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Comment by kyledrake | Hacker News Reader

"telling" is a really curious euphemism for forcing volunteer Debian developers at gun point or they'll get thrown in jail. People in recent history seem to have forgotten that this is how governments enforce laws. If it was not, why would anyone bother obeying the laws if they didn't like them?

Governments are dangerous monopolies on force and the use of that force shouldn't be casually tossed out like candy at a parade on crap like this. If it doesn't matter if you lie, what's the point of even doing this, to prove that we're insane? Or is it the pretext for requiring a remote server id carding service in the future under that guise? Keep driving down this road and you end up with an end game that looks a lot more like North Korea than a free society with limited government.

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The law defines it as a product quality issue. Meaning you can return it for a refund and a company that keeps selling broken products may be ordered to recall them or to stop selling them until they're fixed. You can't go to jail for selling broken products, and this doesn't apply to free software since it's free and has no warranty (which is only allowed because of the fact that it's free.).

Do you think the rule that children's toys can't contain lead is equivalent to living in North Korea? That's the same kind of law as this one.

You also have a lot more flexibility to negotiate on product quality. If you have a good reason why you can't meet normal product quality standards because your product is sufficiently different from the normal products in that category, you can usually put a prominent warning label on it to cover your ass and then you're fine.

> The law defines it as a product quality issue. Meaning you can return it for a refund and a company that keeps selling broken products may be ordered to recall them or to stop selling them until they're fixed.

And if they refuse to do all of this and resist, what happens to them? If you want a sample, stop paying your taxes, stuff your money under your mattress and see what ultimately happens. Just because our government is slow, stupid and incompetent doesn't mean that they don't use the same mechanism of action.

I would love to get into why looking at porno is not even in the same universe of danger as lead poisoning, but I've spent weeks trying to explain harm comparison to people that genuinely think high schoolers using social media is the same thing as them using cigarettes and heroin and I'm just exhausted.

idk, what happens to someone who keeps giving away lead-painted toys for free?

Apparently he/she gets equivocated as a porn star by authoritarians on hacker news arguing against their own self interest.

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