China has been planing to reunite with Taiwan for decades, and they are clearly building a military capable of that. The US has committed to protecting Taiwan. That is the US has been planning war with china since not long after WWII. It hasn’t happened yet, it may never happen, but it is planned for and one of the more likely wars the US could get involved with.

If your country doesn’t have a plan to go to war with every other country in the world (separately) your military leaders are incompetent. Most counties far away are very low risk and so the plans don’t have to be well thought out, but you should have at least the start of a plan. The more likely war is the better you plans should be.

General advice is smart switches, dumb bulbs. Switches mean that you can control the light without getting out your phone, or whatever it is you use to control the bulb. Sure HA can talk to many bulbs, but only if the switch is on. Guests will not have the ability to control your bulbs - either there is too much work to install an app for a short stay, or the system is a security nightmare (often both). Use a smart switch because they have a control on the wall that guests can use to get what they want done without having to worry about apps.

Most often you can choose bulbs with the right color temperature, but if not some dimable bulbs change color temperature. If this is not good enough two lights: a general room like, and a separate special effects light, don’t combine them (HA can control both, but they are separate systems generally not used at the same time)

What is the point of it? If the are doesn’t cryptographically trace to the right birth certificate for who is at the keyboard now it won’t do anything - kids will lie about age if there is any issues. If it does trace back that well there are huge privacy problems.

where do the maitainers of the linux distro of your choice live? I mean every single person because if even one lives in CA (Brasil…) you have to either ‘fire’ that person or follow the law for their sake. I agree systemd shouldn’t be the place for this, but systemd wants to take over everything and I’m sure some of their maintainers live in CA thus they feel they must.

It won’t protect children, but you can’t igore the law. You can get lawyers and fight that way. However too many eevelopers live in CA to ignore and every one of them is at risk of the law going against them. Small distros can say they don’t have anyone who maintains it in CA so the don’t allow their distro to be used in CA. Large ones cannot ignore the law just because it is stupid and won’t work.

BSD BSD BSD. read that in a chant of course.

Water is very common. Others might or might not work. Most ofthe others are rare. (Amonia is not rare, I have no idea how useful it might be)

Water is extreemly common in the universe. It also enables a lot of useful chemistry that complex molecules need. In turn it is reasonable to expect water is part of all life - not a given but most of the other options rely on something far less likely to occure.

This assumes there is life. Not a debate I’m touching. Although if there is physics is against us ever discovering it. Even if earth is an extreem outlier in taking so long to develop intelligent life and every other star has it in a few hundred years few will never detect another lifeform

I was taught basic programming in school - by people who clearly had no clue. (it was clear to 11 year old me, and in hindsight I was far to kind in my evaluation of their knowledge) I was also taught on the then very modern apple IIgs - I wouldn’t be surprised if you have never heard of that, but all you need to know is nothing I was taught is relevant anyway - if you were taught on windows 7 a lot of what you learned has changed anyway.

Point is we need to teach people to teach themselves because things change.

I have all the parental controls I can enabled - but hotspot is one soften requested feature I can’t block. I can block chrome completely but I can’t unblock it for my kids online piano lesson because they are on youtube which means every video is unblocked despite only one channel of interest. Next thing I know they have been watching youtube shorts slop.

i also can’t control the school issued device which they have do some homework on. Often homework includes watch an educational video on youtube

I have never supported mandatory age verification on devices - it cannot work.

i want the same things people who are for is want - but I want a system that works in the real world. I don’t know what that system is. I know parents and schools are hurting because we don’t have a useful solution.

At what point do I change from a concerned parent protecting my kids to an over protective hellicopter parent?

the school devices are locked down. However your experience shows why the locks are not good. Too many useful searches could be bad. They are not going to assign a team of humans to review every search result. Either they whitelist things so restricted that you can’t research anything or they blacklist so little things not on the list spread faster than they can block. (Both is a real possibility)

I don’t care about your device. The school devices are lockee down - but it isn’t feasable to lock everything down and still have a useful device for the things they need to do.

Almost everything is a webpage these days. Or a youtube video

They are enabled - the kids have found bypasses. Turning on the hotspot and then using their school device for instance

But not my kids phone that they turned the hotspot on before then. even if I take it their school device can be got from the backpack

It only takes one kid to figure out the bypass and it spreads all the kids. Some of those kids are talking to kids going to other schools.

every week my kids hear about a new game the school isn’t blocking while they are in class. Sometimes the teachers catch them, but kids are good at hiding what they are doing - and switching to what they should do when the teacher comes near.

I can’t - teachers give them homework that must be done on the device all the time.

Every week my kid hears about another game (not boobs) that the school didn’t block and thus they can play when the teacher isn’t looking. There are also a lot of non educational youtube videos they can watch, but since some of their real educational videos are on youtube they don’t block most. (Again youtube will block boobs - but that is not all I’m worried about)