFundMe could do better.

Something like 15% comes from the federal government, 13% from state government, and 3% from local government. Roughly a third from the government in total:

https://pbsfoundation.bento-live.pbs.org/foundation/areas-of-focus/sustaining-pbs/

Yes it has become increasingly difficult for me to file taxes abroad. For my 2021 taxes I had to print out and physically mail my return since for some reason the electronic filing failed. For my 2022 taxes every company I used to file taxes from in the past refused to take my non-American credit card. I couldn’t even access the free stuff, presumably due to some IP blocking.

Hopefully eventually the IRS will solve this and everyone who needs to file taxes can easily do it for free.

It’s not just people being cheap. I encourage you to read this piece and think about the ideas in it:

https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/08/tipless-restaurants-the-linkerys-owner-explains-why-abolishing-tipping-made-service-better.html