Excellent. From now on all kids will become linux natives. The decade of the linux desktop is coming!
Now we've decided that if we don't talk about something, people won't get curious about it. Sadly, without being properly taught how to be safe, that generally ends tragically.
1200 deaths a day from diarrhea in India.
Put it in perspective.
They use it as a metaphor to attempt to make an argument about a different, actually real, situation. My argument is this is pointless because no real world situation will ever meaningfully resemble the trolley problem.
The correct answer to the trolley problem is STOP THE TROLLEY. "You can't do that!" "Why not?" "because magic" "well how do I know this magic is there?" "more magic!" etc etc.
What do you do if the dragon demands a sacrifice or it attacks the town? You fight the dragon.
I hope you're arguing out of perversity, not conviction - such is valuable, and i did have to think for a minute. I agree that lateral thinking can be productive.
> Someone brave attempts to jump onto the moving trolley, risking their own neck
This is a completely different problem. The whole point of the trolley problem is to attempt to justify the sacrifice of the few for the good of the many.
The entire framing is about other people dying, not whether or not you would sacrifice yourself.
Globally, 1.2 million people (all ages) die of diarrhea every year.
India accounts for 120k deaths of children under 4 or roughly one fourth of global D related deaths or 328 deaths per day.
Assuming a similar ratio across all ages, India must account for 300k D related deaths every year of roughly 820 deaths. Not great (obviously) but at least it only accounts for 1/4 of all D deaths, not 1/3rd.
Edit - worth pointing out that India has 1.4B out of 8B humans globally or a little more than 1/6th.
https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/diarrhoeal-diseas...
https://www.joghr.org/article/75428-evaluating-india-s-inten...
And part of the problem is that our entertainment media (movies, shows, video games) pretty much trains anybody who has not been taught gun safety in real life to reflexively point a gun at somebody when it is picked up, often with their finger already on the trigger (although some movies are better about this now). People see a gun on the ground, may not even know its real and think its a toy, "Hey guys look what I found" and immediately aim down the sites at their friend.
I dread the outcome of practical safety lessons because, the moment you give a classroom guns, then some teenage edgelord is going to pantomime shooting their buddy, or escalate a playground beef.
People do not work the way you want people to work :-(
May i offer an alternative? Make gun ownership a tedious bureaucratic procedure. Reams of paperwork will filter out many stupid. Stupid exist who can fill forms, but it's a smaller set.
The cavalier phrase "tit about with" is exactly the issue. People do so due to a lack of education about gun safety.
> I dread the outcome of practical safety lessons because, the moment you give a classroom guns
OP didn't mention practical lessons, and giving real guns to school children would be idiotic. You don't have to actually have a gun in your hand to learn what not to do with one should you encounter it. We have MYRIAD examples of non practical instruction (things like sex ed, chemistry [what happens if sodium is dropped in water and why?], physics [hey kids, lets visit a live nuclear reactor!]). If anything, the best way to dampen the glamor of guns instilled by media would be to make it a boring school subject.
> Make gun ownership a tedious bureaucratic procedure.
In many cases, it is. In my state, you can't hunt with a gun (or even a bow I think) without a mandatory gun safety course, and I needed a background check to buy the rifle in the first place. A background check that required a form.
Not to say there aren't loopholes, of course, and I think most Americans agree with common sense gun laws to implement more scrutiny.
I've never hidden my interest & passions, and I think the world is a better place when people are proud of what they enjoy. We're people first, after all.
But 2 years from now a baseline has been established where the need to know your age when using a computer is taken for granted, and it's revealed that self-reporting isn't working and gasp there was this one kid in the news about something bad happening.
This is how it goes. This is one of the reasons the anti-gun crowd is so adamantly opposed to virtually everything. I'm not advocating anything with respect to guns here, but "sensible" measures were broadly supported and then turned against the owners who acquiesced.
An "exception" is two faced in this case. It implies Linux needs an exception to begin with and that the bill itself isn't absolute garbage and a direct attack on general purpose computing. Again, they establish a baseline with something that people are ok with.
So really, both concepts can mesh.
After all, once compliant an adult is then not restricted.
> These amendments redefine the term “operating system provider” to exclude any person or entity that distributes an OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” Any software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses satisfies that test, which removes the likes of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from AB 1856’s scope. […]
> Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android remain fully in scope, with age collection required at account setup from January 1, 2027. A later July 1, 2027, deadline applies to devices set up before January 1. Whether SteamOS is in scope isn’t yet clear: its Arch-based system components are open source, but Valve distributes the image alongside the proprietary Steam client.
I’m slightly confused about Android, I thought Android the OS was open source but then enough functionality is added by Google’s app store to keep it sort of under their control for the most part…
The reason Steam OS is a gray area is the question of what constitutes "the OS". For Android, you can't run apps without the components in question, so it's pretty cut and dry. Steam OS, you can technically use it without Steam: switch it to desktop mode, disable Steam, and run it as just an Arch variant; you can even launch games installed via Steam if you really want. But in practice nobody does that, because you would just use another distro if that was your goal. So, is Steam part of "the OS", since it's the main thing you see when you boot by default, and probably the reason you use that distro? Or is it just a prominently featured application?
edit to add: Here's a graphic depicting the general shape of Android. Pretty much everything except the kernel can have closed source modifications (and even the kernel will typically have proprietary drivers and firmware blobs): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/AOSP_And...
So the only thing that really changes in the Steam case is the timing of the question, and possibly how and where the (unverified) answer is recorded.
And most techies are already primarily on Linux and its derivatives.
Linux has gone from attracting hippies to openly endorsing corporate closed-source products, something something live long enough to become the villain.
Would always install some variant, think it was "pretty cool" for a few days, then revert back to "whatever MacOS was offering" (for my daily driver).
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2026: I just finished building my third Ubuntu Linux machine, this year (gave the first one to my brother). An Ubuntu running a 5070Ti is now my main operating system.