Age verification is dumb

How many times do you go to watch a video on a site that's not porn and it asks you for your date of birth? There's plenty of videos out there that do that... video games are the ones that annoy me the most. Especially since the sites that I watch videos on, I am registered for and my date of birth is stored with my profile. Sometimes it's just a 3 box combo of month, day and year where you have to type, other times it's 3 drop down boxes where what is automatically selected is January 1, 2004. Other times it's 3 drop downs for month day and year but no default date is selected. On GameTrailers.com, these are the least annoying. They don't have verification code built in so you can just press "OK" and it'll let you watch the video without selecting anything. On the ones with the 3 drop downs where January 1 2004 is automatically selected, I just drop the year down to 1980 or earlier, even though 1990 will suffice now (jeez, people born in 1980 are already 28). The only ones that get my real date of birth are the text box variations where it's easy to type. Seriously, the drop downs gotta go.

These are so dumb and annoying. But I guess you gotta be responsible. Annoyingly responsible to those who could watch R rated movies for 12 years now. To those who can buy anything where an age restriction is in place. To those of us who could almost run for president of the USA (35 is the minimum if I recall correctly). The only thing I can't buy, age-wise, is a house in my parents' community because you have to be 55 or older.

But I guess you gotta be responsible. You definitely want to make it a good warning that you should be of X years (13 for PG-13, 17 for R, etc) before you watch the movie, play the game, drink the beer, etc. But of those, I think it's only actually illegal to drink if you're not old enough. Still, those sites should save your birthday as a cookie or something so you don't have to enter it 120 times. That can't be used to track anything that they wouldn't already know or could even get any information from... how many people were born on March 23, 1979? Well, I guess, how many people were born on March 23, 1979 in the IP range that I use? Probably far less. But still. Hold onto my date of birth or make it so if I just press "OK" I get to watch it anyway :) I like that bug.

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