The law is not for the individual person, but for organisations that develop the OS. So they would go to Arch linux org and start threatening them with huge fines, unless they do something here. And all the headache of how exactly to implement this would fall on arch developers. At which point I suspect they would go the same route as Midnight BSD and just forbid the use in California, because as you rightly said it is impossible to implement age verification in DIY distro.

You can, but it requires some setup in the desktop mode. I guess some people do not bother or don’t know you can do that.

So what was the original saying? As I see it, this phrase is wrong no matter how you look at it. Because all ram is used at all times, for example if you have 32GB of free ram, the kernel will use all of it as a page cache to speed up the file system. The more free ram you have the more files can be cached, avoiding access to the disk when you read them.

This phrase is just plain wrong. Unused ram is used for the page cache by the kernel. You must always have some ram free or else the whole system will not operate without a page cache. Larger page cache allows to cache more files from the file system.

I think you missed the point. Imagine 2 devices, device A has a chip with flash memory that contains a binary blob with firmware. Device B doesn’t have built-in flash storage so it requires the driver to load the same binary blob during boot. Both devices are reprogrammable and both contain the same closed source firmware. However device A would be allowed but device B would not. From my point of view they are the same device. The fact that you don’t know how to reprogram device A doesn’t make it more or less proprietary.

We don’t use them in my project, I only added an exception for ©®™ and such. You can easily whitelist any character range you need. My command looks like this:

- (! grep -r -I -P '[^\x{00}-\x{7f}©®™°]' src)

I just made a CI pass to forbid non ASCII characters in the code. Found a lot of em dashes :(

It’s the other way around, you will get all of the tickets which are missing plate info. Some guy did it and regrets it, there is a documentary about it.