To most people, a separate gaming appliance is seen as convenience, not waste.

A console is a computer purpose-built and streamlined for playing games. No more, no less.

It's really not possible to avoid that when, at the end of the day, you're doing it to make a living for yourself and your employees, not doing charity work in your free time because you enjoy it.

> The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.

Yep, but that's then called market research, not customer support.

But read-only media has always been pressed and then vacuum coated with aluminum. No dyes.

And the main component for both is always polycarbonate, which is organic, and probably won't last 100 years. There were some problems with early DVDs where the polycarbonate was not sealed propery, which led to oxydization of the aluminum layer, that's probably what GP observed. And of course that can happen through degradation as well.

In theory, it's possible to make these discs from glass, which should indeed last thousands of years. I've even heard that some glass music CDs were made for Hifi enthusiasts in Japan.

It's just an example of automation done badly. Just have multiple QR codes to allow scanning in parallel. And if 6 people each paying for the own stuff creates a mess then sorry, that's just incredibly incompetent UX design. It should actually be easier to do it right when they're already ordering through separate devices!

That's an absurd exaggeration in regard to the issue at hand. Almost certainly far less than 1% of purchases by minors are voided, and NONE of those involve legal fees unless the seller chooses to go to court rather than refund.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet money that there are overall far less purchases refunded in Germany than in the USA.

Most retailers are probably willing to take the risk of maybe having to do a refund, unless it's something really expensive (or perishable/consumable).

Basically yes - the limit is generally considered to be the amount of monthly pocket money children typically get, so around 20 EUR for a 10 year old. And it would be possible for the seller to ask for a signed note of consent from the parent.

And of course the risk is limited to possibly having to revert the sale, which would be fairly rare for things that are just somewhat over that limit. Educated guess about how high the risk is for any given case are probably not hard.

Depends on the jurisdiction, of course. But for example in German law, the contract is not void exactly because and only if it was about daily necessities of low value - the law does, in fact, care very literally and explicitly about those details. So it's completely unfit as an example to generalize, and the contract with AWS would in fact be void. Their problem if they don't verify users' identities and age sufficiently - and it's almost certainly a deliberate business decision not to do that in order to reduce friction. and occasionally write off an unenforceable bill as cost of doing business.